The Anti-Beach Read
Don’t tell your book club, but some books are not meant to be read on the beach. Whether difficult, deep, or just straight depressing, these books pair well with air conditioning and isolation. Cozy up to that grumbling HVAC and enjoy my list of books that are not beach reads.
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (1919). This is absolutely one of the best story collections ever published in America since the Great War. It signaled a sea-change in modern literary art and introduced a new American sound to storytelling. But the title makes it seem like a pastoral, and it's not. At all. Anderson wanted to call it The Book of the Grotesque in homage to Poe's 13 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, but his publisher objected: readers wanted pastorals or books that at least sounded that way. But when they got a load of Anderson's grotesque tales about the often abysmal and difficult lives led by the average rural American in the new modern age, they wanted their money back, along with his head.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952): If you love reading sci-fi on the beach, take Brave New World by Aldous Huxley instead. There's no movie spin-off role for Claude Rains or Kevin Bacon here. The hero has not invented a way for light to pass through human skin, rendering himself invisible. There's another reason nobody has ever really managed to see the hero: his skin is not white. The book recounts a long traumatic odyssey the hero undertakes from an African-American college in the South to Harlem in New York and the ways he tries to force those he meets to truly see him, and the failings those people possess that cause them to see nothing but their worst fears.
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski (1965). Again, the title is misleading. This is not Henry James' The Golden Bowl, which really is about a bowl or object of beauty purchased in a second-hand shop by two people with romantic ties. Kosinski's book is the story of a homeless boy's wanderings through war-torn Europe during the Second World War and his experiences are harrowing, grotesque, and painful. The title is a metaphor referring to human beings who have some bright difference, the painted birds among us, in particular the ones who attract the wrong kind of notice and are soon destroyed. So take Henry instead. His incredibly lush prose will make you sleepy.
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (1970). The title sounds like instructions for playing a particular song on the piano. Also, it's an attractively slender little book, one you figure you can knock off in an afternoon. Actually, it's about the young heroine's descent into Hell as a starlet in the 1960s during one of Hollywood's darkest, most exploitative eras. In divorcing her director-husband, she loses custody of her child then much of her sanity, suffers PTSD, and shows why, for generations, Hollywood hasn't been a healthy place for women. The title is actually a piece of gambling advice about how to survive at a craps table in Vegas. But read it anyway. Beach schmeach. This is still one of the best American novels out there.
This month, I recommend The Sparks Brothers movie because it’s about music’s underground. For five decades, the Sparks have made great music you never heard and their fan base has included musicians far more famous than they are like Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Gos and Paul McCartney. Their longevity is proof there’s more than one way to make it and live out your dreams.
For any new readers: My new novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.