My family is just back from a week at the beach, our habitual spot where, among other things, I habitually enjoy reading a book a day by the ocean, the pool, and on the balcony. These dedicated doses of quality reading time would be delightful on their own, but one of the highlights of reading in public on our trips is I get to see what other people are reading. I love to snoop other people’s book choices no matter where I am, but because beach and summer reading are near and dear to my heart I especially like to see what people choose to read on vacation.

This oceanfront sampling from Florida’s gulf coast is in no way representative of readers at large, but since we’ve been visiting this beach for nearly twenty years now (I’m shocked it’s been that long) I’ve had the opportunity to see how people’s reading habits have evolved over time in this small stretch of shoreline.

So what’s the beach reading situation in 2024? Just like last year, I spied so many readers reading actual paper books! Nowhere near as many people reading books as iPhones, but still, so many physical books, many more books than Kindles. Interestingly, those reading paper books tended to be older than me (50s, 60s, 70s) or younger than me (teens and 20-somethings); not many people who appeared to be in their 30s or 40s had actual print books this week. (Any theories as to why?)

This beach reading photo is from 2022 but you’d never know it; I had the same suit, hat, Kindle, shades, and fabulous oceanside reading experience in 2024!

In many ways, this year’s beach read sampling resembled what I observed in 2023. To explain, let me first walk you back to 2022, when Colleen Hoover (lots of different titles but especially It Ends With Us) and Carley Fortune’s just-released debut Every Summer After dominated the beach. (Not a judgment, just an observation.) But this year and last are remarkable, compared to previous years in our iPhone-saturated era, not just for the recent increase of physical books but for the the great diversity of reads on display. I’ve never said this before but: this week I never saw two readers with the same book, with one notable (and awesome) exception.

I saw many books I expected to see—those recent and current bestsellers that are statistically likely to show up in crowds of readers—but not in the quantity I expected. Instead of multiples as in past years, I saw single copies of new beach-worthy releases like Abby Jimenez’s Just for the Summer, Emily Henry’s Happy Place paperback and her new Funny Story hardcover, Christina Lauren’s The Paradise Problem, and Carley Fortune’s 2022 hit Every Summer After (but not her new release, the Summer Reading Guide selection This Summer Will Be Different). Our typical beach spot is not terribly close to any bookstores, independent or chain, and I do wonder if we’d see more new releases and bestsellers were we closer.

I saw piles of mysteries and thrillers in the hands of readers of all ages, including Lisa Jackson’s You Don’t Want to Know, Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind (Netflix tie-in edition, in a teenager’s hands), Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, When I saw Gregg Olsen’s If You Tell and Doug Kari’s The Berman Murders in readers’ hands I assumed they were fictional thrillers, but it turns out they’re both nonfiction true crime tales—the former about three children abused by their mother in 1990s-2000s rural Washington state and the latter about a still-unsolved 1986 murder that took place in the Mojave Desert.

Romance and women’s fiction were well-represented: I saw several different titles from Lucy Score and Ana Huang, multiple installments from Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, and a handful of Colleen Hoover titles—but in nothing like past years’ quantities, and no repeats. Over the course of the week I saw a handful of library books and two magazines, which made me wistful for my family of origin’s spring break beach trips in the 80s and 90s: I used to love stocking up on Seventeen and Allure and the like at the grocery store before leaving for vacation. (This week I saw Real Simple and Outside; the Outside was in my husband’s hands.)

A beach read is any book you read on the beach, and plenty of readers had chosen nonfiction books that you probably don’t think of when you hear the phrase “beach reading”: Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Kati Neville and Lindsay Ahrens’s Fix, Freeze, Feast. I saw one man reading Chat GPT Made Simple with James Clear’s Atomic Habits waiting on deck. For a moment I thought The Perfect Marriage was nonfiction because the reader seemed to be journaling about it, but then I noticed the blood splatter on the cover. Turns out it’s a psychological thriller about a successful defense attorney who must defend her own husband when he’s accused of murdering his mistress. My mistake!

As for what I read on the beach: alas, this year the answer was not a book a day, but I am definitely happy with my reading week and the four books I completed in six full days. This is the part you’re not going to like, because I’m about to get vague, but for a good reason: I started the week with two of my personal most-anticipated forthcoming releases that I now know we will feature in our September Fall Book Preview. (Tickets not yet available, but you can check out last year’s edition right here.) Both were mystery/thrillers from authors I already know and love; each was suspenseful and plotty and exactly right for the beach and kept me happily occupied for exactly twenty-four hours.

Then I shifted to Isabella Hamad’s 2023 release, the Aspen Words Literary Prize winner Enter Ghost, which I bought at Books & Mortar in Grand Rapids in April (at the recommendation of WSIRN alum Allison Matz, who didn’t say anything about it beyond it being her favorite book of the year, or some similar superlative). Since then I’ve been saving it for my own summer reading. It was the kind of book that I had to read slowly: smart, reflective, and beautifully written. I knew very little about it going in and was surprised to discover it’s a theater book: in the wake of a destabilizing break-up, a Palestinian actress flees London and returns home to visit her Palestinian family in Haifa after a long absence, and while there is pulled into an Arabic production of Hamlet. This story demanded to be read slowly, and on top of that I did so much googling, both for my understanding of the plot and timeline and out of curiosity about the region’s history and present. While not at all the same, in many ways it reminded me of Hala Alyan’s The Arsonist’s City.

I finished the week with a sexy and intellectual (yes, both!) re-read that was undeniably work reading, as I was revisiting it with fresh eyes to determine if it would make a good fall pick for Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club. (I think … yes?) But the book itself was a pleasure, and I discovered it’s the sort of read that is even better on the second pass than the first.

I almost forgot! Now about the only time I saw two readers with the same book: almost every day I saw two women who looked to be my mother’s generation sitting side by side with matching paperback copies of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. I only saw them reading, never talking—but I do hope they enjoyed good conversation about their reading all week long.

If I’m the only one who wants to eavesdrop on other peoples’ reading choices, I don’t want to know. But if you also like to see what everybody else is reading, or what you’re choosing to read this summer, tell me in the comments section!

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