maybe the one true gen-x classic.

i’ve read this a few times since it first came out and it’s still infinitely better than the dicaprio movie, which isn’t anywhere near awful to begin with. little masterpiece.

like hemingway meets lord of the flies meets chuck p.

a book that stays in your noggin.

Actual rating 4.5/5 stars.Every year a new horde of backpackers descend upon East Asia in an attempt to escape the banality of their everyday lives. Richard is one of them. He finds the peace of mind and the perspective he hoped to garner with his travels obstructed by the inauthenticity he instead feels there. This stems from the thronged streets full of, it seem to him, like exactly the sort of individuals he hoped to escape from. He too, he then realises, is just one more face inside this hor...

Surely a modern classic in the making. The search for an Eden in Thailand. The adventure. And what happens in Eden? Multi level book with the quest for and concept of how little untouched virgin lands remains in the world. A society outside of authority how will civilisation be maintained? What are the rules? Every writer's dream, a spectacular debut novel! 8 out of 12, Four Star read.

2007 read

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/All I knew about The Beach before beginning is that it was a movie I never watched starring little Leo that was released about 72 years ago and that it seems to be on many “if you want to call yourself a bibliophile, you better read this” type of lists. Now that I’ve checked it off my reader’s bucket list I’m a bit at a loss for what to say. This is a story that had A LOT of things that I typically enjoy.Potential utopia that eventuall...

I really have no idea how to describe this book, it was mesmerising. Richard, a British backpacker arrives in Bangkok and on his first night in a hostel is given a map that leads to a so-called Eden, a secret beach that few travellers know about. So with French couple Etienne and Francoise in tow, they try to find the island. When they do life is idyllic for a while, then cracks start to appear, and they find that their Eden isn't the Paradise it seems.I can't even pinpoint what it is about this...

Having never heard of Alex Garland I picked up his debut novel, "The Beach" because the cover and premise were intriguing. I'm happy to say that Mr. Garland delivered exactly what he promised and I breezed through this little yellow book in two days. If Jack Kerouac wore shorts and hung out with William Golding, the two might have produced something like this. The Beach is compulsively readable because of several factors. First, the chapters are structured and trimmed into an expert lenght, ofte...

I really wish the copy I read didn't have shirtless Leonardo DiCaprio on it.

Great, bizarry, chilling story, keeps you turning the pages til the end. In the top of my booklist definitely.

Note 2018 after this book came up again in my goodreads library: another 'classic' which I really found intriguing back then. Need to reread definitely.

I basically devoured this book. Started on Friday, finished by Monday. Part of it has to do with the way the book is written (short, three to four page vignettes that make it easy to say, "Oh I'll just read one more") but a larger part has to do with the momentum of the story. it doesn't really ever let up. i was never bored reading this book in fact I almost compulsively needed to know what would happen next. The whole thing kind of plays out like a really well-done summer popcorn movie. Two de...

I will defend this book's subtle intelligence to the ends of the Earth. Garland's performative act--seducing us with the myth of perfect travel, deftly balancing the naive hypocrisies of Westerners rooting out the exotic in the East--creates a brutal ending that recasts what had led up to it. While Garland could have easily stopped with a cautionary tale, he went further by lacing his character's thoughts not with literary allusions, but filmic ones. Which 20-something British kid wouldn't think...