Though the term “beach read” wasn’t popularized until the 1990s, the concept has existed for so long that it can seem like easy breezy pleasure reading while on summer holiday has simply always been. In fact, it has a distinct history that can be traced back to the early 1800s.
When the mathematician Dr Kit Yates sees a weather forecast predicting a 25% chance of rain, he packs an umbrella. When he meets someone who shares his birthday in a crowded room, he is not in the least surprised. And if he comes across an unfamiliar phrase, such as “the Baader-Meinhof effect”, he knows he is likely to encounter it again, very soon.
“One of the biggest things I learned from writing my book was that surprisingly unlikely things can and do happen, given enough opportunities,” Yates says, referring to his new book, How to Expect the Unexpected.
My small turboprop plane whirred low through thick clouds. Below me, St. Paul Island cut a golden, angular shape in the shadow-dark Bering Sea. I saw a lone island village—a grid of houses, a small harbor, and a road that followed a black ribbon of coast.
Some 330 people, most of them Indigenous, live in the village of St. Paul, about 800 miles west of Anchorage, where the local economy depends almost entirely on the commercial snow crab business. Over the past few years, 10 billion snow crabs have unexpectedly vanished from the Bering Sea. I was traveling there to find out what the villagers might do next.
In love, in art, in crime, what is done intentionally and what is done unintentionally? This is the question at the core of Stephanie Bishop’s fourth novel, “The Anniversary.”
For a novelist to engage in literary experimentation requires initial boldness and enduring resolve.
Rachel Cantor succeeds with energy and empathy in “Half-Life of a Stolen Sister,” in which familial eccentricity abounds, sorrow pervades and time wobbles.
We are accustomed to thinking of the car as an inevitable fit for America and Americans when it appeared around 1900. A spread-out people, already accustomed to personal travel by horse, with an often-noted aversion to crowds, made the conversion to mechanical automobility easy. Nowhere was this more evident than in the region of Southern California. In 1900, Los Angeles was a new city, free from the density and labyrinthine streets of the old walking towns of Europe or even New England; it had attracted settlers (and developers) expecting personal space but also the easy access to work and shopping the car alone could provide. The city had weather that accommodated early roofless and unheated vehicles that in New York might have needed to be stored during winter. Even the early L.A. trolly system paved the way for the car by fostering dispersal and the subsequent need to fill in the gaps between the web of trolly lines with cars and roads. But, as Darryl Holter and Stephen Gee’s recently released book Driving Force: Automobiles and the New American City, 1900–1930 claims, Los Angeles as the United States’ quintessential car town cannot be reduced to such abstractions. People, even individualistic people, made it happen.