Novel ideas for bikini girls to dip toes into

THE comedian Jenny Éclair wrote recently of the five ages of swimwear. The bikini, the tankini, the one piece, the one piece with sarong, and finally, being buried up to your neck in sand. Chronologically, I am probably somewhere between the sarong and full burial.

Unless of course you ignore this and remember that really, the only thing you need for a bikini body is (a) a bikini and (b) a body. With that in mind you may be hitting the beach in your brand new not-terribly-teeny-weeny polka dot bikini, all pale blue midriff and chunky wobble. Looking nothing like an air-brushed magazine page, and not caring even slightly. Caring about not looking air-brushed is like being angry at the weather. You’d better get over it fast, or relocate to a different climate.

No, what is far more concerning is not having the right beach body, but having the right beach book. The beach is just the right place for a big fat bikini-clad readathon. But which books?

What if you are going on holiday with a man who reads Ezra Pound for breakfast, Yeats for lunch, and the French existentialists the way the rest of us read a menu? Dare you whip out Irvine Welsh’s latest from your bag, and brazen it out? Shouldn’t you really be reading that book he gave you last Christmas, the David Foster Wallace one? All 1,079 pages of it? The one you lost interest in after 79 pages.

Perhaps the middle ground. A memoir maybe, of bohemian schooldays with a dash of dystopia. Mikey Cuddihy’s A Conversation About Happiness sounds fantastic. Or some feminism, to go with the inappropriate bikini – Laurie Penny’s Unspeakable Things promise lots of swearing, sex, lies and revolution. But then again, do you really want revolution while you are splayed on a lilo, smeared in factor 50? Maybe Hadley Freeman’s How To Be Awesome might be more holidayish — perky and smart but not requiring too much insurrection. Or something polemical around obesity?

But do you really want to be seen bursting out of your bikini whilst reading Sarah Boseley’s The Shape We’re In, about how junk food and diets are killing us? Especially as it has doughnuts all over the cover.

Anyway beaches are all about novels, and losing yourself in a made-up world, a bit like the holiday itself.

The very kind of made-up world you have yourself been attempting to create all year in your own novel, were it not for the intervention of real life in the shape of a very well-read man.

Would he break up with you were you to pull Caitlin Moran’s How To Build A Girl from under your sarong? Better pack some De Beauvoir to balance it out.