2022 Summer Reading Guide
Book recommendations for the dog days of summer
We have now reached my official halfway point of summer - July 15. With the prospect of fall and a busy law school schedule looming, I’m trying to pack in as much reading as I can. Maybe you’re like me and want to pack in as much reading as you can before the season ends or maybe you’re looking to get your reading season started. Either way, I’ve compiled a list of compulsively readable books across a spectrum of genres, with hopes that there is something here for everyone. There is no overlap with my recommendations from last summer, so if you are looking for even more suggestions you can check out what I recommended in 2021 here. And, if you want a primer on what I consider “beach reads,” (essentially anything that’s fast-paced and readable to you), and why I think they get a bad rap, click on this link to check out my post from last year. I think this definition aligns well with Molly Young’s assessment in the New York Times, who recently wrote that a beach read for her is:
Any book that accommodates wildly inconsistent levels of focus. For example: Does it hold up to sober morning scrutiny while forgiving sun-dazed afternoon torpor? Can you look away from the page and observe a boogie boarder getting tubed, and then shift your gaze to a lady blasting this version of “Proud Mary” from a Bluetooth speaker, and then return to the book with zero penalty?
Happy summer reading, whether it be on a beach, by the pool, or just on your couch!
Classic Beach Reads
Funny You Should Ask - Elissa Sussman
Funny You Should Ask begins with a celebrity profile of actor Gabe Parker, written by Chani Horowitz. Chani is struggling to make a name for herself in the industry and this profile is her chance at notoriety. Over the course of a weekend, Chani and Gabe get to know each other, starting in a restaurant, heading to a movie premier, and ending at a party thrown at Gabe’s house. The will-they-or-won’t-they tension that percolates throughout sets the stage for a reunion piece ten years later during which Gabe and Chani reflect on past events as readers discover what parts of the famous profile really happened, and what was left out.
The “then” portions of this book are based on a real 2011 GQ profile of Chris Evans written by Edith Zimmerman in advance of his filming of Captain America. If you read this book and then go back and read the profile as I did, you can see how closely Sussman stuck with not only the events that took place but also the writing style of Zimmerman’s original piece. The “now” sections of the book are, I have to imagine, an invention of Sussman’s imagination of what could have been if what took place between the lines played out in reality. The result is a charming and clever read, so much more than what meets the eye, and a classic beach read if there ever was one.
Rating: 8/10
Small Admissions - Amy Poeppel
Kate Prescott is 25-years-old and adrift. After stumbling her way through an interview for an admissions counselor position at an elite Manhattan private school, Kate is offered the opportunity to reinvent herself. Told in alternating perspectives, readers are given multiple glimpses into Kate’s character development as well as different views of the Manhattan middle-school admissions process. Tensions are high for parents who see middle school acceptances as the gilded pathway to an elite high school and elite university and they do not take rejection lightly, leading to the dramatic conclusion of the book. Small Admissions offers a critique of the insane Manhattan private school admissions process without being preachy. I found that even if Poeppel relies a bit on cliché, those clichés make for an entertaining and relevant story. If you are looking for an easy-to-read, enjoyable novel with a strong sense of place and quirky characters, this is the book for you.
Rating: 8.5/10
Nora Goes Off Script - Annabel Monaghan
Nora Hamilton is a romance screenwriter known for her ability to churn out formulaic scripts for Hallmark channel-style films. However, her career is mismatched with the situation in her present life, given that her husband has just left her and her two young children after years of a loveless marriage. Reacting to her divorce, Nora writes a new screenplay about her experience, deviating fully from her typical genre. The script is picked up by a major producer who is able to get big stars in the lead roles. Portions of the film are even filmed in Nora's backyard, which is how she meets and gets to know the star Leo Vance, who after filming wraps up, remains in Nora's home in a desperate bid for a taste of normal life. When Leo leaves to film a major action movie and stops communicating with Nora, she is left to wonder if what she had was way too good to be true.
This romance novel deviates slightly from the standard formula utilized by the genre because the required "break-up" before the happily-ever-after (which typically takes place in the final quarter of the book), occurs right in the middle, allowing Monaghan to develop Nora as a character independent of her romantic interests. Annie Jones of the Bookshelf (my favorite books podcast) absolutely raved about this book, admitting to having read it twice in the span of four months. I'm not sure I was as blown away as she was, but I can attest that the book was fast-paced, entertaining, and cute - definitely an ideal summer read.
Rating: 8/10
You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty - Akwaeke Emezi
After Feyi meets Nasir at a bar, he connects her with a prominent art curator and invites her to come with him to his family home in the Caribbean to participate in one of the curator's shows. Upon arriving, Feyi discovers that Nasir's father is a Michelin star-rated celebrity chef with an opulent home and magnetic personality. Whatever spark Feyi was lacking with Nasir is present in full force with the father, Alim. The two bond over their previous traumas while falling in love, which inevitably creates conflict. While the book may have included some convenient resolutions, Emezi is no doubt a talented writer who has crafted a book that certainly deviates from any traditional romance plot structure.
Rating: 8/10
Thriller/Suspense
The School for Good Mothers - Jessamine Chan
Frida Liu is a single mother struggling to maintain her job while raising her toddler, Harriet. One day, in a fit of frustration, Frida makes a mistake. She leaves her daughter alone for two hours while she drives to her office to pick up paperwork. A neighbor who hears Harriet's crying decides to call the police and Harriet is taken out of Frida's custody and given to Frida's ex-husband and young girlfriend while the state determines Frida's parental status. Worried that Frida's behavior is indicative of larger parenting deficiencies, Frida is sent to the School for Good Mothers, a pioneering institution designed to take "bad mothers" - mothers whose offenses range from letting their kid walk home alone from the library to not preventing their child from taking a fall on the playground - and reform them with lessons over the course of one institutionalized and carefully monitored year. If the mothers decide not to enroll, their parental rights will be severed. If they complete the year, the judge will review the evidence that has been collected and make a final determination. As Frida's situation quickly spirals out of control it becomes clear that the odds are not stacked in any mother's favor, including Frida's. The state that Chan has built intentionally does not look very different from the one that we occupy, but in this version of reality the stakes have been raised significantly, creating tension-filled and anxiety provoking chapters.
Rating: 8.5/10
Other People’s Clothes - Calla Henkel
Zoe and Hailey are two New York art students who move to Berlin in 2008 for a year abroad. Upon arrival, they find an apartment available to sublet from the thriller-crime writer Beatrice Becks and her mother, who claim to be spending the year in Austria while Beatrice participates in a writing fellowship. A few months into their stay in Berlin and disappointed with their lack of assimilation, Hailey and Zoe begin to discover clues that make them think they are being watched by Beatrice. After reading an interview in which Beatrice states that her next novel is about a pair of roommates in Berlin, Hailey decides that she and Zoe should control the narrative and begin to throw elaborate parties in the apartment that gain traction in Berlin's nightlife coverage. Zoe, who appears desperate for acceptance, goes along with Hailey's increasingly hairbrained schemes as it becomes increasingly clear that they are being watched, resulting in the book's exciting and dramatic climax.
Although the story is supposed to draw parallels with the Amanda Knox trial from 2007, Amanda Knox’s press coverage and notoriety are also incorporated throughout this novel, subtly influencing Zoe and Hailey’s decisions during their time abroad one year later. I very much enjoyed this twisty novel and found the premise and writing to be extremely clever.
Rating: 8.5/10
Non-Fiction
Love Lockdown - Elizabeth Greenwood
Love Lockdown is an exploration of love and relationships in which one partner is incarcerated and the other is not. Greenwood mostly focuses on couples that met while one of the partners was incarcerated, whether through prison pen pal websites, news attention, or mutual friends. To highlight these experiences, Greenwood is calculated in the types of relationships that she writes about, attempting to draw attention to the different circumstances of different couples. Throughout the course of her reporting, Greenwood discovered a large support system and online community that exists for couples that met while incarcerated, including the Strong Prison Wives network, which is comprised of non-incarcerated wives across the country who have banded together to counter judgement from the outside.
I was not expecting to be as enthralled by this book as I was. Greenwood is very clear from the beginning that she is not a fully objective third party reporter and concedes that it is possible she broke journalism ethics rules when buying snacks for inmates or when she called one of the prison wives with concerns about the woman’s susceptibility to domestic violence upon the release of her husband. I do not think that this detracts from the story that Greenwood is trying to tell. If anything, it is an asset to be able to highlight such intimate details of these people’s lives, which she is only able to collect through her personal relationships with these characters.
Rating: 9/10
The Outlaw Ocean - Ian Urbina
As you sit by the water, what better book to read is there than a book about the ocean? Ian Urbina, an adventurous investigative journalist for The New York Times, seeks to redefine our priorities by exposing readers to the expansive underbelly of the fishing industry and the lawless terrain of the world’s oceans. Jumping from boat to ship around the world, Urbina experiences firsthand the myriad types of exploitation that take place at sea. Each chapter tackles a different issue, from the lack of safety standards for fishing trawlers off the coast of Vietnam and Indonesia, to the horrible and unsafe working conditions for fishing crews, to a rampant trafficking industry of laborers that amounts to slavery. In addition to the massive human costs associated with profit seekers at sea is the immense environmental costs, including a disregard for endangered species, toxic dumps of chemicals and waste into the ocean, as well as the inefficiencies of fishing for one type of fish and inadvertently killing and wasting the many other fish that were caught as collateral. At the heart of each of these issues, and the biggest roadblock to enacting meaningful change, is the fundamental lawlessness of international waters and associated difficulties in enforcing any types of standards to improve conditions. In spite of these enforcement challenges, Urbina encourages readers to be aware of how they contribute to these problems - indeed, unless you seek out your fish from a specific local source, you are likely eating fish that was collected within this outlaw industry.
Rating: 8/10
Cultish - Amanda Montell
When people think about cults, more often than not people think of extremist groups united under the rule of a charismatic leader. Less frequently do we extend this association to social media personalities or fitness brands. In Cultish, Montell makes the argument that cults, loosely defined, can crop up anywhere people are looking for a sense of belonging. Although they vary in the danger they present to their members and the outside world, what binds them together is the language employed by their leaders to attract and maintain their membership. While Montell discusses “traditional” cults like Heavens Gate, in my opinion, the most interesting section, potentially because it was the section that I could most relate to, was when Montell talked about the cultish language and techniques utilized by fitness brands like SoulCycle, CrossFit, and Peloton. The language and marketing used at these companies are designed specifically to encourage active devotion to the brand and what it has to offer beyond a 45-minute workout. While not a harm to society like other cults are, Montell encourages readers to be aware of blind fanaticism and carefully curated brands.
It is important to note that this is not a piece of academic work. Montell’s qualifications in linguistics are limited to her undergraduate degree, which may be why her advertised focus on cult language veers off topic frequently. The book is also written very casually, with frequent sarcastic commentary from the author provided in the footnotes and within parentheses that, while funny, highlight the author’s biases and millennial outlook. However, if you are looking to learn generally about different types of cults and how they relate to our lives, this is certainly an entertaining and informative read.
Rating: 8/10
Literary Page-Turners
Let's Not Do That Again - Grant Grinder
After taking over her late-husband's seat in Congress, Nancy Harrison has worked hard to do all the things a Democratic congresswoman is supposed to do, setting her up perfectly for a Senate run. Control of the Senate is at stake and Nancy must win, not least because of her opponent - a former TV actor turned Republican firebrand. Enter Nick, Nancy's oldest child and former staffer cum fixer. Burned out by politics, Nick is now a writing professor at NYU and working on a musical about Joan Didion. He's called in as the fixer one more time just weeks before the election when his younger sister Greta goes viral throwing a champagne bottle through the window of a fancy restaurant in Paris. Upon arriving in France, Nick and Nancy's team discover that Greta has been living with a far-right nationalist who has been manipulating Greta's anger towards her mother's parenting in order to enhance his fame and mess with American politics. Let's Not Do That Again, is equal parts political satire and social commentary on the lives of the ultra elite. It is fast-paced, funny, and engaging, making me invested in characters even if I didn't like them.
Rating: 9/10
Olga Dies Dreaming - Xochitl Gonzalez
When Olga and Pietro were young, their mother abandoned them to become a Young Lord and revolutionary fighter for the cause of Puerto Rican independence. With their father dying of AIDS, Pietro and Olga move in with their grandmother, forging their own paths while dealing with their loss and abandonment. Moving forward nearly thirty years to 2017, Pietro is now a United States Congressman representing Brooklyn and his neighborhood of Sunset Park while Olga is a wedding planner for elite New Yorkers. Although they are outwardly successful, they are both struggling - Pietro with the gentrification of his neighborhood at the hands of real estate tycoons who are blackmailing him and Olga with living a meaningful life. Every so often, usually after making a visible life decision, they receive cryptic letters from their mother, who they have neither seen nor spoken to for thirty years, admonishing their choices and lack of commitment to the cause of revolution. When Hurricane Maria hits in 2017, Olga and Pietro are both forced to reevaluate the trajectory of their lives while also confronting the woman who they thought they knew. Olga Dies Dreaming is a fabulous debut. It is propulsive and meaningful, full of substantive questions on how to live a worthy life in an unjust world.
Rating: 9/10
Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus
Elizabeth Zott is first and foremost a chemist, pushing boundaries in the field of abiogenesis at the Hastings Research Institute in California in the 1950s and 1960s. With her PhD pursuit cut short after her thesis advisor rapes her, Elizabeth takes a job as the lone woman in a research lab where her voice is discounted and discredited despite her obvious intelligence. It is only when she meets Calvin Evans, a Nobel Prize-nominated scientist who has his own lab a few floors above, that she finds someone who will take her seriously. A few years, unfortunate twists, and unplanned pregnancy later, Elizabeth is a single-mother struggling to raise her brilliant daughter Madeline and make ends meet. A chance confrontation with the father of Madeline’s classmate, who happens to be a producer at a local television station, lands Elizabeth a role as the host of a daytime cooking show, Supper at Six. The show quickly becomes a national success, not least because of Elizabeth’s commitment to teaching her viewers the chemical principles behind cooking, which inspires women across the country to push beyond their prescribed limits. Don’t be fooled by the pretty pink cover of Lessons in Chemistry that is sure to superficially place it in the category of “women’s fiction.” Lessons in Chemistry is at its core a story about resilience and moxie, with witty characters and a protagonist who refuses to give up.
Rating: 9/10
Disorientation - Elaine Hseih Chou
Ingrid Yang is a PhD candidate at Barnes University studying the poetic techniques of the late-Chinese American poet Xiou-Wen Chou. Although she’s in her final year, her ambivalence towards the subject-matter - which was thrust upon her by the eager (white) department head of the East Asian Studies department who assumed Ingrid’s Taiwanese-American background would translate well to the study of a Chinese-American poet - prevents her from making any real headway on her dissertation. Instead, Ingrid sits in the library day after day idly passing the time. One day, while sitting in the archive, Ingrid comes across a note left on one of the poems she had been studying, sending Ingrid on a wild goose chase to uncover its meaning, which ultimately reveals shocking secrets and truths about Chou and Barnes.
It’s hard to summarize the plot of the book without giving away the many twists and turns that give this biting satire its punch. Hseih Chou has written a remarkable debut that humorously and deftly tackles big issues of discrimination against Asian Americans, political correctness on campus, and institutionalized elitism. This is satire at its very best - it makes you laugh and it makes you think.
Rating: 9/10
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Great recommendations; I'm reading Lessons in Chemistry for the MMD Book Club and I've put a few others on my TBR that is ready to topple. :)