I have always hated the phrase "beach read," and the notion it represents, that somehow your vacation is the only appropriate time for pleasure reading or genre fiction. It seems like the kind of unrealistic trope that is exacerbated by magazines, like you should buy some sunglasses based on your "face shape" and a swim suit that emphasizes your "small bust" and get a "beach read" for your vacation. I have a tendency to bring on vacation any book on my TBR list that is compact and lightweight, i.e. paperback, and there is usually no rhyme or reason to it. That said, I can concede that people often want good books for vacation time with the implication being that they'll be sitting in a hammock, on a beach, or poolside for long stretches of time and need a book that they can really disappear into. Thus, the following, my recommendations for beach books this summer:
Read more#ReadWomen2014: Virginia Woolf
This week's #ReadWomen2014 author recommendation is going old school. Virginia Woolf is the O.G. advocate of women in literature-- she read plenty of women authors and was a notable appreciator of George Eliot before it was cool; she delivered a lecture on why there aren't more women writers historically, which was subsequently turned into the excellent little volume known as A Room of One's Own; perhaps most importantly, she was a critically-acclaimed novelist herself, which only served to legitimate her opinions even further.
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