Switching Off Is In: The Beach Reads Helping Us Travel Well This Summer
There is a particular kind of rest that only travel gives you, when it's done right. Not the itinerary kind. Not the "must see everything before the flight home" kind. The softer kind, where your phone goes face down on the sun lounger, your shoulders finally drop an inch, and your brain has nowhere urgent to be. A pool. A terminal gate with nowhere to rush to. A book that has absolutely nothing to do with your inbox.
That is where the reading well, comes in.
There is real science behind that exhale. Studies have shown that reading fiction activates the brain's default mode network, the part associated with imagination, empathy and creativity, the very system that gets quietly suppressed when we're heads-down and "on." It also lowers heart rate and stress levels in a way not dissimilar to meditation. Pair that with the effects of actually being away, a change of scenery, a change of pace, and you get one of the few genuinely reliable resets available to a nervous system that has spent all year in fight-or-flight admin mode.
Which is really what travelling well is about. It's the switching off and giving yourself permission to stop producing for a while and simply refill. And for a lot of us, that refill starts with a book that has nothing to prove and nowhere else to be.
So this summer, instead of asking the people we trust for restaurant recommendations, we asked them what they were packing to read. Here are the six books that came back, and the friends of ours who swear by them.
Recommended by Natalia Montigny (Co-Founder of Maison You) and Lauren Vaknine (Holistic Health & Life Coach)
This one is less a gentle beach read and more the book you cannot put down on the plane, which is exactly why it made the list twice over.
It follows Natalie, an influencer with a picture-perfect "tradwife" life online, who wakes up living as a frontier woman a world and a decade away from the one she built for her followers. The story moves between the life she curated and the life she is actually living, and slowly unpicks the gap between the two.
It's a strange, gripping thing to read while travelling, a story about a woman completely disconnected from her real life, at the exact moment you are trying to disconnect from yours. It has a way of making you look up from the page and appreciate exactly where you are.
The Names By Florence Knapp, recommended by Rhian Stephenson (Nutritionist and Founder of Artah)
Rhian's pick opens with a mother choosing a name for her newborn son, and then splits into three different versions of his life depending on which name she picks. Thirty-five years unfold, three different ways, all from one decision made in a single afternoon.
It is a beautiful thing to read while you are somewhere unfamiliar yourself, a reminder of how much of life turns on small decisions and different paths, and how there is always more than one version of the story still available to you.
The Women by Kristen Hannah, recommended by Lauren Vaknine (Holistic Health & Life Coach)
Lauren's second pick is a bigger, sweeping kind of read, maybe one we’d reserve for a long-haul flight rather than a single afternoon by the pool.
It follows Frankie McGrath, a young nurse who enlists to serve in Vietnam, and the story of her service and her difficult return home afterwards. It is not light in the traditional sense, but it is deeply human, and it captures a kind of resilience and sisterhood that stays with you.
It's a good reminder that "travelling well" doesn't always mean escapist and easy. Sometimes it means a story big enough to hold your full attention for a whole journey, and gratitude for the version of rest you get to have.
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, recommended by Natalie Louise Burrows (Nutritionist and Metabolic Expert)
If any book on this list captures the idea of filling your own cup, it's this one. Raising Hare is Chloe Dalton's memoir of finding an abandoned baby hare near her countryside home during lockdown, and the unexpected bond that followed. It is slow, tender, and completely unconcerned with being anywhere else. Just one woman, one animal, and a total recalibration of what actually matters.
It's the literary version of switching your phone to aeroplane mode and genuinely meaning it. A gentle reminder that nervous system regulation doesn't have to be dramatic and instead just noticing the world slow down around you.
Unreasonable Hospitality By Will Guidara, recommended by James Lee (Physiotherapist)
James's pick is the outlier on this list, not fiction, and not obviously a "beach read," by the literal sense, but it earns its place. It's Will Guidara's account of turning Eleven Madison Park into one of the best restaurants in the world by obsessing over how people feel when they are looked after properly. It's about generosity, attention to detail, and making someone else's experience better than they expected it to be.
It is, in its own way, a book about travelling well too, about what it means to be genuinely looked after, and how much that hospitality can do for someone's nervous system, whether you are the one serving it or the one receiving it.
Fever Dream By Elsie Silver
And finally, one from Eleanor - founder and Editor of The Well Edit.. If you read the last edition of this list, you will remember our love affair with Ford in Wild Love. Fever Dream is the reason we are still thinking about Elsie Silver, an extension of that same addictive, small-town, chemistry-you-can-feel-through-the-page energy, this time following a bull rider and a reality dating show gone very wrong in the best way.
It is pure escapism, the kind you want when you are somewhere with a decent view and absolutely no intention of doing anything productive. Which, frankly, is exactly what a good beach read is for.
Why Travelling Well Might Start With a Book
We talk a lot about switching off and filling our cups, but rarely about how. It isn't always a spa day or a digital detox. Sometimes it's smaller than that. It's a book in your bag that has nothing to do with your to-do list, cracked open somewhere far from your usual four walls.
Fiction gives the nervous system somewhere else to go. Nonfiction, like Raising Hare or Unreasonable Hospitality, can do exactly the same thing, offering a different pace, a different set of priorities, a reminder that attention and care are worth slowing down for.
And travel, done well, does the same. It isn't about the itinerary. It's the permission to stop optimising for a while, and just notice where you are.
So however you're getting away this summer, on a plane, a train, or simply a sun lounger that counts as "away enough," consider this your permission slip. Pack a book that has nothing to prove, and let your nervous system have the holiday too.
Words by The Well Edit.
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