[Each of the last
few years, I’ve helped kick
off summer with a series on AmericanStudies
Beach Reads. If it ain’t broke and all, so here’s this year’s edition!
Please share your responses and beach read nominees for a weekend post that’ll
put its toes in the sand!]
On why it’s
important to get serious on the beach, and a book that helps us do that.
As part of my
BlockbusterStudying series last month, I
addressed the argument that “It’s not Shakespeare”—the perspective, that
is, that some popular art isn’t meant to be deep or thought-provoking, and
shouldn’t be analyzed as such. The same argument could be made for beach reads
as for blockbuster films, of course—that we can’t analyze or study a John
Grisham legal thriller the same way we would To Kill a Mockingbird, not without acknowledging their overtly
different intended audiences and effects at least. While I agree that we can
and must consider the individual circumstances, goals, and genre of each particular
work, however, I don’t at all agree that we can’t also analyze
any and every work of art, including if not indeed especially the
most popular. After all, every work both tells us something about its world
and contributes something to ours—and that’s just as true if we’re engaging
with them on a beach as when we encounter them in a classroom.
Moreover,
closing that perceived gap between the beach and the classroom has another
important effect: it can help us think about the benefit of bringing to the
beach books that we might not consider beach reads, works that feel more “serious”
than the category generally implies. For one thing, many of those so-called serious
books are just as readable, engaging, page-turning as the kinds of thrillers I’ve
addressed earlier in this series (a goal for which all writers, including the
most scholarly or academic, should strive). And for another, even more
important thing, neither the world nor our place and role in it go away when we’re
on vacation, in more relaxed spaces and situations—and so it seems to me that
finding ways to continue engaging with complex social, cultural, historical,
and identity questions as part of our beach reading is a great metaphor for
bringing a piece of that world with us. It was for that reason that I featured
my third book in last year’s Beach Reads series, and it’s for that reason that
I’m ending this year’s series with Jeff
Hobbs’s The Short and Tragic Life of
Robert Peace (2014).
Hobbs’ book
tells the story of one compelling American life, that of Hobbs’s college
roommate Robert Peace. Peace, an African American young man, made his way from
the inner city of Newark to Yale University, only to end up drawn back into the
violence of that hometown neighborhood and killed by it at far too young an
age. Peace’s story is thus profoundly illuminating of many of the social and
cultural issues that remain so vexing and vital into 2015: race and community,
the state of America’s cities, violence and guns, education and its
opportunities and limitations, and many more. But it’s also and just as importantly
a compelling story, compellingly told, capturing first and foremost the
identity and perspective of this individual young man. Hobbs’s book reminds us
on every page that great storytelling and analysis aren’t necessarily opposed,
that indeed they can work hand in hand to impact both our emotions and our
thoughts, our reading and our reflecting. That’s a pretty potent combination,
for the beach and beyond.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: Responses to the week’s posts? Other Beach Reads you’d share? You know
what to do!
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