Things you can easily read on the beach:

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain (but read Kitchen Confidential first if you haven't already).

Also recommend FiveBooks.com, which does interviews with various academics and "thinkers" each recommending 5 books on a particular subject. It's a bit slanted towards politics but has a fair bit of hard science as well.