The summer before I started fifth grade, I took the first three Harry Potter books on a family trip to New York. By the time we touched down at JFK, I’d already read most of the first book. I continued the series through long beach days in Long Island, my butt planted in the fine-grained East Coast sand. And I hauled the books through Manhattan just to get a few pages in on the subway or waiting in line for the museum. I got halfway through the third book before we touched back down at LAX.
Harry Potter distilled the feeling of summer: possibility, expansiveness, the thrill of diving into a new world, escaping the quotidian. That, to me, is the perfect summer reading: a *feeling* more than a specific genre, or certain themes or motifs. I have a friend who insists that War and Peace is the perfect summer reading and another who reads only murder mysteries on the beach. To each their own.
For me, the books below embody that feeling I’m talking about. These days, I turn more toward coming-of-age tales and sensual themes like food, art, or interesting places than I do toward fantasy/world-building type of books like Harry Potter. I like stories about characters who pursue something creative and discover their own potential. And, most of all, I like writing that captures the languorous pace and sensual beauty of summer. Here are seven favorites:
23-year-old Edie wants many things: human connection, healing from childhood trauma, to pursue her art. Most of all, she wants clarity of existence. She wants the grace to make mistakes, sort her past, and try to find herself in a classist, racist, misogynistic world that often erases her. She tells us all about it with sarcasm and a bluntness that underscores her humanity. The best part about this novel isn’t the darkness. It’s the mounting hope as Edie overcomes barriers, both internal and external, to find herself. That and the writing. Visceral, sensual, lyrical, and completely immersive: I wanted to follow every intentional run-on sentence for pages on end.
Call me unoriginal, but I love a girl-spends-a-summer-in-New-York-City-and-it-changes-her type of novels. And this one is great. 25-year-old Kate has never been to New York, but she takes a house-sitting gig in the city to get away from her Phd studies, which feel directionless, and her law-student boyfriend, whom she can’t stand. Always a rule-follower, Kate finds herself drawn to the bold and reckless: a party-girl who sells herself on Craigslist and her charming, embittered father who lives off his only success as an author. As she follows them through a garish world of clubs, bars, and performance spaces, she learns about connection, solitude, and her own desires.
A young woman in North Dakota sues a former high school English teacher over an affair they had when she was 16. A mother of two follows her desire outside of her loveless marriage. A socialite and her husband keep their sex life alive by inviting other people into it. Journalist Lisa Taddeo followed these three women for almost ten years to capture their stories. And it shows. She writes about their trauma, desire, and vulnerabilities so vividly you’d think each was an autobiography. Then again, the poetry and power of the writing makes it easy to forget you’re reading nonfiction at all. I could not put this one down.
While this book is about the narrator’s devoted account of his grandfather’s life, it reads more like an epoch featuring a complex and passionate hero. In the same fluid, associative way that memory itself often works, the narrator conveys the multitudes of his grandfather’s life, from his rebellious childhood in Philledelphia to his time as a soldier in Nazi occupied Germany to his devotion to the narrator’s mother during her mental health break. And the writing: lyrical, intellectual, and kissed by magical realism.
31-year-old Casey wants to finish her first novel and become a published author, despite the odds. And there are many odds, including grief from her mother’s unexpected death, childhood trauma, an unexplained end to a whirlwind romantic affair, and crushing student loan debt. Then there’s the loneliness, as she watches her peers abandon their writing for steady jobs, marriage, and kids. As she navigates the chaos, Casey tells a candid, vulnerable story about following a dream, seeking connection, and learning to trust yourself. Her insights on loss, love, self-doubt, and inspiration are lucid, beautifully written, and so deeply relatable for anyone who desires a creative life.
I loved dropping in on the glamorous world of Condé Nast as legendary food writer and former editor in chief of Gourmet, Ruth Reichl, recounts her days running the magazine. While returning the sinking publication to its former glory, she set new standards for the role of food writing and the way Americans think about cooking and eating. This book is about the ups, downs, risks, and beauty involved in that journey: the privilege of working with incredible talent, the lack of work-life balance, the challenge of navigating a well-established institution while sticking to your creative guns. For anyone who has fantasized about the golden days of magazine publishing or the fun of a career in food writing, Save Me the Plums will be as un-put-downable as Reichl’s chocolate cake recipe on page 45.
The Van Ness Quartet includes Brit, the reserved violinist mourning the death of her parents. Henry, a prodigy on the viola for whom everything comes easily. Daniel, the embittered cellist who came from nothing. And Jana, their tough and serious leader on the violin. All four of them desire success in the cutthroat wold of classical music. As they tie their professional fates together, they also experience heartbreak, romance, loss, marriage, and parenthood alongside one another. This book brings all of those elements together in four compelling, beautifully-written stories about what it means to live in service of an artistic ambition and how relationships, the ones we choose over and over again, can be the defining force of our lives.
I’m always surprised by how much certain books shape my memories. For instance, I cannot imagine my family trip to France this year without The Ensemble by Aja Gabel. It’s as if the four main characters ate croissants by the fountain in The Tuileries and watched the sun set over…
Being a stay-at-home mom isn’t working for the protagonist of Rachel Yoder’s novel, Nightbitch. She feels “stripped of all she had been, of her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones…” But she suspects something is truly off when she finds “a patch of course, black hair sprouting…
The 32-year old protagonist of Dolly Alderton’s Ghosts, Nina, has a lot going for her: good friendships, a stable family life, and a new flat—paid for by her dream career as a food writer and cookbook author. But being in her thirties also makes Nina aware of what she doesn’t…
