Reading fell into four major categories. Since we went on a Sunday, nearly every towel was accompanied by a copy of the New York Times. With the exception of Dick here, the Week in Review went mostly untouched, as did the Metro section. People went deep on Sunday Styles. But, as one man told us, you can only read the Sunday Times once. (True, but it takes like 20 whole minutes!) After the Times, most people turned to the peculiar genre of magazines devoted solely to living in the Hamptons. Per capita, the Hamptons probably has more magazine titles per reader then anywhere else. You have Hamptons, Hamptons Style, Dan's Hamptons Paper, Social Life, and Hamptons Cottage and Gardens, to name just the big ones. The value of these magazines, as far as we could tell, is that they are full of pictures of the very people who are reading them.

But for those who find the Times or themselves too boring, there was always Harry Potter. And for those who thought themselves above J.K. Rowling's masterpiece, there was Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns," which let others know that the reader was a serious person with intellectual heft and a liberal interest in "minorities."

And then there were those for whom no books were needed. The beach is why God made BlackBerries.

The Emperor's Children
By Claire Messud
Reviewed by Meghan O'Rourke

Meghan O'Rourke went to Yale and writes for a "contrarian" publication and in this week's NYTBR, writes about Claire Messud who also went to Yale and wrote a book about a group of privileged New Yorkers who went to Brown who write for a "contrarian" publication.

To make matters more complicated, the "Up Front" column, penned by "The Editors," which we t ake to mean Sam Tanenhaus, Yale MA '78, explains how O'Rourke went to Yale, and wrote about Messud (who went to Yale) who wrote a book about Brown graduates.

And here's the icing on the cake that may just blow your mind: We went to Yale (and St. Ann's where Meghan O'Rourke went!) and write for a "contrarian" publication.

Yale graduate/St. Ann's-attender (we didn't graduate from there) writes about Yale/St. Ann's graduate writing about Yale graduate who wrote about Brown graduates. AND Yale graduate/St. Ann's-attender writes about "Up Front" column written by Yale graduate about a Yale/St. Ann's graduate writing about a Yale graduate who wrote about Brown graduates.

There you go.
Now you can send us a bag of burning poop.

Voyage Along the Horizon, Your Face Tomorrow
By Javier Marias
Reviewed by Wyatt Mason

This was one of the more alienating reviews we've seen in quite sometime. Almost as alienatingly pretentious as a class we heard about called "Re-reading Faulkner." Damn. Wyatt Mason might be a smartie, but there is no reason to write this first paragraph:

To judge the Spanish novelist and essayist Javier Mar as solely on the basis of "Voyage Along the Horizon" would be akin to imagining Flaubert only from "Salammbo" or Nabokov from "Transparent Things.

This is the like the obnoxious Jeff Bridges character in The Squid & the Whale who referred to A Tale of Two Cities as a "minor Dickens."

Mason then goes on to drop Proust, Italo Calvino, Agatha Christie (she doesn't really count, but we threw her in for good measure), Proust again, and uses the words Conradian, Jamesian and Melvillean in a row.

Remember, New York Times Book Review writers, your audience may have just finished reading "Come on and Do the Tuckermotion with Me." Be gentle with us.

Letters

Oh, come now re: the GUSHING letters to the editor about Joe Queenan's show-offy and dull backpage essay, "Why I Can't Stop Reading Books."

Saul Schachter of Sea Cliff, NY writes this whimsical little number:

I started reading Joe Queenan's essay, "Why I Can't Stop Starting Books" (Aug. 6), when about halfway through I switched over to the review of the Richard Hofstadter biography, which I didn't finish because I was attracted by "The Syringa Tree," Pamela Gien's novel of apartheid...

And so on.

Leni Grossman of Whitehouse Station, NJ cutesie-poo-ly writes:

Aging lady would like to meet Joe Queenan. Thick glasses but good measurements: 36 (books on my nightstand), 26 (books on the table next to my reading chair), 36 (books piled on the floor....

And so on.

And finally, Rochelle Clerkin of Hamilton Square, NJ, writes:

Thank you, thank you and thank you again, Joe Queenan. I thought I was the only one who kept the same unfinished, dog-eared volumes in strategic reading locations around my home for years at a time....

And so on.

We were trying to think of something snappy to say involving Saul Schacter, a Syringa tree, and Joe Queenan's feces, but we're reeling from the mental image of Leni and Joe, rolling lustily around in a pile of unread paperbacks. Yeek.

Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon
By James Sullivan
Reviewed by Caroline Weber

Here's the review in a nutshell: Caroline Weber has Joe's Jeans that cost her at least $160. Jeans are important. Culturally. In case you forgot, Caroline Weber has Joe's Jeans.

Related: When will the denim bubble burst?

TBR: Inside the List
By Dwight Garner

We were tickled by Dwight Garner's little blurb about author Mark Childress's website, on which he apparently dumped a list of keywords in an attempt to fool search engines:

Mark Childress, Crazy in Alabama, novelist novelist novelist, Tender Tender Tender, Gone for Good Gone for Good, A World Made of Fire A World Made of Fire A World Made of Fire V for Victor V for Victor V for Victor Southern novelist Southern novelist Southern novelist Southern writers...

Ha! We just had to see these crazy shenanigans for ourselves, so we paid a deliberate visit to www.markchildress.com. Alas! Childress must have removed his list in shame after reading Garner's piece, cause it wasn't there.

Hey, there's no shame in that game! To wit: Gawker Gawker Gawker Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Hilton Family Sam Tanenhaus Tanenhaus Tanenhaus Lohan Desparate Housewives Blowjob Asian Teens Teens Teens Slut.

The Bedroom Secrets of Master Chefs
By Irvine Welsh
Reviewed by Robert Macfarlane

From the review's mild HED ("Pain Spotting"), harmless DEK ("Irvine Welsh's new novel is set in depressed Edinburgh") and informational PQ ("Welsh's fiction has won notoriety for hits episodes of sex, violence and self-abuse, and for its adventures in the Scottish demotic") one would never know that this was one of the nastiest reviews we've seen in our R-about-R tenure.

Writes Macfarlane of the newest novel from Welsh, who also penned "Trainspotting" and a slew of others:

Although it fails at every imaginable level — metaphysical, ethical, technical, thematic — it is at the stylistic level, the level of the sentence, that Welsh's novel is most wanting. The prose throughout is lazy, clich -ridden and exhaustingly repetitive.

He goes on, mercilessly:

Nor is this what George Orwell fondly called good bad writing. This is bad bad writing. There are tautologies (offices that are "unobtrusively tucked away"). There are mixed metaphors (the "bull of a man" whose frame was "going to seed"). There are mistakes — the use of the word "diligently" where "carefully" is meant. And there are unfortunate ambiguities, as when Welsh describes Kibby's erection as "poking through the material of his trousers." We must assume either that Welsh means "showing through," or that Kibby has an unusually sharp phallus.

OK, OK — we get it, but pray tell: What's wrong with an erection "poking through the material of his trousers"? An erection "showing through" does not sound that much better... sometimes penises really do poke and it's fine. Hell, we like it that way.

Essay: What I Did at Summer Writer's Camp
By Rachel Donadio

Backpage essays are generally like those kids in class who "talked most said least," but, hey, nothing wrong with a blowhard. This week's essay is no exception really. Though it didn't really say all that much, Donadio's piece on the phenomenon of the cushy artists' colony was amusing. There were quotes from fun folks like Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides and A.M. Homes and it made us want to go to a writers' colony and do not much of anything and maybe meet our husband and maybe have that husband be Jonathan Franzen. Oh, New York Times Book Review, always taunting us with false hopes!