Calgon, take me away

Smart beach reads for when you feel mentally beached.

We’re capable of doing hard things, but we shouldn’t always feel like we have to, you know?

As my stackmate pointed out last week, this spring just seems to be trying to kick all our asses. It’s actually been quite beautiful most of this week here in central Iowa and probably the threat of another spring snow is now past, but still everything feels daunting. Slower, in that moon boots on flypaper sort of way, more prone to the kind of lurking frustration that makes you feel like maybe there’s a little can’t-get-my-shit-together storm cloud hovering overhead.

Even reading has felt like a bridge too far lately. In the last couple of weeks I hit the jackpot on my library holds with Geraldine Brooks’ Horse, Alex Michaelides’ The Fury, and Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! all landing on my Libby¹ shelf. And you know what, I couldn’t get myself to crack open even one of them. I didn’t seem to have it in me to dive into the murky unknown.

When I feel this kind of inertia around books, the antidote is often to revisit a favorite feel-good read, something light but not entirely empty of calories, comfort food in book form.

So I picked up Julia Whelan’s Thank You for Listening, tucked into a nest of covers, and let myself breeze back into the story of two audiobook narrators who fall for each other — twice, and under just about every romance trope there is. (Trope, not cliche, mind you.)

I’m happy to report, dear readers, that the cure seems to be working. I have since waded deep into Martyr!, which I highly recommend if you’re feeling up to a beautifully rendered and sometimes heartbreaking journey.

If, however, you’re still in a spring slump, below is my prescription for escape that isn’t total brain candy, a shortlist of rom-coms with a side of complicated.

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Smart Beach Reads for When You Feel Mentally Beached

Thank You for Listening, by Julia Whelan

If you listen to a lot of audiobooks, you probably know Whelan’s voice (she’s a prolific fan favorite), and as a writer her sophomore novel is a delight centered around two narrators working through their own identity crises. Sexy night with a charming stranger, email epistolary romance, hidden identities, matchmaking from the grave, a little Hollywood thrown in—sounds like quite the tossed salad, but it’s more like crisp frites and champagne.

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Evvie Drake Starts Over, by Linda Holmes

The weird guilt and relief of someone problematic dying, baseball and the yips, male-female best friendship, coastal MAINE! (if you’re keeping track of my obsessions, add this to your bingo card), and a love story. It’s witty, layered, and full of characters I’d like to know.

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Beach Read, by Emily Henry

“Beach read” — it’s literally in the title. Excellent contemporary romance/rom-com example. Two novelists and former college rivals who both have writer’s block end up living next door on Lake Michigan for the summer and challenge each other to write in the other’s genre — she writes romance, he writes “serious literary fiction.” (Like a million other people, I’m a sucker for rom-coms with writers in them.)

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LESS, by Andrew Sean Greer

An often pee-your-pants-funny travelogue of a world tour prompted by a mid-life-my-ex-is-getting-married crisis that also happens to be, in my opinion, an incredibly insightful and generous look at the insecurities and foibles of being human and trying to love and be loved. There’s a scene in Japan with a rental car’s rogue GPS that made me laugh so hard I couldn’t catch my breath.

P.S.: It won the Pulitzer in 2018.

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P.P.S.: You know who wins our Pulitzer? You and you and you, dear readers! Thanks for tuning in. Happy almost-weekend and we’ll see you next week.

1. Do you know Libby? It’s the free library app that lets you check out ebooks and audiobooks from your local library (best kept secret! that shouldn’t be a secret). I love physical check-outs too, of course, but if you need a new book at 2 a.m. or you’ve finished #3 in a series along the Interstate in Nebraska and have to have #4 right now, Libby is your best friend.