Summer is in full effect and the reading lists are starting to fill up! (joke, reading lists are always full to begin with.) But summer is special, and we might want something different for our vacation than what we would normally go for on any given day.
Summer reads announcements are all over the place, and more and more celebs are jumping on the book club wagon. So if you still haven’t found your summer read, or have room still in your TBR pile (who am I kiddding, there’s always room in the TBR pile, that’s why it’s taking over my life) – I’ve made a list! (Oh man! I love lists!)
The tonights show – summer reads
The tonight show with Jimmy Fallon chose (in my opinion) 5 great summer reads, and Fallon will read one of these with the audience based on votes. The 5 books are:
Providence by Caroline Kepnes
Best friends in small-town New Hampshire, Jon and Chloe share a bond so intense that it borders on the mystical. But before Jon can declare his love for his soul mate, he is kidnapped, his plans for a normal life permanently dashed.
The immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?
It’s 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.
They killed my mother.
They took our magic.
They tried to bury us.
Now we rise.
Book 1 of 2 in the Children of Orisha series.
Who can you trust if you can’t trust yourself?
Early one morning, twenty-six-year-old Yu-jin wakes up to a strange metallic smell, and a phone call from his brother asking if everything’s all right at home – he missed a call from their mother in the middle of the night. Yu-jin soon discovers her murdered body, lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs of their stylish Seoul duplex.
IQ by Joe Ide
East Long Beach. The LAPD is barely keeping up with the neighborhood’s high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, lost children unrecovered. But someone from the neighborhood has taken it upon himself to help solve the cases the police can’t or won’t touch.
The New York Times summer reads
The NY Times posted 100 summer reads (but I’m obviously not going to list 100 books) – but here’s a few of those:
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
One of 2017’s big hits, now in paperback, this beguiling tale of the comings and goings of an oddball ménage à quatre won last year’s Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award.
A debut novel to savour, this story of a father who leaves his daughter to search for monsters in the Wild West is entrancing. Small but perfectly formed.
Bussi shows why he is one of France’s favourite writers in a hugely inventive story about a long-ago accident and the victim who might still, mysteriously, be alive.
Already a sensation in France, this shocking story about a murderous nanny horribly illuminates the darkest fears of many parents.
Last year’s Man Booker winner, a haunting, multi-voiced tale of Lincoln, his dead son and the ghostly inhabitants of a cemetery.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
A book-club favourite, the compulsively readable story of a family in a placid, progressive suburb going off the rails.
The Shepherd’s Hut by Tim Winton
A modern Australian Huckleberry Finn, in which a desperate teenager embarks on a gruelling trek.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
An isolated outsider tries to learn how to lead a normal life, in a debut that’s become one of the year’s big reads.
Reese Witherspoon choses a book for each month, and for
My summer reads!
Personally, I love really thick books for summer. I like to bring along a real brick that’s going to last me hours in the sun. Last year I got through The Goldfinch, and I absolutely loved it! I’m going to continue the brick tradition this year with these two I’ve been saving:
A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.
It’s 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson hasn’t seen his mother, Faye, in decades—not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she’s reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart. Which version of his mother is true? Two facts are certain: she’s facing some serious charges, and she needs Samuel’s help.
These are obviously just a small fraction of what lists are out there, but these appealed more to me personally than many of the obvious beach reads. This summer I want to get through my two bricks and a couple of more from the lists. I have my eye on Lincoln in the bardo and The good son, but we’ll see where the summer ends up.
Happy summer, happy reading!
Marie III 