July 1book140 Beach Read Nominations: A Running List

Earlier this week, we put out a call for nominations for our July 1book140 selection—the theme is beach reads. Readers responded with more than 60 suggestions. Here's a list of the titles that have been nominated so far, which range from ancient epic poetry (The Odyssey AND The Aeneid) to present-day literary fiction (Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan). If there's a book you'd like to read that's not there, nominate it! We close the nominations round today at 5 pm Eastern. We'll publish the short list and start voting tomorrow.

2030 by Albert Brooks

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Arms and The Man by George Bernard Shaw

Breath by Tim Winton

Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Dead I Well May Be by Adrian McKinty

Dirty Job by Christopher Moore

E.F. Benson- Any 'Lucia' book

Fake Perfection by Linda Ginac

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins

Great House by Nicole Krauss

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larsen

Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey

Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit by P.G. Wodehouse

Jeeves and the Mating Season by P.G. Wodehouse

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl

Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse

Life by Keith Richards

Life With Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar

Lucia in London by E.F. Benson

Maine by Courtney J. Sullivan

Make Way for Lucia by E.F. Benson

Motorcycles and Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor

Naked by Nick Hornby

Not George Washington by P.G. Wodehouse

Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb

On the Beach by Nevil Shute

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

P.G. Wodehouse- Anything work

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Replay by Ken Grimwood

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

Starter for Ten by David Nicholls

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Swimming Pool by Holly LeCraw

That Paris Year by Joanna Biggar

The Aeneid by Vergil

The Beach by Alex Garland

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud by Ben Sherwood

The Man From Beijing by Henning Mankell

The Newest American by Denny Sheehan

The Odyssey by Homer

The Passage by Justin Cronin

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

The Sea by John Banville

The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost

The Shark Net by Robert Drewes

The Snowman by Jo Nesbo

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

World War Z by Max Brook

About the Author

Eleanor Barkhorn is a former senior editor at The Atlantic.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”