Is this the formula for happiness?

I cannot say for sure, but I am pretty sure I will be enjoying some seriously happy moments in a very very little bit. The purpose of this post is not to tease, though, so I will just make my point.

Beach reads. How do you feel about those?

Does the thought of choosing a book for the beach send nice ticklish feeling of anticipation down your spine?

I bet it does. I love picking out books and I am pretty serious about my choices. With so little time to spare, we just cannot afford to do much guilty pleasure reading. When it’s summer time, though, I argue we can and we definitely should. I can give you three solid reasons to use a carte blanche, when shopping for beach reads.

1. It’s the beach – there is wind, sand, the sea, glare and heat. You can never focus on a serious literary fiction ot non-fiction or, God forbid, academic reading.
2. No one will judge you for bringing Divergent to the pool party. Pack Bukowski and you become a pretentious hipster-poet. Pack Murakami and you will have to discuss his literary merit. Pack a classic and you will have to listen to everybody’s excuse why they never actually read it, but… I am speaking from experience here.
3. If it’s a paper book you are bringing, it will get crumpled with dried salt water spots and it will have sand between the pages, no matter what you do to clean it up. It won’t be pretty. Don’t do this to a darling. Do this to a guilty pleasure book and call it even.

My beach reads this year are The Martian and The Rosie Project. Mind you, I don’t take any of them to be guilty pleasure reads, but I do expect them to be lighter and more entertaining than the majority of my to-read list.

Have you read them? Please, share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Reading at the beach happens rarely to me – most of the time I am just holding the book and looking around over it. What I enjoy is its company, knowing that I am free to spend the entire day in an imaginary world that lays open before me. It’s there for the taking and nothing can hold me back, except for the salty touch of the sea and the breeze on my face – things I am perfectly fine letting distract me.