Literary Cats experience vacations in places of fact and fiction.

About Beyond Beaches, Susan, and Literary Cats

What's Beyond Beaches all about? 

The short answer is…

Books to read and places to go.

The longer one…

Beyond Beaches helps curious readers choose books that fit where they’re going, how they want to feel, and what they want reading to add to their time away from daily routines.

BeyondBeaches.com is where our curiosity about the world meets our passion for reading and travel. It’s a place for people who enjoy discovering stories—both on the page and on the map—and who believe an escape into a good book can be as satisfying as a getaway vacation.

Hi, I'm Susan

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I've been an enthusiastic reader of fiction ever since I outgrew Jack and Jill and Dick and Jane and Nancy Drew rescued me from my cousin’s endless games of Candy Land. Mystery stories became my favorites…and made me view the world with more curiosity—about people, places, and what happens next. 

That curiosity stayed with me as I got older. I earned a degree in English literature spiced with sociology and psychology. Then I landed in a rather long and wiggly corporate career—turning what the PhD folks thought they said into what our clients needed to hear. 

Reading and writing became constant companions, at home, at work, and certainly on vacations (whether I had time to travel or only time to read). 

Mystery stories have remained my preference, although my reading now wanders freely across genres, categories, and formats. 

Retirement brought me to Alabama’s Gulf Coast beach paradise, where my beach-vacation-kind-of life provides time for reading, wandering, observing, and exploring both beach places and beach books.

For those of us who live (or visit) here and treasure reading, there's much to discover, with settings of Southern stories close enough to inspire day trips or weekend getaways—and varied enough to fill many long afternoons of reading. 

A short trip inland opens a wider view of Southern history, culture, and stories—and a truly compelling story can lure us into journeys even farther afield. 

More than once, reading books has pulled me into real-life adventures—down rivers, across borders, and over seas. And each wonderful experience was better for having read.   

How I Help You Choose Books

Connections between literary settings and places to visit seem to happen naturally; however, vacation reading isn't only about connecting stories to destinations.  

For Beyond Beaches, the more important connection is between the story and the reader—finding a book that will help your vacation feel the way you want it to feel.   

Sorting through stacks and racks of possible stories to choose calls for many of the same skills I developed while turning corporate-speak into straightforward communication: interviewing, researching, analyzing, and organizing information with a clear sense of purpose and audience. 

Before choosing a book, it helps to consider:

  • where you are going
  • how you want to feel
  • how much time and attention you'll have to read
  • what you want reading to add to your vacation

These few bits of information won't find you a perfect vacation book, but knowing them will help improve the choices you make while browsing our pages. 

Beyond Beaches looks closely at the when, where, why, what, and how of vacation reading—and especially at the reader and the people sharing the trip. 

That curiosity leads Beyond Beaches to examine vacation reading from angles you may not expect. We uncover useful details about titles, plots, characters, and context—details that help you choose books suited to the vacation you hope to have.  

The right books don't just travel along on your journey—the right books become part of your experience.

How Beyond Beaches Began

I started Beyond Beaches on an Alabama beach with a quiet idea. My idea was to connect beach vacations with the many literary settings, authors, characters, and cultural tales surrounding our beaches.   

Beyond Beaches would be the place where books and travel could meet, mingle, and maybe share a glass of sweet tea on a warm afternoon. 

Alabama beaches do serve as our steady starting point from which we explore stories, histories, cultures, and destinations for you to visit, in person or in books.

However, for Beyond Beaches to be useful to readers looking for vacation books, we need to do more than connect a story to a particular destination.

Reading influences our mood, attention, imagination, and even how clearly we experience the places around us. And a vacation includes much more than only the place you go to get away. 

So while Beyond Beaches started as a quiet idea to highlight places near Alabama beaches to visit while you're on a beach vacation, it now grows beyond our beaches, Southern vacations, and Southern literature. 

Meet Literary Cats

To make the site more interesting to read—and write—I created Literary Cats, a playful, curious, and occasionally opinionated collective voice that hosts the pages of Beyond Beaches. 

Literary Cats blend my reading and travel experience with comments, questions, and candid observations gathered from fellow readers and travelers encountered on beaches, trains, and getaways—and every so often in checkout lines. We're never sure where Literary Cats will pick up a book remark next, but no one seems to mind. In fact, hardly anyone notices.

Using Literary Cats as hosts rescues our pages from sounding like a corporate report or instruction manual—and allows Literary Cats to scoot our sweet tea aside, making room for a few icy mint juleps!