A Summer Reading List Written By an Actual Human
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | May 23, 2025
Header Image Source: Stefano Guidi via Getty Images
Summer is here. The days are getting longer, the heat is turning up, and I have way more opportunities to go out for early-evening ice cream. Apparently it’s controversial to describe Summer as my favourite season. I get it. If you live in a country that isn’t Scotland, the endless heat and humidity can be killer. Personally, I’ll complain about the weather all year round, as is my patriotic duty, but I can’t deny how much I love these months. I like that the sun is still out at 8pm. I love having the chance to sit outdoors with a drink and a book (although said opportunities are somewhat spotty given that, you know, it’s Scotland.) But hey, it’s also the perfect excuse for a Summer reading list!
We all have this idea in our heads of the perfect Summer read. We think of beach reads, of fizzy novels with high drama and low stakes. It can’t be too heavy or prescient. There’s no time for pressing political tracts that remind us of our current hellscape. That’s not to say you can’t enjoy such things in a Summer book if it’s what you crave. Personally, I plan to spend my favourite season delving into the sleazy paranoid noirs of James Ellroy. Summer is a good time for that chunky non-fiction hardback you’ve had in your TBR pile for a while. Mostly, when I think of a good Summer book, I think of something that’s gripping enough that you want to devour it in one go. I want a book that engrosses me so much that the world melts away around me.
So, with that in mind, here are a few of my Summer reading recommendations, some existing books you can actually buy, all suggested by an actual human and not AI. Apparently, I have to say that now.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
While this is easily the most well-known of Mandel’s novels, in large part thanks to the TV adaptation, I have to give it a shout out here because it truly is as excellent as its reputation suggests. Yes, it’s a dystopian novel, which might put some people off, but what makes Station Eleven so enthralling is how it paints a portrait of humanity’s fight to survive in the face of abject pain.
A flu epidemic very suddenly takes over the planet and kills off vast swaths of the Earth’s population. Twenty years later, a troupe of actors roam the remains of North America and perform Shakespeare plays to keep up humainty’s spirits. That’s the basic plot but, as with all Mandel novels, the real meat of the story is in the web of characters and timelines that populate this world of the past and present. Mandel has this impeccable skill to take all of these seemingly disparate ideas that seem as though they have nothing in common, then weave them together so expertly that any other conclusion seems impossible. There’s a grim quality to this book. How could there not be. But what stays with you is its multi-generational portrait of how art, people, and ideas can survive in spite of seeming hopelessness. There’s optimism here, something most dystopian novels chicken out on. And it will make you cry.
Pictures At a Revolution by Mark Harris
In the Heat of the Night. Bonnie & Clyde. The Graduate. Doctor Dolittle. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? In 1967, the five nominees for the Best Picture Oscar represented a film industry in the midst of change. The old studio system was almost dead, and the new era of bright young film school brats in baseball caps were rewriting the rulebook. But the entertainment industry is suspicious of change, and the old ways stubbornly held onto power for as long as they could.
Mark Harris’s study of one year in Hollywood history is a gripping and extremely juicy study of the film world on the precipice of a new era. The Hays Code was crumbling, allowing for a greater depth of portrayals of sex, violence, and social change. Abroad, European filmmakers were transforming what cinema even looked like. Yet the box office was dominated by more traditional efforts, even as younger audiences clamoured for something more representative of their generation. This was the time when the three-hour-long mega-musical was in charge but a foreign film like Blow Up could be a commercial hit. Harris delves into the making of these five movies, what they came to represent, and how the Oscars acted as a barometer of the industry’s turbulent relationship with the future. Read it, if only for all of the stories of the animals in Doctor Dolittle trying to murder Rex Harrison.
Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz
Nobody in Los Angeles in the 1970s had more fun than Eve Babitz. Nobody was hotter, had more impressive connections, went to cooler parties, or had sexier one-night stands than her. The past decade or so has seen Babitz’s work reemerge after years of obscurity, elevating her to cult legend status and the literary companion of many a hot girl summer. A recent memoir tried to position her as the anti-Joan Didion, but that book was insulting and crap and missed the point. Frankly, it’s far more worthwhile to get the story from the horse’s mouth.
Her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, is a glass of champagne with a whisky chaser, both buoyant and celebratory but also proud of its sleazy roots. Babitz’s work is anti-Didion in that Joan, her one-time friend, tended to portray the city in a starker, more nihilistic sense (see Play It as It Lays, my favourite of her novels.) For Babitz, L.A. is just as vibrant, socially and culturally, as New York, maybe more so. She is immensely confident in her declarations, which prove infectious to the reader. You want to hang out with her, and this book is as close as you’ll get to being in the centre of the action as rock and roll took over the city and hippie optimism gave way to a darker kind of fun.
Persuasion by Jane Austen
I came to Persuasion later, reading it for the first time only this year. I’m glad I waited until I was in my 30s because Austen’s story of second chances and regret only resonated with me more at this point in my life. Believe the hype. Sorry, Pride & Prejudice devotees, but this might be her masterpiece. Anne Elliot’s struggle as an aged spinster (27?!) trying to maintain her dignity in the midst of familial troubles is so achingly realized that it could have been written at any point during the interim two centuries since Austen published it. It’s also incredibly funny. Austen’s humour has not aged a day. Her wit is timeless and pinpoint precise in ways that made me guffaw out loud and in public.
I think a lot of readers, including those of us who know better, fall into the trap of seeing any book labelled as a ‘classic’ to be akin to homework. Oh, it’ll be too heavy for a light read. The language will be tough to follow. It’s going to be such a slog. I get it. I’ve been there. But I promise you that there is nothing homework-like about Austen or Persuasion. Yeah, you might have to focus more than the BookTok title of the moment demands but the rewards are limitless. This is a joyous read, so melancholy and romantic and hilarious. Take you time and delve into it with an open heart.
Weaveworld by Clive Barker
Summer’s a great time for a chonky read, those hefty doorstop fantasies that you hesitate to pick up because it seems like too grand a commitment. What could be better than a 700+ page high fantasy horror adventure novel that’s weird, beautiful, and horny as hell? Bless you, Clive Barker. You just know what the people want.
Barker is, of course, best known for his horror works that blend body horror and queerness with phantasmagorical nightmare fuel. But he was always more interested in blending genres than sticking to one path. Really, the Hellraiser stories were always more fantasy-rooted than traditional horror. Barker’s scope is vast and the worlds and creatures he creates reach well beyond the most expected confines of fantasy.
Consider Weaveworld, wherein the Fugue, a magical land inhabited by descendants of supernatural beings who once shared the earth with humans, resides within a carpet. After the rug’s guardian in the real world dies, a battle for control of the Fugue breaks out. This is a densely plotted book that, like a lot of Barker novels, is hard to do justice in a quick summary. The sheer depth of his themes and allegories deserves a PhD thesis. There’s a welcome optimism to the story even as it delves into some pretty gnarly horror and creatures so horrific that they would make the Cenobites blush. All that and it’s super f*cky! Why would you ever want to read about wizard boarding schools after this?
Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Look, sometimes you just need monsters. You need sewer creatures, museum antics, and a Southern dandy detective who looks like silver-haired Benedict Cumberbatch but talks like Benoit Blanc in Knives Out. I am a simple woman with simple tastes and I know what my trash is. Lincoln and Child’s long-running Pendergast series has become the latest addition to my canon of long-running and highly addictive series where the readers and writers alike know exactly what they’re offering and consuming. This is like if Dan Brown could write and didn’t take himself so unbearably seriously. It’s silly but still with high enough stakes for you to invest in. Again, there are monsters. What more do you want?!
Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon
Maybe you want something darker this Summer, something that really puts you through the emotional wringer but in a way that boldly tackles ideas of autonomy, power, and trauma. Vern flees the only life she’s ever known, including an abusive husband and fanatical cult, and escapes to the woods. She gives birth to twins and decides to raise them in the wild. As time passes, she evades capture as the cult of Cainland tries to recover her, and her sons learn about life off the grid. As time passes, Vern begins to experience a curious transformation, one that will force her to confront her brutal past and that of the violence that created both her life and that of America.
Solomon is a phenomenally talented writer, a ferociously poetic craftsperson who is unafraid to delve into dark topics through a speculative lens. Sorrowland is not necessarily an easy read and might defy some of the more traditional notions of a Summer book, but it’s also all-consuming and thought-provoking in the ways that the best seasonal reads are. Vern is a young Black girl whose trauma is not only her own but that of a long-lasting lineage towards Black bodies. This is a thoroughly modern gothic horror with its roots in tangled questions about the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, faith, and power. That makes Sorrowland seem like a nightmare read but Solomon is too talented a prose writer for it to ever seem didactic. Take the risk if you’re up for it.
Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Viridiana wants excitement beyond the mundane realities of her hometown where her only options are to marry well or run away. When a wealthy American writer arrives with his wife and brother-in-law, Viridiana becomes his assistant. The glamour and sensuality of these outsiders seem so exciting, but, of course, something sinister is afoot.
Moreno-Garcia is often heralded for her striking world-building and mythos but she’s also great at grounded, claustrophobic noirs full of devious characters who are as charming as they are repellent. Silvia Moreno-Garcia is one of the names at the top of my ‘buy on the day of release’ list. She has a new book out? Oh, I have to buy it immediately. While she’s better known for her sci-fi and fantasy works, she’s also a phenomenal crime writer with a retro-noir flair that appeals to all of my niches. Untamed Shore is like a sleazy ’70s mystery, the offspring of Raymond Chandler or Patricia Highsmith transplanted to the beaches of Baja, with a dash of the gothic.
←
Previous Article
|
Next Article
→
More Like This
© 2007-2024 Scathing Websites, LLC. All rights reserved.