What To Read Before Summer's Over
Here's to summer. To Adirondack chairs and sunscreen. To longer days and fewer emails. To getting out of town and tucking into all the books you've been meaning to read.
And to that last point, we've picked some of our very favorite books that will help you soak up and squeeze out the rest and best of summer1.
Before The Fall
Noah Hawley, Grand Central Publishing (May, 2016)
Noah Hawley's 'Before The Fall' begins with a sliver of calm before pouncing with the book's title disaster: a private plane plunging into the Atlantic Ocean . . . 'Before The Fall' capitalizes on its propulsive plot, even as Hawley brings other ambitions to bear, examining wealth, media, art, class, desire, and love to illustrate how our lives are determined through a constant struggle between internal and external forces.
[AV Club]
Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi, Alfred A. Knopf (June, 2016)
In her debut novel 'Homegoing,' Yaa Gyasi explores the damaging effect of the slave trade on a family split between the U.S. and the Gold Coast of Ghana across 200 years. With a few exceptions, even the most extravagant multigenerational novels seem to top out at three or four generations, capturing characters whose lifetimes overlap, who have time to get to know and interact with one another. 'Homegoing' covers seven generations in 300 pages and is, for the most part, a blazing success.
[LA Times]
City On Fire
Garth Risk Hallberg, Alfred A. Knopf (2015)
Garth Risk Hallberg's 'City on Fire' is a big, stunning first novel and an amazing virtual reality machine, whisking us back to New York City in the 1970s . . . [Hallberg] captures the city's dangerous, magnetic allure — for artists, for dreamers, for kids eager to escape the platitudes of suburbia. And he also captures what it's like to be young in New York, propelled by the dizzying adrenaline-rush of possibility and frightened, too, by the fragility of urgent ambitions.
On Bowie
Rob Sheffield, Dey Street Books (June, 2016)
Rob Sheffield's 'On Bowie' is a kind of master class in how to transmute grief into beauty (and quickly), a lesson that feels especially poignant right now. In his introduction, Sheffield describes the book as "a love letter to everyone who adored him, because bringing us together is what he was really about." There is a sense, reading "On Bowie," of being among friends. That feeling — the most beautiful there is — remained for me long after I put the book down.
The Art Of Fielding
Chad Harbach, Back Bay Books (2011)
The 'Art of Fielding' feels like a novel from another, more innocent age. It revels in themes that have been unfashionable in literary fiction for generations — team spirit, male friendship, making the best of one's talents. In its optimism and lack of cynicism, in its celebration of the wide open spaces of the Midwest and its confidence in the deep inner meaning of baseball, it is a big American novel of the old school.
Still Wild: Short Fiction Of The American West 1950 To The Present
Larry McMurtry, Simon & Schuster (2000)
'Still Wild' is a gathering of some of the best in contemporary Western short fiction: a meditation on the American West as a strange, dangerous, and lonely place, written by a murderer's row of contributors including Richard Ford, Wallace Stegner, Louise Erdrich, Raymond Carver, and Dianna Osanna . . . Here, the West comes at you sideways—there are no John Waynes, and Monument Valley is far away. Rather, these stories interest themselves in a feeling, an environment.
The Fight
Norman Mailer, Little, Brown and Company (1975)
'The Fight' is double Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer's eye-witness account of the Rumble in the Jungle — the historic bout between heavyweight champion George Foreman and challenger Muhammad Ali. Mailer offers an incredible insight into the two fighters (Mailer's relationship with Ali is particularly fascinating) as well as a blow-by-blow account of the contest itself, in what remains one of the most exhilarating pieces of sports writing you're ever likely to read.
[GQ]
The Goldfinch
Donna Tart, Little, Brown and Company (2013)
'The Goldfinch' is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind. I read it with that mixture of terror and excitement I feel watching a pitcher carry a no-hitter into the late innings. You keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but in the case of 'The Goldfinch,' they never do.
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami, Kodansha (1987)
'Norwegian Wood' by Haruki Murakami, is hands down the book to read this summer. It's full of enough sex, death, and magical realism to keep readers fully entertained. It has deep literary seed, with a touching story of love and loss and growing up.
The Arab Of The Future
Riad Sattouf, Metropolitan Books (2015)
This [graphic memoir] delivers a vision of childhood that is both extreme and familiar: its terrors and painful revelations, the utter mystery and absolute power of adults, the sensory details that lodge forever in the memory. But Sattouf's vision is also of the unusual childhood he lived in Moammar El-Gadhafi's Libya and Hafez al-Assad's Syria, as well as in the shadow of his father and his delusions. 'The Arab of the Future' blends a rueful backward glance at the early days of two dictatorships that finally imploded in the Arab Spring and an intimate indictment of the way boys were taught to be men.
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alfred A. Knopf (2013)
'Americanah' is indeed a novel about being black in the 21st century — in America, Great Britain and Africa, while answering a want ad, choosing a lover, hailing a cab, eating collard greens, watching Barack Obama on television — but you could also call it a novel of immigration and dislocation, just about every page tinged with faint loneliness.
[NPR]
Burning The Days
James Salter, Vintage (1997)
A fighter pilot in the Korean War, a struggling writer in Paris and New York, a screenwriter working for a young up-and-coming Hollywood actor by the name of Robert Redford, [James] Salter did it all, but the main subject here — as with all his work — is women, the wooing and losing of them, the slippery nature of happiness when with them, the barely-concealed delight they exist at all.
[GQ]
Ten Thousand Saints
Eleanor Henderson, Ecco (2011)
Henderson's fierce, elegiac novel, her first, follows a group of friends, lovers, parents and children through the straight-edge music scene and the early days of the AIDS epidemic. By delving deeply into the lives of her characters, tracing their long relationships not only to one another but also to various substances, Henderson catches something of the dark, apocalyptic quality of the '80s.
Patience
Daniel Clowes, Fantagraphics (March, 2016)
Comics aren't time machines, but they are chronological atlases, each panel a frozen instant, each page a map. Exploiting this quality of comics, Clowes dramatizes the painful work of putting together the pieces of a beloved's history. And as he does so, his book rewards attention to its details as much as it does to the difficult, moving whole. In 'Patience', each assured and elegant panel reminds us that every moment matters.
[Slate]
If you love books but don't like squinting to read in the sun…or get motion sickness while reading in the car…or just want full use of your hands during your commute, try Audible. They have 180,000 audiobook titles available and if you play your cards right (i.e. clicking on this link) you can score a free 30-day trial.
Happy reading.
