Six Books for a Hammock and a Long Afternoon
Slow, generous reads that do not mind in the least if you fall asleep halfway through.
The hammock book is a genre of its own, and most recommendation lists get it wrong. The requirement is not that a book be easy. It is that a book be forgiving — that it survive being put down for forty minutes and picked up without a sense of having lost the thread.
What makes one work
Long chapters are bad. Short, self-contained ones are good. Plot that depends on the reader holding six names in mind is fatal. A strong voice matters more than a strong story, because voice is what you re-enter when you wake up.
Essays qualify. So do the long, digressive novels that nobody reads for the ending. Thrillers, counter-intuitively, do not — the tension that keeps you turning pages is the same tension that makes falling asleep feel like a failure.
