What’s in your beach bag? 

My friend Dianne and I were recently discussing books that we read that are decidedly not book club worthy.  As retired high school English teachers, we both appreciate good literature – novels (and, okay, some nonfiction) that reflect beautiful use of language, layers of ideas to be discovered and often, creative narrative techniques.  Dianne’s secret pleasure is spy books and I love mysteries and the occasional science fiction, often 3 star choices.  “Three stars are okay,” commented Dianne and I have to agree.  When I look at my Goodreads list, probably half the titles I’ve read in the last year and a half fall into that category:  good, entertaining, page-turning books that I would have felt lucky to have written myself.  The 3 star book is, in fact, exactly what you look for to stuff in your beach bag or throw in your carry-on for a long plane ride.  So, here are some suggestions for your vacation reading.

Girl Waits With Gun by Amy Stewart

Most interesting to me is the fact that this book, although a novel, is based on real people.  Stewart draws from newspaper articles and court documents as well  interviews with descendants to create the basics of the plot.  The three Kopp sisters, Constance and Norma, both in their early 30’s, and Fleurette, 17, live on a small farm outside of Paterson, New Jersey in 1914.  As the novel opens, the women are in town in their horse and buggy when they are broadsided by a car driven by Henry Kaufman, a wealthy silk factory owner.  Constance insists on seeking reparations from Kaufman who turns out to be a small-time thug who retaliates with threats to kidnap Fleurette, written on bricks thrown through the Kopps’ windows.  While most people might be cowered, Constance, from whose point of view the story is told, goes to the police, learns to shoot a gun, and becomes involved in the life of one of Kaufman’s employees who has been taken advantage of by Kaufman.

The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian

Annalee Ahlberg disappears from her small town Vermont home one night and her two daughters fear the worst.  Annalee is a sleepwalker with a history of some dangerous business when she is not awake.  Lianna, now 21, the story’s narrator, remembers having discovered her mother perched naked on the railing of a bridge high above the Gale River.  Another time, Annalee spray-painted the hydrangeas silver before going back to bed.  Strangely, Annalee only sleepwalks when her husband, a college professor, is out of town.  Having turned down conferences for four years to keep his wife in bed, he finally decides to travel again, only to have her take a nocturnal spin. The family fears the worst as each day passes.  The detective who is investigating also knows much more about

Annalee than he is telling.

Landline by Rainbow Rowell

Georgie McCool is a TV writer who, along with her professional partner Seth, lands the opportunity to craft a pilot and several episodes of the show they have always wanted to create.  Unfortunately, it is a week before Christmas and the planned trip from L.A. to Omaha to visit her husband’s mother.  Georgie sees this as the career chance of a lifetime and begs off; her husband, Neal, packs up the two kids and goes without her.  As each day passes and Neal doesn’t pick up or return  Georgie’s calls, she becomes increasingly distracted from her work and fearful that her marriage is falling apart.  Unable to return to her empty house, she drives an hour to her mother’s and spends the night in her childhood bedroom where, in desperation, she decides to try calling Neal’s mother’s house on the landline.  Rowell here employs a clever conceit:  Georgie reaches Neal on this phone, but it is Neal 15 years earlier when they were college sweethearts and he had gone home to Omaha for Christmas.  Her present day Neal won’t talk to her but young Neal does and they have long conversations over the next few days that make Georgie realize how much she has underappreciated Neal and how she needs to make things right.  The narrative moves back and forth in time, chronicling their relationship.    

A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear is the eighth book in the series featuring Maisie Dobbs who early on leaves a nursing career behind to become a private investigator.  At this point it is pre-WW2 and Maisie is recruited by MI5 to pose as a philosophy professor at a college in Cambridge to try and determine if there is pro-Nazi activity in the school.  Winspear does a nice job of providing a sense of the era and Maisie is a feisty, smart and independent woman.  You can pick up any book in the series without having read the rest, but there is a continuing storyline and returning cast of characters.

False Cast by S. W. Hubbard

This is the fifth in a series written by a friend of a friend.  Frank is the police chief in a small town in the Adirondacks. The story has several issues:  a mother who is released early from prison who wants her daughter (who has been fostered now for years by Frank and his wife’s best friends) back; a family man who can’t make payments and has been threatened with foreclosure holds his wife’s daycare kids hostage, then flees into the mountains; a seemingly innocuous fisherman is murdered.

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

One could argue that the entire book takes place in the head of the unnamed main character.  Conversations take place but there are no quotation marks, reinforcing the sense that the whole story is being told retrospectively to some unknown audience.  The story initially seems to be a mystery.  The narrator is contacted by her mother-in-law who is a bit frantic that she has not heard from her son who is not responding to emails or voicemails.  The narrator and her husband, Christopher, have quietly separated 6 months earlier but at Christopher’s request, no one has been told.  Isabella, his mother, tells her that he had informed her that the couple were going to Greece an she sends the narrator to Europe to find him.  Upon arriving at the little niche hotel in a remote area, the narrator confirms that her estranged husband has a room there but he hasn’t been seen for days.

I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh

Another book in the genre of unreliable narrator, plot twists and questionable crime.  The story begins with a mother picking up her 5 year old son from school; as they are walking home, he lets go of her hand and runs ahead, dashing into the street where he is hit and killed by a car that then speeds off.  The next chapter is told in first person from the very grieved point of view of a woman who decides she can no longer stay around after the accident.  Our narrator, Jenna, flees with only a backpack, ending up in a small seaside Welsh town where she rents a dilapidated cabin and tries to come to terms with her emotions.  She is befriended by the local woman who runs the caravan park and by a handsome vet to whom she takes a puppy that she finds on the side of the road.  Formerly a professional sculptor, she develops a small photography business by writing names and personal messages in the sand and then photographing them.  Her chapters alternate with those of the police investigation into the hit and run.

Evelyn, After by Victoria Helen Stone

Evelyn is 40, working in the attendance office at her son’s high school, and playing good wife to Gary, her psychiatrist husband.  She’s also bored but she doesn’t realize it until she gets a late night call from her husband to come to the scene of an accident in which he and his mistress, a patient, are involved.  Not only does it turn out that he has been unfaithful but she soon realizes that the deer he says Juliette hit while driving his car was actually a missing teenage girl.    Evelyn becomes understandably unglued, calling in sick to work for two weeks while living on sleeping pills and stalking the woman on Facebook.   The chapters alternate between “Before” – beginning slightly before the accident and leading up to the moment when she decides to go into Juliette’s husband’s art gallery – and “After” – the aftermath of her decision to meet Noah. 

Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple

From the author of Where’d You Go Bernadette, this whacky laugh out loud book takes place over the course of a single day, a day that Eleanor vows will be different.  She lists off the things she will do, the implication being that she has trouble getting herself organized and motivated to do anything.  She will go to yoga, she will go to her poetry lesson, she won’t swear, she will initiate sex with her husband.  Eleanor gets as far as the poetry lesson; she meets weekly with “the best poet on faculty” at the local university where she recites from memory the poem he has assigned, they discuss it and then she pays him $50.  The lesson is interrupted and the day starts its path off course when she gets a call from the school that her 8 year old son, Timby, is sick.  Stopping by her surgeon husband’s office, she discovers that he has taken the week off, saying he is on vacation, an odd development since he has been home every night and at the breakfast table every morning.  As Eleanor spends the rest of the day attempting to solve this mystery, there are flashbacks to an earlier life.  There is some dark material here, but it is filtered through Eleanor’s somewhat manic point of view at a point in her life where her goals for the day are relatively small.

What’s in my beach bag?

I am headed to the beach myself in a few weeks and I’ve been on a book-buying-binge.  As I told my friend Gail, I have FOMA (fear of missing out) except it’s not about social media but rather reading a review of a book I’d like to read and deciding that it is only one click away and I might forget it if I just add it to my amazon wish list (which now totals 343 titles. . . .).  Gail asked if I have considered using the library.  I have not.

I usually get through 6 or 7 books in my two weeks under the umbrella, but of course you need more than that, so you have choices, right?  Here’s what I am taking with me: