beach/airplane reading recs

A friend and I are going to Crete next week, on a much-needed vacation. We’re flying from Korea so it’s going to be a bit of a flight, plus we’re planning on spending a lot of time on the beach. I’ve bought A Walk to Remember and my boyfriend got me LA Confidential, but I need more than that. Obviously I’m not looking for anything too heavy - some books I’ve enjoyed in the past as light reading are The Secret History, The Other Boelyn Girl, What I Loved, The Time Traveller’s Wife, Something Borrowed, etc. I like epic fantasies and am considering re-reading the Dark Tower series on this trip as well, but I’d also like some new stuff to read.

How about a book of short stories from the first part of the last century?

Pulp Fiction: The Villains: An Omnibus.

I’m reading this at the moment and find it to be very absorbing.

My last trip with airplane/airport time I read Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much Is True. Not frivolous, but completely absorbing – a great travel read.

I’m reading “The Lost City of Z” which seems tailor made for reading on travel. It’s a non-fiction account of a early 20th century explorer in the Amazon.

Don’t ask me why, but I would recommend these:

  • **Haruki Murakami **- A Wild Sheep Chase, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Easy reads, but weird and complex in a totally cool way with a tad of fantasy thrown in.

  • **Robertson Davies **- The Killer Angels. Davies was a Canadian author who was educated at Cambridge (or Oxford? I know - not a mistake I should be making) and a headmaster at a private school in Canada. This book stands alone wonderfully but is also part of a trilogy set in a academic institution. The characters are wonderful and a hoot, as is the story - kinda like a great PBS/BBC miniseries. His writing voice is very wise - you feel very comfortable leaving the story-telling to him.

  • **Richard Russo **- **Straight Man **- another book about academia, but Russo has a wry sense of humor that he brings to small-town America and the folks who inhabit it

  • **David Foster Wallace **- the Broom of the System. His first novel and the one that broke it open. If you aren’t interested in the travails of Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, receptionist at the publishing firm of Frequent & Vigorous (she’s having an affair with Vigorous) - and all the hilarity that ensues, well, then you need to just read it again! Did I mention that she has a parrot named Vlad the Impaler? Just read the first page on Amazon where Wallace digresses to discuss Mindy Metalman, the beautiful roommate with the ugly feet and see if you aren’t drawn in…I tried to copy out of Amazon’s page search to quote here, but they don’t allow copying…

The Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich are quintessential beach reads.

I second the Murakami suggestions - I love every book I’ve read of his, though I tend to prefer translations done by Birnbaum.

These aren’t really in the same style of what you’ve said you like, but I have recently read “the Graveyard Book” by Neil Gaiman and “Fool” by Christopher Moore, and both were fantastic in completely different ways. Again, everything Gaiman has ever written, I’ve loved so far.