Summer happens slowly, then all at once: longer nights, a drink on the porch followed by one more, the trickle then flood of every publication writing (or getting AI to write) a list of summer books you should read. Just as predictable is the kind of books that will appear on these lists. These books are recent, they are already well-publicized, and they are generally described as suited to one particular location (the beach). But summer, and summer reading, is capacious. It's more than the feeling of being on vacation and more than the books you might buy at the airport. This is why we decided to give you a different kind of summer reading guide.
Our list is full of books that we genuinely endorse that are not all super new or super popular. We tried to pick books that went with summer's various and specific moods, or that we might not have a good excuse to recommend otherwise. Here are 35 good books perfect for everything from sipping a spritz abroad to finding your first beautifully ripe tomato.
When It’s So Hot You Can’t Leave Your House and Have to Sit in Front of the AC
Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag - Sigrid Nunez
You know Sigrid Nunez. You know Susan Sontag. But did you know Sigrid Nunez dated Susan Sontag’s son and lived with them? And did you know she kinda didn’t like Sontag?! This book feels claustrophobic the way a hot, hot day feels, but like in a good way. —Alex
Temporary - Hilary Leichter
If anyone else had tried to write this book, it would have been incoherent; in Leichter’s hands, it’s a joy. Reading this feels like eating ice cream for dinner and somehow feeling good after. —Patrick
Mrs. S - K. Patrick
If made to describe the atmosphere of this book in one word, it would be “languid.” —Brandy
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - Peter Biskind
What better way to ignore a hot summer day than to drown yourself in the X-rated exploits of the film industry as the end of the studio system and the beginning of a youth movement? Biskind’s book is full of great gossip, deplorable behavior, and egos absolutely run amok. And drugs, so many drugs. It’s the best kind of summer read. —Israel
Interior Chinatown - Charles Yu
Brain-breaking, format-bending, darkly funny—a perfect companion for one of those liminal, sultry days. —Rachelle
The First Day of Perfect Weather
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Classic novel about the joys of a summer holiday and the tragedy of falling in love with a Catholic. —Brandy
The Oysters of Locmariaquer - Eleanor Clark
I’m a sucker for single-topic books. I hope to one day be as obsessed with anything as Eleanor Clark was with these damn oysters. —Kelsey
Eve’s Hollywood - Eve Babitz
Babitz is the platonic ideal of a writer: someone who has lived and can explain those exploits better than anyone else. A pitch-perfect example of getting to tell your own narrative. Eve’s Hollywood looks at LA with an arch but loving POV; she is the sharpest crayon in its box but feels too connected to it to ever come across as dismissive. A perfect book about the ideal ways to spend a summer. —Israel
Sipping a Spritz in a Foreign City
Farewell, Ghosts - Nadia Terranova
Translated from the Italian! Set in Sicily!! Ghosts!! —Kelsey
A Time of Gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermor
The premise of PLF’s book, the first of a trilogy, is extremely simple. The year is 1933. Disaffected after graduating college in London, he eschews entrance into a prestigious military school and sets out to walk across Europe, from the Netherlands to Istanbul. Being in that place at that time sets the table for some obvious revelations, and they form the background of what turns out to be an incredibly sweet portrait of a world about to be destroyed. —Patrick
The Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
Requires no explanation. —Brandy
Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin
I don’t always love Baldwin’s novels in comparison to his essays, but maybe after spending my own trips to Paris reading this one in multiple cafes, I have a soft spot for it. It’s certainly the kind of behavior the novel’s protagonist, David, would get up to while reminiscing about past lovers and whatnot. —Israel
Driving for Hours on a Beautiful Highway
Defector recommends the following audiobooks:
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
Ben Miles’s reading of the Wolf Hall trilogy was so good, it ruined audiobooks for me. —Patrick
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier (read by Anna Massey)
The late English actress Anna Massey makes this novel just as spooky and delicious as it should be. The way she reads the climactic scene is so good, I wish I could experience it again for the first time. And I still get chills thinking about her Mrs. Danvers! —Maitreyi
Watchmen - Alan Moore
Watchmen is a dense, all-over-the-place deconstruction of the superhero myth, and while the animation is part of the magic of the story, it’s got all the fantastical drama and action that would make for good listening on a long drive. —Israel
Beginning a Summer Fling
It feels almost cliche to recommend an Ernaux to go with a summer fling, but she’s a titan for a reason. No one is hornier than Ernaux, and almost no one writes like her. —Kelsey
The Beginners - Anne Serre
To be read in the hope that yours is less complicated. —Brandy
Helen of Troy, 1993 - Maria Zoccola
A delicate little poetry collection to get you through big feelings. —Maitreyi
The Guest - Emma Cline
No one said it had to be the most romantic fling. —Israel
Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
As a reminder that even doomed love can be beautiful and worth pursuing. —Rachelle
The Moments on the Beach When You’re the Only One Not in the Ocean
Colored Television - Danzy Senna
If you’re not getting in the ocean, you need a great reason. This is the great reason: a desperate and delusional writer trying to stay afloat in bougie LA while cashing in on her identity and pretending she isn’t. —Alex
Western Lane - Chetna Maroo
A winter book, but a totally gripping one. Maroo is a talented stylist, and there’s so much heart to this book. —Patrick
The Mountain in the Sea - Ray Nayler
What’s that behind you? Did something just move in the distance? —Brandy
Three Strong Women - Marie NDiaye
This 2009 winner of the Prix Goncourt is the perfect excuse to remain firmly planted on your beach towel. Three Strong Women, which was translated into English in 2012, moves primarily between NDiaye’s homes of Senegal and France. It follows, you guessed it, three women whose strength is tested over and over again, primarily by the men in their lives. (Many such cases.) It’s tightly plotted, densely detailed, and the very last scene is indelible. —Rachelle
Waiting for Your Three-Hour Flight Delay to End
Scattered All Over The Earth - Yoko Tawada
Tawada is maybe my favorite living author, and this is maybe my favorite from her bibliography. It is nominally a sort of utopian climate fiction, one that begins from the premise that Japan has disappeared from the face of the Earth. Hiruko, who is Japanese but lives in Denmark and gets by on a made-up language called Panska, sets out to find someone who speaks her native tongue, kicking off a beautiful odyssey. —Patrick
On the Calculation of Volume - Solvej Balle
The perfect book for when you’re feeling stuck. —Brandy
The White Boy Shuffle - Paul Beatty
An easy-to-read, acidic, sharp-tongued satire about Los Angeles, basketball, and the next black messiah. It’ll make those hours fly by. —Patrick
Eating the Season’s First Perfect Tomato
Stemmy Things - imogen xtian smith
I don’t remember if there is a tomato in this poetry collection, but I do know it is a book committed to indulgence in all its luxuriant sprawl. xtian smith is a poet of all the senses, and they invite you to touch, taste, and even secrete various [redacted] pleasures. This is a book about being in your body and making the most of it. —Sabrina
Ties - Domenico Starnone
If there are tomatoes in this short three-part novel about a strained marriage, I don’t remember them. And they are probably not eaten but thrown at someone, or left to rot in an apartment. (Read it back to back with Israel’s recommendation below, The Days of Abandonment!) —Maitreyi
All About Love - bell hooks
It’s not just because the cover is as red as a tomato; I think hooks' outlook on love in our culture and society makes for a good side dish. —Israel
Listening to the Downpour of a Summer Storm
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
Sometimes, the day is long and rainy and you want to read all day. One of the first scenes in Villette is a summer downpour. See your reflection! —Kelsey
The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
Summer 2025 is for sighing Italianly. —Patrick
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino
Honestly this one isn’t particularly on theme, I just think everyone should read it. —Brandy
The Days of Abandonment - Elena Ferrante
A book that understands when it rains, it pours. —Israel
Voices from the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland - Ed Moloney
Consider Voices from the Grave a companion account to Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing. The first half is a surprisingly honest recounting of the career of IRA legend Brendan Hughes from none other than the legend himself; to this day, it remains one of the few frontline accounts of the Troubles. Gray skies will only make it easier to transport yourself to the streets of 1970s Belfast. If you need any further enticement: Hughes only sat down for the interview with the stipulation that it be released after his death. —Rachelle
When You Become Depressed for No Reason in July
These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson - Martha Ackmann
If you’re surprise depressed, why not just go deeper into your mind palace—or perhaps the mind palace of a famously reclusive poet obsessed with death?? As the title suggests, this is a biography of Emily Dickinson told in 10 moments in her life. Don’t skip the intro; Ackmann details her extremely method research process, which involved doing the same actions in the same rooms at the same times of year as Dickinson had. —Alex
回 / Return — Emily Lee Luan
This poetry collection is charged with a desperate homesickness for many kinds of homes—a childhood, a family, an ancestral homeland. I loved Luan’s Chinese reversible or multidirectional poems, which mirror the experience of longing in that they can be read backwards or forwards with different meanings, circling around a desire.
Here is one of my favorite excerpts, in which Luan imagines what her life would be like as a flight attendant:
I might stare out of one of the windows,
imagine the ocean blue. Or, say, when cleaning
up a toddler’s vomit, I might yearn
for a less solitary life. But otherwise, loneliness
might be okay when surrounded by other
flight attendants in the sky, my body
a body made for tending to bodies in flight.
I’d breathe in the air of neither
here nor there. I’d remember everything
about my lives on earth.
—Sabrina
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes — Bill Watterson
When I’m depressed, I want to laugh or read something juicy, so I could pick up a book of good gossip related to movies or sports or the literary world, or I can revisit the classic story of a boy and his imaginary tiger. —Israel
Taking an Unapproved Summer Friday
Slug and Other Stories — Megan Milks
What I would give to play hooky and read Slug again for the first time! It’s a deranged little collection of stories teeming with carnal desire and mutating bodies, as well as lots of tender references to growing up in the '90s, an era where time felt limitless, horrifying, and yet somehow mundane, just like the arcs of these stories. If reading this book can’t transport you back to that decade, perhaps it can transport you to that feeling. —Sabrina
Fever Beach - Carl Hiaasen
There’s no state more spiritually connected to the idea of escaping from your responsibilities for your own selfish gain than Florida. It’s an entire state whose self-image is built on the mirage that lawlessness is the same as righteousness, after all. Fever Beach, the newest book from sometimes kids author and sometimes Florida chronicler Carl Hiaasen, gets at the rotten core of this idea by taking the absurdity of that belief at face value. This is a satirical story of government corruption and incompetence, white supremacy and its many inconsistencies, and the sheer stupidity of hatred, but it’s also the story of how Florida has been stripped of so many natural resources in hopes of a quick buck, the ultimate self-first philosophy of greed that has set the peninsula back into a quickly sinking playground for the rich and vile. There are good people in the state, argues Fever Beach, but they are under the thumb of stupid, evil people, and while those modern-day villains might get their comeuppance, there’s no end to the havoc they can wreak on the way to an often gruesome end. Not bad for a bit of light reading on a Friday afternoon. —Luis
Crook Manifesto - Colson Whitehead
Take a break from working for the man to read about hustlers and schemers and criminals just trying to get it however they can, while you fantasize about being half as enterprising. —Israel
All books available through bookshop.org can be found on this list.
