Chels

I love to research. It’s one of my hobbies, and probably the reason I write. I love nothing more than deep diving into a topic, then forming my opinion. I may not have been great at science growing up, but if there’s one thing I respect, it’s the scientific method. So, when I have a passing thought, you bet I’m going to investigate it.

The thought this week? That the beach read has changed over the years. From my own memory, I recall the popular beach reads from a decade or so ago being romcoms, but these days, the popular choices seem to be thrillers and mysteries. Over the years, though, the celebrity autobiography has remained a solid non-fiction choice. Of course, this is all anecdotal, and could just reflect the changing tastes of the people in my life, but I’m sure there’s more to it. 

I quickly learned that it would be pretty impossible to follow the scientific method to the letter – it would be hard enough finding a definitive list of the most popular books read specifically on a holiday in a given year, never mind going back over a decade. So, I’ve changed my angle. To solve this question, I’ll be looking at the books that were predicted to be huge over summer, and were recommended as beach reads. That seems fair. It’s also pretty tricky to find one outlet that’s consistently published this kind of list. To compromise, I’ll be taking my data from two sources – Glamour, who pretty consistently had lists available in the 2000s and 2010s, and Elle, who seem to have taken over in the last few years. Both of them are longstanding beauty and lifestyle magazines with a similar target demographic, so I think they should be pretty consistent.

So, what actually is a beach read? There’s no set definition, other than the books that we read on our summer holidays. I think generally, the books we consider beach reads are ‘light reads’. Less high fantasy, things you can pick up and put down casually between conversations. They’re also usually shorter, too, so they weigh less in your suitcase. That’s why the rise in mysteries and thrillers is so surprising to me – they’re typically longer reads, and I personally need to focus a lot harder on a whodunnit than a romance.

2025

We’ll start with this summer, and the books Elle thinks we should be currently reading. This June, they published a list of 20 titles recommended by their editors. As is often the case, for some of the novels, it was hard to categorise them neatly into genres. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere is generally listed as a historical fiction novel, but it’s also a romance, and Janelle Brown’s What Kind of Paradise is predominantly a mystery novel, but it’s also a coming of age story. For the purposes of my question, I’m counting both of them in their respective categories. So, according to Elle, four of the 20 recommended beach reads fall in the mystery/thriller genre, and four are romances. An even split that makes up for almost half of all the novels. Memoirs and biographies make up a further 15%, and the rest of the recommendations are split between literary fiction, speculative fiction, family stories, dark comedies, and coming of age. Really interesting, though, is the fact that half of the romance stories recommended are queer romances, which I wasn’t expecting.

2020

We’re going back to 2020 now, with the caveat that we were all stuck inside. In theory, there were no beach reads, but the concept of the summer read still prevailed despite the lockdown. I read significantly more than average in summer 2020, and I know a lot of people did, but, anecdotally, I think we generally opted to go for the books we’d been meaning to get around to reading, rather than solely picking up new ones.

In 2020, Glamour shared 14 titles recommended by authors. The list is a real mixed bag of genres, with two romances, three mystery/thrillers, and three memoirs. It’s a time capsule of the year – with a further three novels highlighted for their political and social commentary. Four, if you count The Great Gatsby, but the classic was chosen to encourage us to live vicariously through the 1920s parties while we were isolating. Perhaps an outlier year given the circumstances, but it does follow my hypothesis that romances have started to share the spotlight with thrillers – and that memoirs remain a classic staple.

2015

Staying with Glamour, we have a short list – only 9 recommendations for summer 2015. It’s only a small sample size, but it checks out for how I remember the beach read landscape of 2015 to be. Four of the picks were romances, and there’s only one mystery on the list. Unusually, this is the only year where no memoirs made the cut. It could be that there were just none that stood out in summer 2015, but with such a short list anyway, I’m surprised one wasn’t thrown in to fit a non-fiction quota of sorts. Historical fiction got two places this year, which makes sense, since 2015 was the year everyone seemed to be watching Wolf Hall. We were in a bit of a historical fiction era back then. There were also two books which were hard to classify – they’re ‘gossip’ novels, as far as that makes sense. They follow stories of rumours and secrets, but not in the same way as mysteries do. They’re more social mysteries. Perhaps it was novels like these that bridged the gap between romances and mystery/thrillers.

2010

We’re back to Elle for 2010 with a top 10 list of summer reads. In 2010, we had four romances, three memoirs, and one mystery. Again, like 2015, this is the kind of spread I expected to see for the era. Elle also recommended a fantasy this year – Justin Cronin’s The Passage, which also incorporates sci-fi and horror elements. It seems like fantasy novels aren’t recommended as beach reads as often, particularly earlier on. The final book, Based Upon Availability by Alix Strauss, doesn’t really fit into any of the genres I’ve been looking at, but it’s referred to as ‘women’s fiction’. I think I hate that term. We wouldn’t ever have men’s fiction, and even when it comes to the genres seen as more masculine, they’re still enjoyed by women readers. Not to veer off the topic of beach reads, but I do think it’s silly. I think it probably came from a case of books not fitting neatly into a genre other than ‘contemporary fiction’ – and if it follows the lives of female characters, like chick flicks, we’ll just label them as ‘women’s fiction’ to market them.

I can’t really go further back than 2010 – the internet may be forever, but unfortunately, there’s not a great archive for pre-2010 magazine articles on summer book recommendations. So, after my not-so-scientific research, I think I can say that my hypothesis is pretty correct. There are a lot more thrillers and mysteries being recommended, although the number of memoirs and romances stays pretty consistent. It’s just that summer reading lists are bigger now, and there’s a really wide range of genres being recommended. And of course, there are a few caveats to my research – I’ve only looked at the books recommended by two magazines, both with a pretty established demographic of young women, and this doubtless has an effect on the kinds of books that are recommended. Still, I’m confident in saying that the concept of the beach read has definitely changed over the last decade or so.