I am writing this column a few days before heading off to vacation, or “villa,” as Jesuit lingo has it. I plan to spend a large chunk of that time enjoying one of the finest pleasures August has to offer, reading on the beach.
While “beach read” often connotes less-than-serious material, I have taken all kinds of books to the beach, from literary novels to science fiction to books of essays. Last summer I read most of Czech priest Tomas Halik’s The Afternoon of Christianity while on the Jersey Shore. Once it was Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam.
The beauty of reading on vacation, whether the material is pulp or poetry, whether the site is the beach or the porch or sometimes even an airplane, is that the reading is uninterrupted, an oasis of real attention in a desert of what is otherwise just “content.”
