We’ve just closed out our first full week of August (and also #Blaugust!), and I’m really starting to feel that we’ve lost the breaks on summer and it’s skidding by faster than an Edgedancer in pursuit of pancakes in a palace (wow I really did not anticipate a Stormlight reference when I began writing this metaphor . . . nor alliteration).

I don’t have any trips to the beach planned for the remainder of the month, but I’m obviously wishing I did, and thinking of just how great it would be to hit the beach just one more time. I could play in the surf . . . relax on the sand . . . maybe get another sunburn.

But most importantly: READ!!

There’s no shortage of articles out there which will tell you what to be reading while you’re soaking up the rays from good old G2V. And the definition of the term ‘beach read’ has come to mean an unfathomable amount of things in the time since it was first coined back in 1990.

So since everybody’s got an opinion on what to read at the beach, and what criteria makes up a ‘beach read’, I thought I’d add mine to the bunch.

This post is a bit retrospective and so I’ll define ‘beach reads’ as: Anything I either read, or bought, at the beach.

This list is not comprehensive, but it does reflect books that fit the definition AND have been written about previously on the blog. I’ve obviously read many other stories while listening to the waves lap against the sand, but I never got around to writing about them. Hopefully I will at some later date . . .

In any case, I hope you enjoy these five I’ve curated for this post and please check out their original reviews as they’re much more detailed than these snippets, and sometimes, a bit like going back in time. I think you’ll find what I’ve chosen is . . . not exactly typical.

Enjoy!

Meathouse Man by George R.R. Martin

For this first — and probably weirdest — entry, we’re reaching all the way back to 2013 when I visited Stone Harbor with my family. I was apparently feeling a bit guilty for posting on vacation, but experienced some sufficiently strong feelings reading this short story and simply couldn’t wait until I got home to get them down.

I’m not sure, but I think this may be the first piece of fiction I’ve read from GRRM. I had watched a bit of Game of Thrones and so I expected it to be grim and dark, but I don’t think I was ready for just how sick and twisted it ended up being.

It’s about a “Corpse Handler”, which is someone who uses synthetic brains to reanimate the dead and put them back to work in all kinds of jobs from field hand to arborist. Even sex work. So gross.

I’m not recommending that you bring this one along the next time you go to the beach, but apparently I did hahah. I’ll just leave it there.

Little Rice by Clay Shirky

This next one is also from the ‘deep past’ of the blog. I read Little Rice as an ARC from Net Galley back in July 2015.

My only other experience with Shirky’s work — Here Comes Everybody — had been for a class assignment during spring break in Panama City Beach Florida with my fraternity. That was before this blog ever existed (though Blogcerto! had been created for the same class), which is probably for the best as I’m sure my analysis would have been a bit more Tucker Max than anyone would want to read. In any case it seems like I had a bit of a beach/Shirky association going for a while. Or perhaps the only time I had for reading was while on vacation.

The book was pretty revelatory for me at the time. Now that it’s a decade old, it might not be quite as relevant. Mostly it follows a narrative about the rise of Chinese cell phone company Xiaomi, and through this lens is able to discuss larger topics and trends in tech, global politics, and the ‘maker movement’ in different countries.

I give some of my own thoughts about the ‘maker movement’ in my review, which is pretty much inline with how I feel these days. I had to look at my LinkedIn page to double check the timing of things, but I would have been just about halfway through my Journalism certificate, which means I’d probably just completed some reporting about 3D printing in libraries. I was at the start of something and didn’t even know it.

Galatea by Madeline Miller

This compact epic marks the beginning of our more modern entries to the list, and makes the cut because I BOUGHT IT at the beach. I didn’t end up reading it until October of 2023 when I was back at home, and (presumably) should have been reading something spooky but was spiraling towards a bit of a Greek mythology binge.

Like everything else on this list so far, I wouldn’t say this is your typical beach read, though I suppose it could be considered ‘light’ in that it does not have a large page count. Indeed it’s only a short story, though one which I found bound in hardback and sold next to Miller’s other epics: The Song of Achilles and Circe.

Galatea isn’t set in any kind of mythic period like these former works, but instead set in “. . . her own world.” which read to me as a bit more modern even though all the ad copy I can find claims it is still Ancient Greece. It takes shots at the patriarchy, beauty standards and the (in this case literal) pedestal we place women on.

The original myth of Galatea and Pygmalion was a new one for me; however, the story was still quite accessible and sufficiently powerful with only a Wikipedia page’s worth of context.

If you’re looking for a short yet powerful piece, I would highly recommend Galatea.

Godkiller by Hannah Kaner

The opening line of Godkiller is: “Her father fell in love with a god of the sea.”

Like come on. It just begs to be read with the rhythm of the tide in your ears, and the hot sun on your shoulders. With the fine spray of salt-tinged mist suggesting a gentle reminder that the cool embrace of the ocean is just a few sandy steps away.

I’d been on a streak of reading Godpunk novels last August, but Godkiller was stand-out among them for its incredible prose, disabled and queer representation, and Kaner’s unique approach to godhood within the story (there’s also just a really well executed Marks of Magic / Worsening Curse Mark type trope happening throughout).

I recently picked up the next two books in the series and am really looking forward to reading them!

Anji Kills a King by Evan Leikam

I gave this one a bit of a negative review, however, it met my ‘beach read’ criteria, and I think a list is better with five entries than just four. I’d heard about this book from Tik Tok, but didn’t actually purchase it until I visited the local bookstore at the beach. I was hoping to score a copy of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, but it was sold out and I didn’t want to leave empty handed.

I left the store still pretty excited as I’d been looking forward to reading this one, and I thought it was cool to see the book in a real bookstore. Despite my high hopes, I struggled to work my way through it.

There are a lot of things in this book that I’ve enjoyed in other Fantasy books, but somehow could not quite engage with in this story. For instance, the use of Sanderson-like “ideals” — in this story called “tenets” — to track character growth was set up on the first page of the book, but then hardly ever explicitly stated again, so that only in hindsight, after finishing the novel and attempting to write my review, could I see that the characters had actually run up against these benchmarks at all.

I was also disappointed by the main character Anji, who has already done most of the ‘heroing’ before the book starts, and sort of just rides around the countryside, tied up and mouthy like nearly the whole first half of the book. Even when she eventually is unbound, the other characters seem to have all the agency in the story. It seemed an odd choice for a protagonist and POV.

I did, however, enjoy some parts of Anji Kills a King. Many of the characters are older, or aging. The juxtaposition here with Anji being relatively young added an interesting dynamic to what may have been sort of ordinary fantasy elements if the cast had all been the same age. I also thought that Leikam really managed to kinda save the book a bit with its ending, which I won’t spoil, but which I thought was particularly well done.

Wrapping Up

Well that’s all I got for this week. What do you think of these choices? Beach worthy? What have you been reading with the sand between your toes? Please let me know in the comments. Looking forward to talking more about this!

See you next time!