Over the past few weeks, newspapers and magazines have been engaged in one of the more persistent rites of summer—the publication of articles focusing on “beach reads.” These articles (often just lists of beach read suggestions) tend to assume we’re all on board with the concept they promote—that is, when summer comes we only want books that are entertaining, and that don’t make us work very hard.

The way journalists skate over this premise, accepting it as a given, strikes me as representative of the groupthink with which journalism often treats literature. Basically, I think there are four problems with the “beach read” concept.

1. Implicit in the premise is the assumption that we all spend the rest of the year plowing through Buddenbrooks and Finnegan’s Wake, so when summer comes we need and deserve a break from serious literature. I don’t think this is the case with most people’s reading habits—it certainly isn’t with mine. If you look at sales list, it seems that readers don’t need a beach vacation as an excuse to read fiction that is primarily meant for entertainment.

2. Even if this were the case, even if most people dedicated three months to challenging fiction and allotted one season for lighter fare, why would we choose summer for the latter? Don’t we most need the escapism and lightness offered by those books during the drearier months? Many of the books we might consider anti-beach-reads touch on dark themes that can only be exacerbated by the darkness of winter. Aren’t those the kind of books you’d want to deal with while sitting in an Acapulcan lounge chair, the despair of Anna and the torment of Ahab mitigated by bright sun and mango daiquiris?

3. It’s fallacious to argue, as many of these articles do, that the physical lethargy of sitting on a beach necessarily leads to mental inertia. After all, reading of any kind pretty much requires physical lethargy. A recent New York Times beach-read article made this claim: “The only rule: No doorstops—they’re too hard to read in a beach chair.” This line is rendered in a joking tone, but I don’t know what the joke is. Why is it hard to read a large book in a beach chair? The implication is that it’s physically hard (the word “doorstop” refers to size, not complexity), that someone sitting on a beach simply doesn’t have the physical stamina to keep it propped up on their chest. But the further implication is that it’s all too much work, of both the physical and mental kind, with no differentiation drawn between the two. If you can’t summon the energy to hold onto a big book, how could your brain be expected to hold all the plot threads and characters it must contain? Again, I think this is a fallacy, trying to slip this connection between physical and mental laziness past us, disregarding the fact that reading something like The Brothers Karamazov requires a tremendous about of physical idleness.

4. This one isn’t so much a complaint as a point of confusion. I don’t know if the media outlets have any true consensus on what is being discussed in these summer reading lists, what purpose they’re meant to serve. They often use the terms “beach reading” and “summer reading” interchangeably, and of course this is silly. Not many people, even ones who live close to beaches, spend the three months of the summer there. So perhaps the articles are just about books that we might want to read on a week-long beach trip. In that case, it’s a pretty limited and arbitrary window—it’s like writing about books you may want to read while you’re on your back porch. So perhaps it’s broader, perhaps it’s meant to focus on books that we read throughout the summer, not just at beaches but between innings at Cubs games, or while we’re waiting for the grill to heat up, or in the evening as we watch the kids run through the sprinkler. But again, I don’t understand why any of those activities, or the myriad other ones associated with summer, are necessarily better suited for fiction that is less challenging.

Anyway, those are my gripes. At the heart of all this complaining lies simply being fed up with how boring it all is. There may be compelling reasons why we want to read light fiction in the summer, but I don’t see anyone making a case for it—all the newspapers seem to be doing is accepting the shopworn premise, and printing out lists that have been e-mailed to them by publishers.