10 Big Fat Books I’d Need To Read On Holiday

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This week, the prompt is Beach/Beachy Reads (Share books you’d take to the beach OR books that take place at the beach). I think for most people, “a beach read” is something lighly entertaining and easy to read, but for me, if I am ever reading on a beach, that means I’ve gone away on holiday for at least a week. A relaxing beach holiday is an opportunity for me to tackle some of the larger and more challenging books that I might find too intimidating or too much of a commitment when I have home and work responsibilities rattling around in my brain. A beach holiday for me is going to be a minimum of 8 hours of solid reading time a day! Plus, with an eReader, I can take as many big, heavy books as I like and not worry about luggage space or weight!

This means some of the es books I’ve read on the beach (or by a pool) in the past have not been what one would call “light reading” : The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe, I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, and A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick all come to mind!

Nothing like reading The Handmaid’s Tale ceremony scene while lying by the pool with the sun beating down on my back, the sound of people having fun in the water in the background!

I don’t take all challenging books, though. I’ll make sure I have something easy to break up the darkness!

So these are 10 books I would consider taking to read on a beach holiday, if I were lucky enough to be going on one this year… which I’m not. Sigh. We never got around to sorting one out. It’s also difficult because Husband doesn’t like that style of trip; he’d get bored, which makes it a hard sell and difficult to muster interest in actually booking something. I have been promised that next year we could finally go to Santori as a proper honeymoon (Scotland was great, but it was only 3 days!).

Anyway, the books –

1. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

It is 1866, and young Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: A wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, The Luminaries is a brilliantly constructed, fiendishly clever ghost story and a gripping page-turner.

I did not realise when I bought this on Kindle that it is 850 pages long. I am never going to read this unless I go on holiday!

2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Acclaimed by many as the world’s greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature – with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author’s own views and convictions.

I do need to read this one day, but it’s almost 1,000 pages, so again… that is very unlikely to happen unless I’m on holiday or retired!

3. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The year is 1806. England is beleaguered by the long war with Napoleon, and centuries have passed since practical magicians faded into the nation’s past. But scholars of this glorious history discover that one remains: the reclusive Mr Norrell, whose displays of magic send a thrill through the country.

Proceeding to London, he raises a beautiful woman from the dead and summons an army of ghostly ships to terrify the French. Yet the cautious, fussy Norrell is challenged by the emergence of another magician: the brilliant novice Jonathan Strange.

Young, handsome and daring, Strange is the very antithesis of Norrell. So begins a dangerous battle between these two great men which overwhelms that between England and France. And their own obsessions and secret dabblings with the dark arts are going to cause more trouble than they can imagine.

I loved Piranesi so much and I’m curious to read more from Clarke… but my God, this is over a 1,000 pages!

4. IT by Stephen King

Welcome to Derry, Maine …

It’s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real …

They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But none of them can withstand the force that has drawn them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end, and the evil without a name.

Stephen King is one of my “beach read” go tos if I want something entertaining and easy to read, but this one… It’s close to 1,200 pages, so I do not see myself ever picking it up to read during “normal life” at home! A holiday is the only way it is happening.

5. The Stand by Stephen King

First came the days of the plague. Then came the dreams. Dark dreams that warned of the coming of the dark man. The apostate of death, his worn-down boot heels tramping the night roads. The warlord of the charnel house and Prince of Evil. His time is at hand. His empire grows in the west and the Apocalypse looms.

Another long King, just under 1,200 pages, but people seem to love it. This one I might end up audiobooking when I do get around to it, but if I did decide to read it in print, it’ll require me to have a lot of free time!

6. The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake

Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is lord and heir.

Titus is expected to rule this gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons (and his eccentric and wayward subjects) according to strict age-old rituals, but things are changing in the castle. Titus must contend with treachery, manipulation and murder as well as his own longing for a life beyond the castle walls.

I have an omnibus of all three books, which makes a total of 900 pages. It isn’t my usual kind of read and I suspect I might need a nice, relaxed mind to give it the best chance.

7. Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the corruption of the legal system and the society which supports it.

“Jarndyce and Jarndyce” is an infamous lawsuit that has been in process for generations. Nobody can remember exactly how the case started but many different individuals have found their fortunes caught up in it. Esther Summerson watches as her friends and neighbours are consumed by their hopes and disappointments with the proceedings. But while the intricate puzzles of the lawsuit are being debated by lawyers, other more dramatic mysteries are unfolding that involve heartbreak, lost children, blackmail and murder.

The fog and cold that permeate Bleak House mirror a Victorian England mired in spiritual insolvency. Dickens brought all his passion, brilliance, and narrative verve to this huge novel of lives entangled in a multi-generational lawsuit—and through it, he achieved, at age 41, a stature almost Shakespearean.

I’ve enjoyed every Dickens I’ve read over the years but this one is a 1,000 plus pages beast I’ll need the right mood to tackle!

8. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

A thrilling tale of narrow escapes, romance in the midst of a revolution, and battlefield heroism, Victor Hugo’s sprawling 1862 novel focuses on the Parisian underworld. Ex-convict Jean Valjean, who served 19 years in prison for stealing bread, attempts to redeem his life by helping the downtrodden. But his every move is dogged by the implacable policeman, Inspector Javert, whose relentless pursuit of a reformed criminal reflects a morally empty state that values retribution rather than justice.

It’s nearly 1,400 pages for fucks sake, but so many people say it’s incredible, so I guess one day I’ll give it a chance. That day will either be on a nice long holiday or when I retire!

9. London Fields by Martin Amis

London Fields is Amis’s murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a “black hole” of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch?

So this is half the length of most of the books on this list, at 500ish pages depending on the editions! I could have put this one on my 1980s list, but chose Money instead, so that’s why it’s on my mind and snuck its way into here!

10. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening the stability of the whole community. The first of his works set in the fictional county of Wessex, Hardy’s novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with his evocative descriptions of rural life and landscapes, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships.

This is by far the shortest book on this list – 433 pages, pah! – but Hardy books are never light in theme or tone, so it counts. I know I have read this one before at University (actually, I think I read it voluntarily at Uni because I’d admired Jude the Obscure so much), but that was a very long time ago now, and I’d love to re-read this.