A Cairn for Summer
I did not choose the Beach Read life. The Beach Read life chose me.
Two weeks before my family’s summer vacation was scheduled to take place, my daughter got sick. Given her Wolverine-like capacity to heal immediately, her recurring days of glazed eyes and long naps were alarming enough to warrant a visit to Urgent Care. Two days later, well into a course of antibiotics for Strep throat, she went back to preschool.
Almost a fortnight later, helping my son get changed into pajamas, I noticed a bright red rash covering him from neck to knees. “IT’S NOTHING!” he insisted, quickly pulling his shirt down over his exposed red belly. But a trip to Urgent Care would confirm it was not nothing. It was Scarlet Fever, a rash associated with, you guessed it, Strep.
With 48 hours until our flight took off, we found ourselves miraculously able to meet the requisite 24 hours of antibiotics to avoid sharing Strep with our fellow passengers.
Hello two weeks of summer vacation! Hello coast of Maine! How’ve you been, hot humid Massachusetts?! Hashtag blessed.
Then it was Monday. The morning before we were set to travel. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and my beautiful, germ-smuggling extrovert of a daughter woke up with a runny nose.
Don’t panic! I, her mother, insisted.
This happens all the time!
It could be nothing!
It could be allergies!
After getting her dressed and ready for the day, I grabbed a box of COVID tests as she and her father heatedly debated which song would be the soundtrack for their bike ride to school. (Lil Big Stack’s magnum opus Farts In My Butt would ultimately lose out to Dad’s pick, a song with no mention of farts and absolutely zero talk of butts).
Ding! my husband’s cell phone pinged.
“Oh no,” he said, looking at the screen. “Oh no oh no.”
Three kids from preschool had tested positive for COVID. Our daughter, we would soon discover, made four.
“Just put her in an N-95 and still go,” suggested a surprising number of people—people who clearly had never met a four-year-old, or at least not this four year old: a girl who hates wearing masks for longer than a nanosecond but loves coughing directly into your mouth.
We canceled our entire trip because we had no desire to put anyone at risk of contracting COVID. But also because if we were going to drop like flies—and drop like flies we did—we were going to go down in the comfort of our own home.
Goodbye island in Maine. So long hammock that I had planned on lying in reading a towering (quite frankly impractical) stack of books in. Better luck next time Atlantic ocean.
For many, a beach read is a fun read—a light-hearted read, a romantic read, a feel good read. But historically, I have always insisted that to be a “beach read”, a book merely has to be read whilst sitting on a beach.
Of course, I would say this. I am someone who is not great at reading light-hearted books. This is not a judgment of those who are, by the way. It’s a recent understanding that I am, frankly, not a very light-hearted person. I like books about resilience and resistance under colonial occupation! Own-voice immigrant and first gen stories about culture clashes and intergenerational trauma! I read books about prison abolition! FOR FUN!
In fact, days into using the Fable app, a fun online community app to track and discuss books, film, and television, its customized AI-generated reader profile took one look at my “Read” shelf and declared “Your bookshelf is a roller coaster of grief, discovery and resilience” before asking pointedly “can you handle a light read?”
Drag me, phone app!
But everything shifted when I found myself stuck inside my humble two bedroom house for two weeks with my sick husband and two sick children. My kids, in spite of being sick, still had the energy of a thousand suns, and my husband and I did not. They were that overstimulating combination of having more needs than usual because they were sick while also seeking more entertainment because they were bored from being stuck inside. And me? I felt like human garbage and it did not matter.
So how could I—a delicate elder Millennial with a 103* fever and night sweats, under-showered and over-touched, having spent the day pleading with my children to “be more patient” and to “lower their expectations” of me—in a rare moment to myself, grab a copy of King Leopold’s Ghost and tuck in to a bit of educational reading about Belgium’s dark history of colonizing The Congo?
Someday? Absolutely.
Today? No. Give me a light read and three ibuprofen, please and thank you.
So here are some of the books I read this summer. They are my COVID Isolation Reads(TM), née Beach Reads, but Courtney-style: light enough to help you adequately disassociate during a cramped COVID isolation, but with enough depth to pull you in and keep you there.
Hopefully there is something here for you.
Courtney x
Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez.
Emma and Justin have the same curse: everyone they date breaks up with them only to immediately go on to meet the love of their life. So what would happen if they intentionally date each other with a set plan to break up?
Poignant, introspective and, at times, laugh out loud funny, this is the story of a mother on summer vacation in Cape Cod with her husband, young adult children, and aging parents. With the space to review a life, what did we get right and what would we change? (TW: Pregnancy loss, discussions of abortion)
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe.
Margo is 20 years old and unexpectedly pregnant by one of her married college professors. Deciding to keep the baby but abandoned by the father, she figures out how to make ends meet with the help of her father, a former professional wrestler who moves in with her, and her new OnlyFans account.
God of the Woods by Liz Moore.
A summer camp. A missing girl. A family with a storied past. This one is for anyone who requires their summer reads to have at least one dead body.
The Husbands by Holly Gramazio.
What would you do if you had an endless choice of husbands with the possibility of someone better right around the corner? Ask Lauren, a woman who discovers that every time a husband goes into her attic, a new one comes out.
I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol.
Glynnis MacNicol is a 46 year old woman, and unmarried and childfree by choice. But after 16 months of isolating alone in New York at the height of the pandemic, she is ready to travel to Paris in search of pleasure.