TreeFrog
Beach Fanatic
Yeah, I know, the last time I did a review was in December. Oh well...
This month's selection is in honor of my brother's family, who just returned home from a week in Seagrove on the "beach-eat-sleep" program.
Actually, it's selections, plural. At the risk of covering ground already well-trodden, I submit Alexander McCall Smith's "No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" series as possibly the ideal beach read.
Here is the ongoing tale of Precious Ramotswe, well-respected proprietor of Botswana's only female private detective agency. She and a regular cast of characters use a canny grasp of human nature to solve their mysteries, unlike the common detective's brittle cleverness or hard-bitten worldliness.
So why are these books the ideal beach read?
Dialog - You can't beat good dialog for a beach read. Way better than story-telling. Smith lived in Africa. His English versions of daily speech in Botswana are almost musical.
Concise-Small books, short chapters, no knotty plots.
Tone - No tension-filled thrillers here. No gunplay, no end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it terrorist plots, no sordid tales of complicity and infidelity. If your book isn't conducive to nodding off halfway through, why are you reading it at the beach?
Unique - Here's the real strength of this series. Do you really need to read one more book about a cop or a spy? Or another novel of interlocking personal relationships? There are thousands of those, and you pretty much know how they are going to end up. Between Madame Ramotswe and the Botswani culture, the reader is assured a novel experience.
It would be easy to describe these books as lightweight. But they have a appeal that crosses genders and generations. And they are infused with Smith's geniune love for the Botswani people and their culture.
Are they best sellers? Sure. Dull and boring? Not at all. Have a lot of folks already read them? Yep. Are they related to SoWal? Absolutely not, but it doesn't matter.
Available at Sundog, Amazon, and most every other bookseller on the planet.
This month's selection is in honor of my brother's family, who just returned home from a week in Seagrove on the "beach-eat-sleep" program.
Actually, it's selections, plural. At the risk of covering ground already well-trodden, I submit Alexander McCall Smith's "No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" series as possibly the ideal beach read.
Here is the ongoing tale of Precious Ramotswe, well-respected proprietor of Botswana's only female private detective agency. She and a regular cast of characters use a canny grasp of human nature to solve their mysteries, unlike the common detective's brittle cleverness or hard-bitten worldliness.
So why are these books the ideal beach read?
Dialog - You can't beat good dialog for a beach read. Way better than story-telling. Smith lived in Africa. His English versions of daily speech in Botswana are almost musical.
Concise-Small books, short chapters, no knotty plots.
Tone - No tension-filled thrillers here. No gunplay, no end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it terrorist plots, no sordid tales of complicity and infidelity. If your book isn't conducive to nodding off halfway through, why are you reading it at the beach?
Unique - Here's the real strength of this series. Do you really need to read one more book about a cop or a spy? Or another novel of interlocking personal relationships? There are thousands of those, and you pretty much know how they are going to end up. Between Madame Ramotswe and the Botswani culture, the reader is assured a novel experience.
It would be easy to describe these books as lightweight. But they have a appeal that crosses genders and generations. And they are infused with Smith's geniune love for the Botswani people and their culture.
Are they best sellers? Sure. Dull and boring? Not at all. Have a lot of folks already read them? Yep. Are they related to SoWal? Absolutely not, but it doesn't matter.
Available at Sundog, Amazon, and most every other bookseller on the planet.