Ah yes. It’s Memorial Day. Summer beckons. In our house, it’s time for barbecues, evenings playing badminton in our backyard until 8 p.m. or when the sun finally goes down, and scarfing down great beach reads.

A beach-read book is a loose industry term for a mass market paperback in commercial genre fiction. The sort of book someone picks up in the drug store while buying sunblock and sodas on the way to the beach. Popcorn for the brain, essentially.

And those are the books I love best . . . underrated gems tucked inside a salacious cover, where the author expertly ratchets tension to painful, where the plot may be stupid or trite, but the characterization overcomes the banality.

Here are my beach reads for 2008:

The Host, by Stephanie Meyer. My daughter is racing through Meyer’s insanely popular Twilight series at the speed of light. The Host is Meyer’s debut into adult paranormal romance. Basically it’s a love triangle between a man, a woman, and an alien life form. How’s that supposed to get resolved? Can’t wait to find out.

The next installment in Naomi Novik‘s Temeraire series. If you haven’t heard of Novik’s massively popular fantasy series yet, how could you resist this: Horatio Hornblower meets dragons. I’d read His Majesty’s Dragon a year or so back, and was impressed by Novik’s ability to write in a voice that evokes early 19th century British uppercrusty world, while telling an essentially blood-’n-guts fantasy narrative. Throne of Jade is the next book in the series, which now has five installments. There’s plenty to catch up on.

I know this book has been out forever, but this is the year I read Chocolat by Joanne Harris. I love books that use food as a plot point, and Harris’ novel takes chocolate, stews them with emotions and the battle between sin and denial.

I (heart) Bernard Cornwell, and he’s in top form with his Saxon Chronicles series. Sword Song is his latest release, and if it lives up to the billing of the first two novels, it’ll be a satisfying blend of blood, 9th century Anglo-Saxon politics (it’s interesting, I promise!), and Uhtred of Bebbanberg, an amoral warlord who happens to be immensely appealing even when he’s gutting Danes in battles where the odds are impossibly stacked against him. Cornwell is a master craftsman, and the way he sets up scene after scene of unbearable excitement is worth studying.

What are some beach reads on your list? I’m always looking for suggestions, because the best books are the ones recommended by friends.

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.
Kathleen Bolton
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