Beach Reads for Men

“Janet Auchincloss, mother of Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis, with her stepson Hugh D Auchincloss III at Hammersmith Farm, Newport, Rhode Island, August 1987.” You don’t have to dress like a slut this summer!

We talked last week about the superiority of the plane read i.e. a complicated text to impress one’s seat mates. (Listen, I’m not proud of this, but it is a thing.) But I can’t ignore the beach read altogether, even if I prefer the nomenclature of “travel read.” After all, I live part-time in a beach town.

We have an art critic staying in our guest room—I really don’t know too much about him except that he’s an overly intelligent man with two first names—and at breakfast I pestered him for some manly beach reads. He totally misunderstood the assignment, but recommended some lovely books nonetheless. Men really do prefer train travel to everything else:

• The Land Where Lemons Grow is a fun book about the history of citrus fruit by an Italian gardening expert named Helena Attlee. Pair with a picnic. (It looks like Helena occasionally teaches writing classes.)

• Read if you are taking a train around Germany.

• Read Confessions of Felix Krull if you’re taking a train around Portugal. Girls will think it’s lesser Thomas Mann. Apparently an unfinished novel?

• A Carpet Ride to Khiva follows a guy in Uzbekistan, meeting all the nomads, and trying “to rediscover the lost art of traditional weaving and dyeing, and the process [of] establishing a self-sufficient carpet workshop.”

• My husband, who was at breakfast, says read Dune on the beach. Not linking to that.

Here’s a purposively self-conscious beach read list from David Foster Wallace. Alligator looks fun.

Beach bar heels

If you’re feeling prissy and interesting—in your Louboutin sandals—read Madame du Deffand and Her World.

Ninety-Two in the Shade, Under the Volcano — books for drinking heavily by a dirty pool. Pair with these stumble-able palm tree heels.

Listen, there’s nothing wrong with a thematically-appropriate shoe: Waves, starfish. If these are too much, seashell earrings can be a good in-between. These have low attention span written all over them, so I’d pair with Scruples. Here’s a signed copy, totally worth it.

The other woman shoe. Pair with affair novels: The End of the Story by Lydia Davis and Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux. Even the most serious women in the world cheat.