Sand Between Our Toes: Sizzling Beach Reads from Nantucket Island

by Nicole Citron, PW Daily for Booksellers -- Publishers Weekly, 8/6/2003

Last week, PW Daily contributor Nicole Citron fled steamy New York for the balmy beaches of Nantucket Island, Mass., where she conducted an informal survey of seaside readers on a bright Sunday afternoon. Her report from Jetties Beach, a wide stretch of shore that's popular with families:

An easy bike ride from the center of town, the Jetties offers a view of Nantucket Sound and of the ferry boats shuttling vacationers to and from the Island and the Cape, 30 miles away.

For many, pleasure reading in a sand chair differs little from pleasure reading on the couch, while for others, the beach offers rare, uninterrupted downtime for reading they don't have a chance for year round. While the kids hunted hermit crabs--or, were left on the mainland altogether--many parents at the Jetties spent some quality time with Harry Potter. With Book 5 on her lap, Jennifer Schaffer, of Upper Saddle River, N.J., commented, "We're away from our daughter, so I thought I'd get a jump start." Her husband, Mitch, was reading Don van Natta Jr.'s First off the Tee: Presidential Hackers, Duffers, and Cheaters from Taft to Bush (PublicAffairs, $26), which he found recommended in Golf Digest.

Several beachgoers with bestsellers in hand said they were on vacation from obligatory work-related reading. Jackie and Tom Holt, of Spring Lake, N.J., were engrossed in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday, $24.95) and Nelson Demille's Up Country (Warner, $26.95), respectively. "I usually read trade magazines or books on business," Tom, a banker, told PW Daily . "But when I'm at the beach, I like to get away."

Farther up the beach, Kristin Tallman of Philadelphia, Pa., was enjoying Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada (Doubleday, $24.95). Tallman, who works in marketing, said that she does a lot of industry-specific reading at home. "I'm also reading The Influencers, but I would never take it to the beach with me," she added.

Then there were those sunbathers who brought their work with them. Alyson Shea of Scituate, Mass., shaded her eyes with Pediatric Nursing. "I'm studying for the nursing exam," she told PW Daily .

As Ford Harrington of Baltimore, Md., toweled off from a swim, his mother, Meredith, with needlepoint in hand (she left Joanna Trollope's The Rector's Wife [Berkley, $6.99] in the car), announced that he was reading James Gilligan's Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (Vintage, $14) for a criminal psychology course. Ford's dad, Douglas, on his back in the sand, held Francis Y. Bremer's John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford, $39.95) above his face. "My son goes to Harvard," he said matter-of-factly. "He lives in Winthrop Hall, and this is the story of the guy it's named after."

Though off for the summer, eighth grade American history teacher Suzanne Whitley, of Basking Ridge, N.J., was preparing for fall, reading the Civil War title Run the Blockade by G. Clifton Wisler (HarperCollins Juvenile, $15.95), as a possible assignment for her students. Her three friends, Peg Canton, Linda Sullivan and Mary Jane Newman, eschewed professional material for pleasure reading. Newman displayed a copy of Nicholas Spark's Nights in Rodanthe (Warner, $12), which she described as "an easy read." Sullivan, with red hair and freckled nose under her hat, was reading Niall William's The Fall of Light (Warner, $13.95), a novel set during the Irish potato famine. Canton, of Bernardsville, N.J., held up Evelyn Minshall's book about Noah's ark, And Then the Rain Came (Thomas Nelson). "I like to keep my beach reading with a religious bent," she said. "I never get a chance to read, and I'd rather fill my head with this stuff."

Peg Hylant, a traveling salesperson based in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., was two pages away from finishing Anne Perry's mystery Bedford Square (Ballantine, $6.99) and said she balances "the light mystery stuff with the more thought-provoking reading." The two books she intended to read after Bedford Square: P.B. Ryan's Still Life with Murder (Prime Crime, $6.50) and Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God (Putnam, $23.95).

For some family vacationers, though, a beach getaway offers little escape from the 24/7 duties of motherhood. Only a quarter of the way through Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees (Scribner, $14), an Oprah book she started weeks ago at home, Lorraine Calder of Goshen, Conn., kept an eye on her children splashing in the water. "It's hard to read and watch my two boys at the same time," she lamented. "I'd love to just sink my head into the book, but I can't."

Other titles spotted on the beach mostly reflected the bestseller lists:

several more copies of The Da Vinci Code
numerous copies of the latest Harry Potter as well as earlier titles in the series
Lauren Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit
John Grisham titles
Janet Evanovich's Hard Eight
Sue Miller's While I Was Born
Jennifer Weiner's In Her Shoes
James Frey's A Million Little Pieces