A Reader’s Guide to Summer Book Clichés
24th June 2018
It’s summer reading time, we’re told. Apparently people who read nothing more substantial than the back of the cereal box now go to the beach with 1,000-page tomes and settle back to read while squinting and slapping bugs.
But what makes a summer book? It can’t be Russian literature, since that would call for snow. It can’t be something scientific. If you showed up at the beach with “A Brief History of Time,” everyone would kick sand in your face. “Hey, look at the loser, improvin’ his mind! Get him!”
No, it has to be a genre novel, something invariably described as a roller-coaster ride, because everyone remembers how much fun it was to read a book on a roller coaster. So let’s look at some examples of summer beach reading…