The concept, popularity, and dismissal of the ‘beach read’

Like other booksellers this time of year, the Penn Bookstore has put together a “beach reads” table featuring titles such as Emily Henry’s “Beach Read,” Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” and Emma Cline’s “The Guest.”

Cheryl Krementz, director of communications and special projects for Penn Business Services, describes the concept of a “beach read” as escapism. “It’s the grown-up version of summer reading in school,” she says. “We’re not assigned this, so I’m going to read whatever I want.”

As someone finishing a dissertation cheekily titled “Trivial Pursuits: Women Readers, Materialist Feminism, and a New Life of Bookishness in the Twenty-First Century,” comparative literature and literary theory Ph.D. candidate Angelina Eimannsberger in the School of Arts & Sciences has some thoughts about this topic.

“When I came to my dissertation, I really wanted to study what it means for literature to be about women’s everyday life,” Eimannsberger says, adding that she was particularly interested in the question of whether—and in what ways—women reading together is feminist.

She had initially planned to research Reese’s Book Club and Bookstagram (Instagram accounts dedicated to reading), but taking professor James English’s literary studies and sociology course inspired her to expand her dissertation to include the romance genre.

While there’s no consensus on which books fall under the umbrella of a beach read, Eimannsberger cites romance novels first and foremost, and then mysteries, books about travel, and books about summer camp, such as Liz Moore’s “God of the Woods.”

The term “beach read” emerged in the 1990s in book trade publications such as Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly, according to The Guardian. Eimannsberger says that many genre terms in popular culture—such as chick lit and romantasy—come about either through campaigns driven by publishers or from readers themselves.

The origin of the term, she says, seems to have more to do with the books people read at the beach than with books about the beach. For Eimannsberger, beach reads are books she’s reading in “big gulps” rather than a few pages here and there and for no other purpose than pleasure.

“Because ‘beach read’ is such a permission to read something for fun, it gets feminized and criticized in the same way that romance and romantasy do,” she says. “You’re not reading it because The New York Times had a good review of it or even because your book club is reading it for a discussion. There’s this element of self-indulgence to it that’s not necessarily gendered, but I think (it’s) gendered if it’s about love and it’s about domestic topics.”

But “a beach read can be good and can be important,” Eimannsberger says. Pointing to Talia Hibbert’s books as an example, she notes that romance novels often provide real, intersectional representations of mental health, chronic pain, racial diversity, and different kinds of sexuality, adding that beach reads are often written by women for women.

Romance novels are also worthwhile to study because the genre is very popular, says Eimannsberger. For example, she interviewed 10 romance bookstore owners for her dissertation, and one said she had to hire a bouncer for Saturdays at her Cambridge, Massachusetts bookshop—which has a wine bar—because the capacity was too much for booksellers to manage.

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She notes that while Reese Witherspoon is known for romantic comedies, her book club has very few romance novels but many other genres of nonfiction and fiction—including ones that are often counted among beach reads, such as mysteries and historical fiction. The book club’s tagline is “where women’s stories shine,” and Eimannsberger says “there’s a really big impetus toward work-life balance and women having it all.”

For one chapter of her dissertation, she interviewed social media content creators and found that many of them viewed their use of Instagram as a creative outlet, or what Eimannsberger calls escapist labor. “One thing that really unifies this experience is you can talk about what’s important to you, and probably someone else has read the book and wants to talk back to you,” she says.

When Eimannsberger thinks of a “beach read,” she thinks of people taking photos of their books at the beach for social media. Someone might read a book set at the beach while visiting a beach “so the photo can be as much of a Kodak moment as possible,” she says. And then there’s the music, where a creator is posting the book pic with the appropriate Taylor Swift song, such as “August” or “Cruel Summer,” for a beach read.

Now when Eimannsberger is out and about, “I’m always trying to see the covers of what people are reading,” she says. “I figure if I see people commuting or in the park or at the beach reading the books I wrote about, I must have found the books that are meaningful to people.”