Beach blanket book- worms

SHERWOOD KIRALY

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”

-- Logan Pearsall Smith

Pretty soon you’ll be at the beach for a day, or a good part of a

day. You might go in the water. You might play ball. You might close

your eyes and make like a rotisserie. Or you might read.

Some of you may be uneasy about reading in public, sensing that

it’s elitist, nonparticipatory, and brands you as a Poindexter. But

you yourself read.

Don’t deny it, you’re doing it right now. You just did it some

more. A book at the beach can be good company.

Now if you read only one book a year it should probably be an

owner’s manual, but if you enjoy a good page-turner, days at the

beach are ideal for catching up with the latest -- or with something

you always meant to read and never did.

You need to watch what you pick, though. A few summers ago I

decided it was time to tackle “War and Peace,” and I read the whole

thing. It was pretty good.*

But I can’t really recommend it as a beach book; there’s such a

thing as too much sun, and by the time Napoleon’s army got back to

France I had some skin problems. You’ll want something a little

snappier.

Family recommendations: for magazine readers, my wife Patti Jo

likes Vanity Fair and a bimonthly called Foreign Affairs. Her

paperback choice is Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” Katie

is reading Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked,” having recently enjoyed the

musical show. For younger readers, she goes with “The Neverending

Story,” by Michael Ende.

I like a lot of dead writers myself; the best of them survive

tenaciously on the page. Here are three:

P.G. Wodehouse’s short stories about Jeeves take you to another,

funnier world, and who can’t use one of those?

Volume one of Tennessee Williams’ selected letters is out in

paperback and includes several letters from Laguna Beach. Turns out

he lived here in the summer of 1939, two miles up the canyon, and

worked nights setting pins in a bowling alley. He found Laguna

prettier than anywhere he’d been, including the Riviera, but later

decided it was “too perfect” and “unendurable.” Whereupon he left

town and went east to write “The Glass Menagerie.”

Food for thought there, surely. Are we still too perfect? In what

way unendurable? If I moved away too, would I write better? What

happened to the bowling alley?

Finally, the 1920s humorist Ring Lardner doesn’t get reprinted as

often as he deserves. Some years ago I picked up an old book called

“First and Last” and read his description of a female tennis player:

“She has grown into blooming young womanhood and can play three

musical instruments, all ukuleles.”

May you find equally good company this summer.

*Guinness nominee: shortest review of longest novel.