Good Sentences: Beaches (June 2025)
A good book + A good beach = A wonderful summer combination. So here are some beach-themed reading materials.
Enjoy!
—The Good Sentences Team
1. Essay: The Wave by Susan Casey (2011)
Favorite Sentence: “The place had an almost northern feel, with fir and pine trees bent at arthritic angles from the wind.”
—Picked by Cedar Hobbs, Class of 2022 (Favorite Beach: Swami’s Beach in Encinitas, CA)
2. Fiction: Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead (2009)
![Sag Harbor [Book]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eJCM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F40801e53-e3fc-4423-a9df-f14175f16c86_1555x2400.jpeg "Sag Harbor [Book]")
Favorite Sentence: “A car in the driveway was an invitation to knock on the door and get down to the business of summer.”
—Picked by James Brown, Class of 2026 (Favorite Beach: Woolacombe Beach in North Devon, UK)
3. Poetry: Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop (1962)
Favorite Lines:
“His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.”
—Picked by Megan Hess, Class of 2026 (Favorite Beach: Cala Fuili Beach in Sardinia, Italy)
Michigan Sentences: Here’s an article about a research team that is trying to help preserve the shorelines and beaches of the Great Lakes. The team is led by Professor Richard Norton of the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Coastal Care: Researchers Work with Communities to Shore Up Effects of Erosion (2018)
Sample: “Several lake towns along the state’s western edge have faced even more costly damage to their beaches and structures because of fluctuating Great Lakes water levels. For example, in New Buffalo, severe shoreline erosion has cost private homeowners more than $7 million for repairs and resulted in one house demolition.”
Syllabus Sentences: One of the examples I use to describe how pervasive (and exhausting) feeling like an impostor can be—even among people at the top of their profession—is the beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings, who won three straight Olympic gold medals from 2004-2012 along with her teammate, Misty May-Treanor. Here is an excerpt from the book I use.
Chapter 37 of The Syntax of Sports: Drafting and Editing
Sample:
“At every kind of leveling up from eighth grade to high school, high school to college, college to the Olympic team—there was a moment, there were many moments of insecurity in the transition, many moments of, ‘Oh, shit. Can I do this? Am I good enough?’ It’s exhausting. It’s really exhausting.”
Book Recommendations
For good sentences set on the Dorset seashore in southern England
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (2007)
Sample: “She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start—she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.”
For good sentences set on the Isle of Skye in northwest Scotland
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
Sample: “So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.”
For good sentences set on the beaches of Normandy in northern France
The Longest Day: June 6, 1944 by Cornelius Ryan (1959)
Sample: “The village was silent in the damp June morning. Its name was La Roche-Guyon and it had sat undisturbed for nearly twelve centuries in a great lazy loop of the Seine roughly midway between Paris and Normandy. For years it had been just a place that people passed through on their way to somewhere else. Its only distinction was its castle, the seat of the Dukes de La Rochefoucauld. It was this castle jutting out from the backdrop of hills behind the village that had brought an end to the peace of La Roche-Guyon.”
Quick Tip
Here’s a quick tip about something that perhaps some time on a beach, free of distractions, might help you accomplish: learn how to compose “sentences nobody else can write.”
