Books for the Beach

It was one of those rare, blessed, two-book-types of a reader's week. With no writing. Not a word. This was my first visit to Puerto Vallarta - on the Pacific Ocean's beautiful Bahía de Banderas, Mexico, a city that was incidentally, officially founded in the 1850s, as was my Californian hometown of Petaluma.

This bustling, international coastal resort has happily retained its old town charm, taxi-rattling cobblestones and rambling, hillside neighborhoods. Summer months mark a noticeable absence of Americans, Canadians and most anyone other than Mexican nationals who are more tolerant of sky high temperatures, extreme humidity and frequent evening thunder and lightening storm shows that serve to illuminate the entire, stunning skyline, clear across the bay.

Submitting to the heat was not a problem on this trip, I'm pleased to report. My bag full of books beckoned in between a bunch of water based activities.

If you read author Mark Haddon's quirky and unforgettable, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time, you won't want to miss his clever new book, The Red House, a quick vacation read that will likely make you pay a bit more attention to the feelings of extendended family and friends the next time you opt for a week away with the clan in tow.

I couldn't resist a pre-flight purchase of The Red House, straight off the shelves of downtown Petaluma's Copperfield's Book Store. With its premise of eight very different family members reunited in a UK country cottage getaway, this was the perfect novel to surrogate my usual summertime travails across the pond.

And having shacked up for hols with the rellies several times in all sorts of remote British outposts, the concept of what might unravel was tantalizing enough to warrant a read in more tropical climes!

Dreams, hopes and disappointments, ambitions, fantasies and family grudges emerge in glorious narrative splendor thanks to Haddon's grasp of good, old-fashioned family politics, personal demons and irresistable desires.

A satisfying read for one who frequently vacations (rather well) with a range of eclectic, closely related individuals (by marriage, friendship and blood)!

After The Red House I plunged into an action-packed historical debut that successfully rescued one of England's long lost heroes from the mists of early medieval history, bringing him to brutal and bloody life for a reader who hails from the same, mysterious East Anglian Fens as Hereward himself.

Action packed historical author James Wilde wasn't easy to Google search from my iPhone on airplane mode, I'd like to know a bit more about his background than his scant bio reveals. That he himself is a multi-generational man of Mercia (one of the kingdoms of the Anglo Saxon South, East and Central Great Britain during the early Middle Ages) is enough to explain his impassioned, fictionalized account of legendary great English Warrier, Hereward the Wake's symbolic, Robin Hood-like resistance to oppression.

Hereward led the final major rebellion against William the Conqueror and the Normans, starting in 1066. He was born in the town of Bourne, Lincolnshire, not far from where I grew up, with his name a familiar landmark throughout the region on a multitude of street signs, modern day shopping centers, a college and a radio station.

A brutal, bloody romp through the darkest of times in Britain and Northern France, I might not have very likely selected Hereward on my to-read list had I not been intrigued by the shared heritage connection. Yet, Wilde placed the guerilla soldier into such a fast-paced, highly plausible story line hinged around historical fact, I was able to travel back in time to the early days of the remote East Anglian region in which I was raised.

Selected for the beach, but now on my bedside table awaiting their turn for nightime reading, Broken Harbor, a novel by Tana French and The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain beckon.

Dublin based French is an award winning novelist whose mysteries have yet to fail in sucking me in from the start of page 1. I've heard good things of McLain's The Paris Wife - a reportedly mesmerizing novel about Ernest Hemingway's first marriage.