Popular authors tell what goes best with sun, sand

The Post and Courier

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Summer is a season that demands a certain kind of book. It's a time for beach reads, they say, not for "Finnegans Wake" or "Gravity's Rainbow." You don't have to work the book. The book works you.

But what does the term "beach read" mean, beyond bonanza sales? Is a beach read a whimsical Maeve Binchy? Is it a legal potboiler by John Grisham or a sprawling saga by James Michener? Or all of the above and more? (Or less?)

"It's a page-turner," says David Baldacci, an author of political thrillers. "Fast plots. Engaging characters. Twists and turns. You don't have to think a whole lot about serious things."

"It's an indulgence," says mystery writer Janet Evanovich, whose recurring heroine is a bounty hunter named Stephanie Plum. "It's usually a well-crafted book written by an author that consistently delivers. Something you can count on."

"It's sort of paradoxical," says Diana Gabaldon, author of the sci-fi, romantic and historical fiction Outlander series. "A great beach read has to have two attributes: really absorbing so you want to read it, but it also has to be interruptible so you can put it down and chase your kids."

Publishers are rolling out marquee summer titles this month, with the season's sales expected to peak in August. The beach read's popularity stems from the advent of the mass-market paperback industry, which began in 1945 when publisher Ian Ballantine started Bantam Books. Paperbacks were cheap (25 cents in the late 1940s) and fit snugly in pockets or purses: easy to buy, easy to transport and, generally, easy to read. In the '50s, books became available in drugstores, supermarkets and train terminals. Publishers started lucrative TV and movie tie-ins, with paperbacks being released with their film adaptations.

If the '70s gave birth to the summer movie blockbuster, the '60s were about blockbuster books. "Valley of the Dolls" (1966), "Rosemary's Baby" (1967) and "The Godfather" (1969) flew off the shelves as books before they sold out theaters as movies.

"'The Godfather' was the first of the superbooks that totally dominated beach reads," says Albert Greco, a marketing professor at Fordham University who specializes in the publishing industry. "And then in the '70s you see the next round of superbooks: 'Jaws,' 'Roots.' Then in the '80s, you see 'Bourne Identity,' 'Princess Daisy' (by Judith Krantz), Danielle Steel. In the '90s, we start to see a slight shift: The emergence not of the big superstar book, but the big superstar author."

These superstars hit the Top-10 lists year after year: Patricia Cornwell, Grisham, James Patterson, J.K. Rowling. They are brands unto themselves, and their devoted followings count on consistent delivery. Every June, for example, Evanovich releases her newest Stephanie Plum story in hardcover and last year's title in paperback.

"I love being thought of as a beach read," she says. "It makes it easy for the consumer because they know to look forward to this at the same time every year." The popular perception might be that a beach read is somehow deficient compared with whatever's nabbing the Booker Prize. But some novelists dispute this, and writer and critic Thomas Mallon draws a distinction between a beach read and an "airplane read," or a thinly crafted book that seems designed simply to tranquilize flight anxiety. "The beach would actually seem to me the perfect time to read something really serious, because your mind would be clear enough and untroubled enough to take it in," says Mallon, whose novel "Fellow Travelers" was published last year. "The beach sounds perfect for that ambitious run at Proust or Gibbon."

She's not Proust, but if there's one person installed on the beach-read throne by both the publishing industry and the public, it's probably Mary Higgins Clark, the queen of suspense who has sold 80 million copies in the United States alone. She's in the airport stacks, the beach bags and the orderly shelves of rented townhouses on the seashore.

"I think it's defined as sort of light, entertaining reading, as opposed to having a heavier tone," says Clark, on the phone from her home in New Jersey. "You sit on the beach with a book by an author who has so far pleased you, and you know what to expect."

Does she see herself as a beach-read goddess?

"I'm called a good beach read," Clark hedges. "I hope I'm a decent read the other 10 months of the year."

Classic beach reads

Here's a list of reads from the past 100 years that still possess enough snap and crackle to complement any day in the sun.

"Riders of the Purple Sage" By Zane Grey (1912): It's probably the greatest Western ever written. At least, so says Joe Wheeler, co-founder and executive director of the Zane Grey's West Society, which is dedicated to the man who nurtured the myth of the West through his clean, rich prose. The Western is set in southern Utah in 1871. Its heroine, Jane Withersteen, realizes she must break with her oppressive church with the help (and love) of the gentle, roguish Lassiter, the prototype for all literary gunmen who followed.

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" By Anita Loos (1925): While riding a train from New York to Los Angeles, Loos sketched some thoughts as she watched a horde of men fuss over another woman, who was equal to Loos in youth and beauty, but naturally blond. The comic novel is composed of the ditzy diary entries of Lorelei Lee, an American flapper who slingshots herself into the ritzy social orbits of Europe.

"From Here to Eternity" By James Jones (1951): This is an epic, with waves of drama rushing over you, sort of like they did Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in that famous scene from the 1953 film adaptation. Set in Hawaii's Schofield Barracks during the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the dialogue-heavy novel follows two soldiers (one who refuses to join his company's boxing team, one who's having an affair with a superior's wife) as they contend with peacetime Army life in a beautiful oceanside setting.

"The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" By John le Carre (1963): Le Carre takes a subtle approach, one more identifiable with the '60s Cold War reality in this spy thriller. In the book, a British agent is assigned one last mission: to take on the guise of a disgraced agent, get back behind the Iron Curtain and position himself as bait to bring down the head of East German intelligence.

"Rosemary's Baby" By Ira Levin (1967): It starts with the banal. A young couple sign a lease on Apartment 7E in New York's fancy Bramford Building. Only at the end of the first chapter, when a character marvels at the gargoyles crawling between the windows of the building, does the writer hint at the sinisterness to come.

Levin's delicate writing style propels his horror story of a woman who is, as luck would have it, impregnated by the devil soon after moving into the Bramford. Before Rosemary realizes her neighbors are witches, the book hisses with insinuation; after, it pulses with paranoia.

"The Thorn Birds" By Colleen McCullough (1977): For an accessible, operatic family saga, journey Down Under to the Australian Outback, where the Cleary clan contends with forbidden passion, hollow marriages and a whole boatload of other feelings.

Hailed as the new "Gone With the Wind" when it was published, this book made its debut to ravenous word-of-mouth enthusiasm, sold 7 million paperbacks and spawned one of the most-watched miniseries in TV history.