‘Tis the season for guilty pleasures. The summer read. The blockbuster movie. Maybe it’s just me because my day job is in the education field (although I’m one of those dreaded administrators who work all year instead having the summer off [i.e., reserved for various therapies to recover from teaching]). But. I pulled my head out of my current grant deadlines and looked ahead to summer fun.

The New York Times recently published an article about The ‘It Books’ of Summers Past. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve only read one of them. Ever. And it was the 2013 ‘It’ book Crazy Rich Asians, which I read in 2019 and found very entertaining, but as we are all story wonks of varying levels, not particularly well written in a strictly fiction craft sense. Of course, we’ve also discussed all the ways writers can ignore craft rules and still tell a wonderful story. I did see the Primary Colors movie, and of course, Love Story (which I will never watch again or read – it’s just too sad, because, spoiler alert – she dies [no HEA]).

I did a post recently about 2019 Beach Reads and some of those books are on the most anticipated books for Summer 2019 pages. Among them, Time Magazine posted the 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer. It has an Elizabeth Gilbert book on the list (City of Girls). Her Eat, Pray, Love, took the prize in 2006. A romance novel made this list with The Wedding Party by Jasmin Guillory.

On a different note, I found a list of 20 Films to Put on Your Must-Watch List. It’s a mix of coming-of-age, Disney, campy, creepy, drama, and some other mixed genre stuff. I confess to wanting to see Aladdin and The Lion King. My kids were in their formative years and I watched the animated versions until I could sing all the songs, recite the dialogue, and make the sound effects ahead of . . . some unfortunate sound effects. Additional confession – Shaft. I remember watching the original of that one and expect it to be over-the-top campy. I’ve already seen Always Be My Maybe, which is a RomCom. I liked it, but need to watch it again because at the end it felt a little flawed. I wasn’t paying close attention so I’m willing to give it a pass in case I missed some foreshadowing that made some of the zany later non sequiturs make more sense.

How many of the past ‘It’ books have you read? What are you looking forward to reading or watching this summer? Any guilty pleasures on your to-read/watch list?

Wait. Stop. We’re about writing here and we should be doing more of that. What are you doing to stop what I’ve been concentrating on? How do you focus back on your writing when you’re under the beach umbrella?