Books to read beside the sea side

Summer and the sea go together naturaly. Drew Gummerson remembers his summer reads and asks you for yours.

In summer our reading takes us inexorably to the sea.

It may have been the Prince Regent, in the early nineteenth century, who made this flight to the coast fashionable with the remodelling of his summer palace, the glorious Brighton Pavilion. And so he might have taken with him on those summer jaunts, Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate (1821), or James Fenimore Cooper’s, The Pioneers (1822). I don’t know.

It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that there was a real boom in our seaside towns, the advent of steam trains having resulted in a more mobile working class. So it could be said that Dickens himself wrote the first summer blockbusters, or perhaps Wilkie Collins. For what could be better than to be ensconced on the beach at Blackpool with The Moonstone (1868), a rollicking adventure concerning a stolen Indian gem?

My own childhood summer holidays were spent on boats. Every year we would head off to the Norfolk Broads, not the sea itself unless you ventured up to Great Yarmouth, and there it would be, the sea, in spitting distance. I, bookish even then, imagined we would be cast out, like in Arthur Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea.

He was my writer of choice back then and on those holidays I would read and reread his books, especially the ones set on the Broads, The Big Six and Coot Club. I even had my own binoculars and could spot a coot at a distance of quite a few yards. A skill I have not lost in adulthood.

Later on as our family fell on harder times, or disintegrated if you like, I remember long summer holidays in the garden of our council house reading the works of Stephen King and James Herbert (It and The Rats, all four of the series, being my favourites respectively). The house we were in was temporary, up for demolition and damp like a rain-forest and horror must have matched my mood. Or perhaps like all teenage boys I just liked blood and guts. A sensation I have lost in adulthood.

Dad eventually wound up in Greece, and visiting him on a Greek island I read John Fowles’ The Magus (set on a Greek island), and Gerald Durrell’s My Family and other Animals (also set on a Greek island). The former is spectacular with a plot that twists and turns and bends your mind, like the Greek sun. The latter is funnier than I expected, both better and warmer. Both have that sense of freedom and escape, something that holidays are surely about.

One thing for is for sure and that is where there is summer there will always be books.

Take M J Hyland’s latest This is How, for example. In it Patrick Oxtoby moves down to the south coast after his girlfriend breaks off with him. It’s set in the sixties, a time of boarding houses, communal bathrooms, pens hanging on pieces of string.

If you’re a writer don’t read it because it’ll make you want to give up. If you’re a bit of a loner, and awkward in the world, like me, don’t read it because it kind of goes off the rails, and you think, ‘oh shit’. But for everyone else, it’s marvellous.

For those writers and loners reading this, non fiction perhaps being safer ground, then maybe you should get Leviathan. It’s just won the Samuel Johnson prize, nicely timed to thrust it in the public eye for summer.

Leviathan is about, well, whales. (With an ‘h’ you have to say if you are reading this out loud, to a blind cousin perhaps.) It is a real potpourri of a book, full of fascinating facts and stories about whales; P T Barnum’s pair of belugas on Broadway in mid nineteenth century New York, the history of the blue whale being built in the Natural History Museum (looks not a lot like a whale as we’d only seen dead ones in the flesh at that time.)

Did you know we’d seen the earth from space before we’d seen a whale in it’s own environment?

Or that whales can be startled by the slightest thing, the click of a camera say and this will cause them to dive.

Or that touch a whale’s skin and it will feel it across it’s whole body.

It is a history of whaling, the wealth of which built America, and it is infused with the story of Moby Dick; a failure in its own time, out of print and forgotten on Melville’s death. He had a launch party with only one guest, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

It also contains the best descriptive passages I have ever read. Not dull, flowery, pointless prose, but descriptions of days out whale watching, diving to meet these beasts.

I’m ranting.

It must be the hot weather. Or the thought of a holiday looming.

Now, what books shall I pack? Any suggestions?

Supported by Writing East Midlands

Drew Gummerson’s first novel ‘The Lodger’ was published in 2002. It was a finalist in the Lambda Awards in the States. Drew’s latest book ‘Me and Mickie James’ was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2008. Drew is also an award winning short story writer, his short fiction being widely published and featured on Radio 4.