Beach Books

I'm reading Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville. Really good stuff, actually; he observed, for instance, that while America (c. 1830) did not follow schools of philosophy like the fashionable thinkers of Europe did, at the same time they had arrived at a common frame of thinking. De Tocqueville said that there was nowhere that Decartes was less studied but more followed, as a practical matter.