Right now on the New York Times best-seller list, End of Watch by Stephen King, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, and The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins are all hovering in the top spots. Expect to see a lot of those book’s covers tucked into beach totes and laying by the pool during your vacation this summer. But while keeping up with current trends in fiction is just fine, we started thinking about the popular beach reads from decades past. We scoured through the best-seller archives and uncovered the novels that ruled the summers of the past few decades. Consider these classic page-turners for your next beach getaway:
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Valley of the Dolls
This juicy mortality tale about the sex lives and other scandalous activities of four actresses was the top-selling book in America for 22 weeks, including most of the summer of 1966. The book is named after author Jacqueline Susann’s nickname for the pills (aka dolls) thecharacters used to pep themselves up, stay slim and fall to sleep.
The Thorn Birds
This best-selling novel by Australian author Colleen McCullough was published in April 1977, and was a fixture at the top of the list by the summer of that same year. The book takes place in a fictional sheep station in the Australian Outback, where the drama of the Cleary family spanning the years of 1915 to 1969 is the main focus. The book also inspired the widely popular 1983 miniseries of the same name.
Misery
Stephen King was no stranger to the top of best-seller lists in the ’80s and ’90s (and even today, really), and in 1987 his psychological horror novel, Misery, was the must-read book of the summer. The story focuses on Victorian-era romance novelist Paul Sheldon and his crazed fan Annie Wilkes, who rescues him from a car crash—but isn’t the most comforting host (and that’s putting it mildly).
The Pelican Brief
Another fixture on the best-seller lists in the ’90s was John Grisham, whose legal, suspense thrillers ruled the decade. This one (his third novel), about law student Darby Shaw and her legal brief speculating on the assassinations of two Supreme Court justices, was on the top of the charts in July 1992.
The Davinci Code
Dan Brown’s massively popular mystery-detective novel follows symbologist Robert Langdon as he tries to solve a murder at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Since the book explored an alternative religious history (it suggests Jesus Christ might have been married to Mary Magdalene, for instance) it garnered some critiques and controversy—making it even moreof an intriguing must-read in the summer of 2003.
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