by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
By the time you’re reading this, we’ll have just about wrapped up the first week of August. I’m going to level with you: I’m tired of sweating the moment I step out the door. I’m ready for some of those crisp mornings, where the air is clear and the sky is a deep blue.
I get this way every August.
This year, I decided to combat my August blues by diving into some beach reads.
“Beach read” is a relatively new term—it started appearing in book trade publications around 1990, entering the popular lexicon shortly afterward. But the idea of the summer read dates back over a century before that.
After the Civil War, the US industrialized rapidly. The middle class grew larger and wealthier, allowing them to take advantage of the trains and grand hotels that were popping up. The summer vacation was born. Publishers soon began releasing books aimed at vacationers.
I’ve devoured three beach reads over the past week.
The 6:20 Man is a 2022 thriller from the prolific David Baldacci. The eponymous 6:20 man is Travis Devine, a West Point graduate and former Army Ranger who traded in his combat boots for a suit and a junior position at a prestigious Wall Street investment firm.
Devine is quickly recruited into a secret government organization, where he is tasked with investigating a web of murders and potential corruption at the firm that employs him.
The pacing is good and the plot is a lot of fun—just enough turns to keep you guessing, but nothing so complicated that you need a flow chart to figure out what happened.
My only complaint is with Devine, who is something of a Mary Sue (a term used to describe characters who are good at everything, extremely attractive, and largely lacking in character flaws).
Devine is one of the Army’s most respected Rangers, turns on a dime to become a brilliant Wall Street analyst, is somehow a competent hacker and solves two separate crimes without ever having trained as an investigator. Along the way, he has relationships with a series of women, each more beautiful than the last.
Devine is Roger Moore-era James Bond.
System Collapse (2023) is the seventh entry in Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries, a science fiction series that details the adventures of a part-human, part-robot Security Unit (SecUnit), who has privately given themselves the name “Murderbot.”
SecUnits are all built with a “governor module,” which is nice way of saying that they are enslaved. If a SecUnit ever fails to follow an order, the governor module will send an electrical signal that instantly wipes their mind.
Murderbot has hacked its governor module, allowing them the freedom to choose their own course of action.
The series begins with All System Red (2017) and is written entirely from Murderbot’s point of view. There’s enough corporate intrigue and murder to satisfy fans of thrillers and enough regular shoot-outs for those who prefer action/adventure.
Murderbot is every bit as competent as Devine. But Murderbot’s inner life is another story.
Murderbot exhibits signs of being on the autism spectrum. They have difficulty making eye contact, dislike being touched and generally avoid social interaction because they don’t understand how to interpret humans.
Oh, and Murderbot has a pretty severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder.
A throughline across the series deals with Murderbot learning how to make friends and to interact with other people.
The Murderbot Diaries is a bit like Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy—plenty of popcorn-movie moments, but also a little bit there to think about for a couple of days afterward.
If you’re in the mood for something that’s a bit more of a slow burn, Reykjavík (2023) is a great choice. The book is a collaboration between Ragnar Jonasson, author of the bestselling Dark Iceland series, and Katrín Jakobsdottir, the then-Prime Minister of Iceland.
The novel is mostly set in 1986 and revolves around the disappearance of Lára, a 14-year-old girl who went missing 30 years earlier. Early chapters introduce us to the case and trace the toll it takes on those who fail to solve it.
By 1986, up-and-coming journalist Valur Robertsson has opened his own investigation and seems to be on the verge of some new breakthrough evidence.
Reykjavík moves slowly through its opening sections, but at around the 40% mark, you get the first—and most shocking—of two big twists. The novel picks up the pace after that point. After spending three days getting to the first big twist, I raced through the rest in an afternoon. It’s a fun mystery that also examines the ways that people process guilt and grief.
Reykjavík is a deliberate homage to Agatha Christie and should be of interest to anyone who enjoys classic mysteries. And there’s just enough historical background (1986 was the bicentennial of Reykjavik’s founding and also the year the city hosted a summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev) to really bring the setting alive.
Plus, the scenes featuring cold rain in August made the heat feel a lot more bearable.
Speaking of weather, the forecast at present calls for a few more hot days. Beat the heat by stopping into one of our (air conditioned!) branches and picking up a beach read or two.