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Forget walking on water. What if you could do yoga on the water’s surface, like a jellyfish riding the gentle waves in downward dog or child’s pose.

That’s basically the idea behind the Floating Fitness class at the Annenberg Community Beach House. It’s a full-body workout combining yoga and Pilates moves with gentle high-intensity interval training bodyweight exercises — all performed on floating yoga mats in a swimming pool.

The inflatable hardshell BOGAFiT mat that’s used — or “floating training platform,” as the class refers to it — looks like a wide paddleboard with a slightly raised yoga mat on its surface. It’s anchored to the pool walls with bungee cords on either end, so that the mat floats in the middle of the pool but doesn’t flip over. Participants can then get a high-intensity, low-impact workout that’s easy on the joints and requires extra balance, firing up the core. The workout builds strength and flexibility while improving balance and coordination, said instructor Leah Gutentag, who’s been a lifeguard and swim instructor for the city of Santa Monica for about 12 years.

“Being on the mat, on the water, it’s a unique experience,” Gutentag said. “It’s that balance challenge. No matter your workout experience — whether you go to Pilates once a week or once a year — all of those movements change on the water. Your body physically adapts, and your brain mentally adapts. You use stabilizing muscles in your feet you don’t normally use, you feel your core engaged.”

It’s worth noting that the Annenberg Community Beach House pool is directly across from the beach. You can’t exactly see the ocean while in the pool, but you feel its presence. I took the class on an early Saturday morning (it has since moved to Wednesday evenings). Warming up, we stretched out on our mats in a supine position, staring up at the sky and breathing deeply. Heavy seaside fog settled above us, and the air smelled salty. As the ocean breeze kicked up, the palms rustled around us.

It was utterly serene.

Until it was not.

“Keep that left elbow tucked into that right knee as we lift our left leg, then lower it,” Gutentag coached. “Now open from our crunch, and then crunch it back over. Lift, lower! Uncrunch, cross it back up! We’re here for four, for three, for two and one.”

Participants perform planks during Floating Fitness.

(Alisha Jucevic / For The Times)

The position was easy enough — I’d done it countless times on dry land. But even the simplest moves were noticeably harder on an unstable surface. I felt the effort in my abs for days afterward.

Vibe: The more than century-old pool at the Annenberg Community Beach House was once part of the seaside mansion that William Randolph Hearst built for his mistress, actress Marion Davies. It’s beautifully preserved and feels luxurious to workout in, as if you’re on a “wellness vacation” at a resort. The class is held when the pool is closed to the public, and with just a handful of participants the day I attended, the experience also felt exclusive. Instructor Gutentag has been teaching Floating Fitness at ACBH for more than a year now, and she led the group with authority and warmth, offering adjustments for those who needed it. Remarkably, during the hourlong class, only one person fell into the pool, sparking festive cheers among participants. (The water is a balmy 87 degrees, so no one suffered!)

Effort: Don’t expect an aerobic workout. But this class is tricky — the effort sneaks up on you. At first, the yoga and breathwork were easy. But as the class progressed, Gutentag introduced Pilates-style “pulsing,” which was more challenging. We performed classic moves: squats, crunches, high and low planks and bird dogs, among them. The instability of the water shined a light on areas of my body that were weaker than others. A spinal twist to the right, for instance, while doing a “thread the needle” pose, was far more difficult for me than it would be on land. Double heel raises, which are a breeze on land, were nearly impossible on the wobbly mat. I welcomed the challenge and plan to attend the class again to master the moves.

Zoe Krut, left, and Shayna Simmer make waves with their boards during Floating Fitness.

(Alisha Jucevic / For The Times)

X factor: There are plenty of low-impact, aqua workouts in Los Angeles. But they’re largely performed in the pool, using water as resistance. (Conversely, I also attended a paddleboard workout on dry land once.) Floating Fitness at ACBH allows you to do a mix of traditional yoga, Pilates and HIIT exercises as you would on a floor mat, but with the added instability of water — “safe instability,” as the class calls it. And in the refreshing atmosphere of a seaside pool. It’s the best of both worlds.

“This class for anyone who wants to be on the water doing something different,” Gutentag said. “It’s a fun way to keep your body moving.”

I love reviewing books but sometimes the pace of reading them can feel like that classic I Love Lucy episode at the chocolate factory. The conveyer belt speeds up and the books keep coming along faster than they can be “wrapped” in a review. Summer gives me a chance to catch up with some good books that whizzed by in spring.

James Lasdun’s The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh came out the first week of May, which is when I read it. This nonfiction book, which grew out of a piece Lasdun wrote for The New Yorker, is about the investigation and conviction of prominent South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh for the 2021 murders of his wife and adult son.

Then came the real-life plot twist: A little over a week after Lasdun’s book was published, Murdaugh’s conviction was overturned because of jury tampering. A retrial is being scheduled. Rather than rendering The Family Man obsolete, this new twist intensifies the miasma of stories that swirl around the Murdaugh case — including suspicious deaths and embezzlement.

Lasdun is a “true crime” writer in the reflective mold of his late New Yorker colleague Janet Malcolm. Although investigating the double murder case drives this narrative, Lasdun is most interested in exploring the ultimate unsolvable mystery: the mystery of evil.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Harriet Clark’s debut novel, The Hill, which came out in May, has been getting tons of deserved praise. The novel draws explicitly from Clark’s own background: Born in 1980, Clark was 11 months old when her mother, a member of the radical Weather Underground, was arrested and sentenced for her involvement in a Brinks armored truck robbery that resulted in the deaths of three men. Clark’s maternal grandparents got custody and she visited her mother in prison for almost 40 years, before she was paroled in 2019.

Clark’s main character, Suzanna, is 8 when the story begins and living with her grandparents, former members of the American Communist Party. The plot here is a marvel of sustained claustrophobic stasis. Every week, Suzanna is taken — first by her grandfather, then by a nun, then on her own — to visit her mother at the Children’s Center in Hillcrest prison. Suzanna’s voice charges this novel with intelligence:

Each week … my mother fixed and re-fixed my hair. I slept and didn’t sleep, . … Around us women counted down to release, but my mother and I had been released from countdowns. No reason to look forward, no interest in looking back, we were, as I saw it, free of the past and free of the future. Carnival Day, Friendship Day, Birthday Day — the holidays in the Center followed their own lilting rhythms, and eventually we submitted again to the lull and pleasures of our timeless life.

All the while I was reading The Hill, I kept thinking of E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, inspired by the Rosenberg case. The two novels differ in scope, but like Doctorow, Clark interrogates the cost of parents’ radical commitment to their children, as well as how the world itself shifts radically, from generation to generation.

Sometimes I put aside a good book for a bad reason. Mary Costello’s slim novel, A Beautiful Loan, touted as a devastating story about relationships, came out in March. “No,” I thought back then, “not another ersatz Sally Rooney in time for St. Patrick’s Day.”

But, one empty afternoon, I picked it up and kept reading, mostly because the present-tense narration of the main character, Anna, struck me as so weird in tone. Her deadened voice was at odds with her emotional turbulence. Here’s 19-year-old Anna summarizing how Paul, an elusive older man she’ll eventually marry, keeps her in thrall to what she calls “this oscillating life”:

In the middle of the night, … he rises on one elbow in the bed beside me and, in an urgent, desperate voice, says, I love you. In the morning, he makes no reference to this, and I think he must have spoken in his sleep. Never again in our lives together will he say those three words.

A Beautiful Loan spans 25 years and Anna’s obsessive devotion to two men, one dog, the writings of Camus and Jung, and the practice of Islam. Like the other two books I’ve caught up with here, it may not be the ideal “beach read,” but it would be perfect for a wash-out of a summer weekend.