2023 Summer Reading Guide
Escapist reads in every genre; perfect for vacation, relaxation, and book lovers
Happy summer! Earlier this month, I sent out my summer 2023 Publishing Preview, a list of books coming out in the coming months that I am looking forward to. Here, I’ve compiled a list of 19 books, all of which I have read and loved, that I think are perfect for every summer reading taste. The categories include classic beach reads, thrillers and mysteries, literary page turners, historical fiction, history, and current events. Regardless of genre, each book is compulsively readable and perfect for vacation, relaxation, and warm weather. If you want even more summer recommendations, this guide has no overlap with the books included in the 2021 and 2022 guides, so feel free to check those out as well. Happy reading!
The Last Chance Library - Freya Sampson
June Jones is a thirty-year old library assistant who has never left her small English hometown and lives a predictable life of routine, involving work and quiet nights in her childhood home. June is not confident but she shines in her role as a library assistant, and, unbeknownst to her, is beloved by the eclectic patrons. One day, June receives news that the library is under threat of closure due to budget cuts and she must decide if she should join a movement to save the beloved institution or shy away like normal. It appears that this book is marketed as a romance, but I think this is a misnomer used to sell copies. Instead, the issues at the heart of the story connect to larger political and socio-economic ills - budget cuts, the proliferation of chains over local business, community building, and public spending prioritization. This is a delightful story full of heart, warmth, and quirky characters that realistically populate the small town.
Pineapple Street - Jenny Jackson
Set in a wealthy area of Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn on the fruit streets (Pineapple, Cranberry, and Orange Streets - hence, the title of the book), Pineapple Street is about a super-wealthy family and their problems. Pineapple Street alternates between three perspectives: sisters Georgiana and Darley and their sister-in-law Sasha. Sasha and Cord (brother to Georgiana and Darley) have recently moved into Cord’s parents’ fancy brownstone on Pineapple Street. Sasha, who grew up middle-class in Rhode Island, doesn’t quite fit in with the family, as evidenced by the “gold-digger” comments made not so quietly behind her back. Darley, who has given up her job and her inheritance in order to marry her husband without a prenup, discovers the stress of unemployment with two small children when her husband unexpectedly loses his job. And Georgiana, a spoiled twenty-something secretly falls in love with a married man, isolating herself from her support system. This is a messy family story that I absolutely devoured. You know what you are getting yourself into when you pick up this book - a well-written, drama filled story with interesting characters and a quickly paced plot. It might not be the sharpest critique of generational wealth or the privileged lives of the elite, but it is sure to entertain, which I enjoyed immensely.
Book Lovers - Emily Henry
Sometimes you need to read a purely enjoyable book. For me, that’s Book Lovers, which follows Nora Stephens, a literary agent who escapes August in New York for a month-long vacation in Sunshine Falls, North Carolina with her heavily pregnant sister, Libby. Sunshine Falls happens to be the setting of one of Nora’s most famous books - hence, the inspiration to choose this location - and Libby arrives with a checklist of activities the sisters must participate in that match the plot points of a typical rom-com. On their first day there, Nora is shocked to discover her editorial nemesis works in the (failing) bookstore, but, surprise, surprise, as the month goes on they grow close, engage in a lot of witty banter, and ultimately, fall in love. This book is absolutely a romance, but it is also equally a book about sisterhood and family. The story does not shy away from hard topics like grief, anxiety, and PTSD, which all add important motivations to the characters’ actions instead of contrived drama typical in the genre. True to form, Emily Henry’s characters are lovable, delightful, and funny, making me laugh throughout the story.
Romantic Comedy - Curtis Sittenfeld
Sally Millz is a ten-year veteran writer for The Night Owls, a late-night sketch comedy show modeled on SNL. When the book opens, Sally is preparing for a week with host and musical guest Noah Brewster, an aging pop star known for a cheesy love song that made him popular as a teenager. The sketches that Sally proposes for his week - including one that pokes fun at the idea that mediocre looking men are allowed to date beautiful women but not vice versa - catches Noah’s attention, and the two establish a fleeting connection that is put on pause after Sally puts her foot in her mouth at the show’s afterparty. The following two sections, in which Sally and Noah reconnect via long email exchanges during the height of the pandemic and then meet up in LA to establish their relationship, cement the story as a typical romance. Although Romantic Comedy doesn’t reshape the genre, I did think it delivered on what its title advertises - a fun read with enjoyable, humorous characters, even if I wasn’t enamored by some of their choices at the very end.
The Thursday Murder Club Series - Richard Osman
The Thursday Murder Club and the associated series follows a ragtag group of British senior home residents who are quite good at solving murders. What starts as a club to solve mysteries from the newspaper amongst themselves evolves into solving real crimes after a series of strange events comes directly to their community. These octogenarians are led by Elizabeth, a former MI6 officer who brings her past experience to the table when solving every murder and mystery that the group confronts. The series is well-crafted, with mystery elements that are equally balanced against the charming, quirky, and humorous characters. The entire series is escapist and entertaining, filled with wonderful characters that you root for throughout the entire book, including, even, the bad guys.
The Midcoast - Adam White
Damariscotta is a small tourist town off the coast of Maine. Opioid trafficking and addiction has blighted locals in small towns across the state for years, but not Damariscotta, which has suspiciously remained off the radars of the region’s drug dealers. Andrew grew up in Damariscotta and has recently returned with his family to teach at the high school. He arrives to a town that has changed in meaningful ways, including the ascent of his high school friends Ed and Steph Thatch, who appear to run the community. When Andrew last heard of the couple, Ed was a struggling lobsterman and Steph had dropped out of high school after learning she was pregnant with Ed’s child. Now they live in a sprawling riverside home, Steph is the quasi-mayor of the town and Ed’s business is thriving. None of their neighbors can explain how the family became so successful and none of them are particularly shocked when police come to take Ed away in handcuffs (this isn’t a spoiler, it happens in the prologue). As scandal rocks the small community, Andrew sets out to write a book about the Thatches and what they represent, uncovering dark secrets as his investigation goes on. The Midcoast is my favorite kind of mystery - one that focuses more on character studies and the slow build of suspense rather than flashy plot points and dramatic reveals.
The Disappearing Act - Catherine Steadman
Mia is a British actress who comes to Los Angeles for "pilot season," a series of high-stress auditions where actors and actresses hoping to make it in the industry try out for a slate of upcoming roles. While waiting for her turn at one audition, Mia meets Emily. Right before Emily's turn, she asks Mia to top up her parking meter, handing over her keys in the process. When Mia returns, Emily is gone. After a few days of silence, she receives a text from Emily's number asking if she can come by Mia's apartment and get her items. Relieved, Mia says yes. But when she opens the door it's not Emily standing there but someone impersonating her. What happened to Emily? Where did she go? And how far does the conspiracy go? As Mia works to answer these questions she finds herself falling down a dramatic rabbit hole bigger than herself, uncovering the tension between scandal and ambition ever present in a city of people trying to make a name for themselves regardless of the cost. I could not put this book down as I neared its final third. There is no excessive gore or violence, but rather slow creeping suspense and tension that culminates in a dramatic and satisfying conclusion.
The Hopefuls - Jennifer Close
Recently married, Beth makes the decision to move with her husband Matt to Washington, D.C., after he gets a job working in the general counsel’s office in the Obama White House. It is 2008 and all the hope and idealism in the world can not get Beth to like D.C., where she struggles to find a writing job and fit in with the strivers around her. She becomes fast friends with Ashleigh, the wife of one of Matt’s work friends, Jimmy, and pretty soon the two couples are inseparable. A few years later, when Jimmy has the opportunity to run for office in his home state of Texas, he asks Matt to run his small campaign, and once again Beth’s life is uprooted. Jennifer Close’s talent comes from her ability to write about a large cast of characters and ensure that each of them feels fully developed and real. I was drawn to each of their personalities and loved the voices that the audiobook narrator assigned each one during the portions that I listened to the book, enhancing this already witty, engaging, and well-crafted story.
Last Resort - Andrew Lipstein
Caleb is an aspiring novelist unable to write anything worth publishing. After reuniting with Avi, an acquaintance from college, and listening to him tell an unnerving story from his vacation to Greece (the inspiration for the slightly misleading cover), Caleb suddenly has a story worth writing. Two years later, a prominent literary agent wants to work with Caleb, shepherding the book through a purchasing process that ends in a sale worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The only problem is that Avi, the original purveyor of the story, wants credit for Caleb's work, resulting in a legal agreement in which Caleb will receive all of the royalties from the novel but Avi's name will go on the jacket. Caleb thinks he will be okay with this deal, especially given his financial gains, but when the book is heralded as a literary success, Caleb craves the recognition he believes is being falsely given to Avi, setting off a chain of events to reclaim ownership of an idea that might have already been stolen. I very much enjoyed this book and the questions it presents surrounding intellectual property and the need people have for public recognition.
Search - Michelle Huneven
Search, a novel written in the form of a memoir, is the story of one California Universalist-Unitarian church's search for their next head minister. Dana, the author of the memoir, is a former seminary student turned LA Times food critic and best-selling memoirist, who decides to apply for and join the search committee both as a way to reconnect with her community as well as gain fodder for a new memoir. In addition to Dana, the search committee is composed of seven other people who act as a representative sample of the congregation, from the 85-year-old former church secretary to the young mother in her twenties with strong opinions about how the congregation should look in the future. The book follows the committee and their organized deliberations over the course of the nine month process to find the next minister, giving insight into a highly choreographed and highly contentious search. This is a book that contrasts entertaining and tension-filled character interactions with quiet moments of pensive reflection on the roles of community, spirituality, and leadership in a highly progressive enclave. I was drawn to Huneven's prose from the very first page and loved the books unique structure and unconventional subject matter that made it difficult for me to put down.
Trespasses - Louise Kennedy
Trespasses is the story of Cushla, a young Catholic school teacher and part-time barmaid who falls for an older Protestant attorney, Michael. The book takes place outside of Belfast amidst the raging violence of the Troubles. Cushla and Michael must keep their relationship a secret for fear of reprisal, despite her participation in Michael’s Protestant elite dinner party circle. To highlight the stakes of the discovery of their relationship, Louise Kennedy inserts the McGeown family as foils for Cushla and Michael’s potential future. The McGeown family is comprised of a Catholic father, Protestant mother, and their children – one of whom, Davy, is in Cushla’s class at school – who are mocked and harassed relentlessly. One day, Mr. McGeown’s body is left for dead after a brutal attack. In the wake of the assault, Cushla takes Davy under her wing, further exposing her reputation and safety. I enjoyed this book and felt that I was exposed to a specific slice of life amidst the Troubles of the not-so-distant past.
The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O’Farrell
Beginning in Florence in the 1550s, Maggie O’Farrell imagines the life of Lucrezia, the third daughter of the Florentine Grand Duke. As the third daughter, Lucrezia’s life’s purpose is to marry well, but the stakes of her marriage are not as high as her elder sisters. When her older sister dies before she can marry the duke of Ferrara, which would have been a powerful union between two kingdoms, Lucrezia is offered up in her stead. Married as a young teenager, Lucrezia’s sole purpose is now to provide an heir to her new husband and secure his throne. But Lucrezia is just a girl herself and struggles to assimilate in a strange new land with a conniving and controlling husband. A year passes and there is still no child. To commemorate his young bride, the duke commissions her portrait to be painted, which Lucrezia sits for all the while realizing that her husband means to kill her. O’Farrell has an extraordinary capacity to bring long-forgotten characters to life. I felt like I could perfectly imagine the workings of the different Italian Renaissance courts and wanted to scream from the sidelines to steer Lucrezia in the right direction. If Maggie O’Farrell is writing, I’m reading, and The Marriage Portrait did not disappoint.
Joan - Katherine J. Chen
Nearly everyone has heard the name Joan of Arc before, but rarely are we given unfettered access to her life and mind. In Joan, Katherine J. Chen creates a new version of a person whose canonized martyrdom has also given shape to generalized obscurity. Readers meet Joan as a poor, illiterate, and generally unloved child. Her father, known for his might and brutality, had wished for and bet on the birth of a son instead of a daughter, making her presence nothing but a disappointment. Forced in many ways to fend for herself, Joan becomes stronger than everyone else and fiercely observant of the world around her. After her sister is raped by pillaging English soldiers and subsequently commits suicide when she discovers she is pregnant, Joan sets out on her own to avenge her sister’s death. A series of fortunate events (depending on your perspective) places Joan in the sights of the weak French Dauphin, and she is paraded in front of him as a trick-pony who might help him solidify his hold on power. Chen is not arguing that Joan was touched by god or was even faintly religious, two frameworks that those in power needed to help make sense of this 19-year-old girl’s talents. Instead, she is depicted as someone with extraordinary motivation, wit, and fighting capabilities, breathing fresh life into a well-known figure.
How the Word is Passed - Clint Smith
In How the Word is Passed, Clint Smith uses eight different locations to explore how slavery and its legacy are publicly acknowledged, taught, and reckoned with within American society. The places that Smith visits are roughly representative of the different ways in which public history considers slavery, the Civil War, and its enduring impact. Smith uses intimate and lyrical language to link each of these narratives to his central thesis: recognition of America’s sins is rooted in a system of education and memory that struggle to confront hard truths. Although historical context is weaved throughout the chapters to provide background to the locations Smith visits, Smith’s original contribution to this field of study comes from his examination of the creation of public history itself.
Bag Man - Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz
Bag Man tells the story of the investigation and prosecution of Vice President Spiro Agnew for corruption. Although these events take place at the height of Watergate, Agnew was involved in his own separate scandals. Indeed, because of the acrimony between Nixon and Agnew, Agnew was one of the few high level officials in the Nixon administration who is able to claim a lack of involvement. The Watergate era added a heightened level of importance to Agnew’s corruption because of the urgency that federal prosecutors had in indicting Agnew so that he would not be next in line to the presidency after the expected Nixon impeachment.
The clear parallels between the story of Agnew and the Trump era raise important questions about how institutions are reliant on good actors within government who refuse to bow to pressure from bad actors. If federal prosecutors had not been as dogged as they were in their investigation and if Attorney General Richardson had not been supportive of the proceedings, it is very likely that Agnew, a man taking bribes from his office, would have become president once Nixon resigned. The lessons learned from Agnew’s story serve as an interesting and terrifying lesson that can be carried forth into our present.
Do Not Disturb - Michela Wrong
Do Not Disturb is a history of modern Rwanda covering colonial liberation in 1962 to the present. Although the genocide is mentioned, it is not the primary focus. Instead, Wrong writes in great detail about the rich and complicated politics of the country to make the argument that Paul Kagame and the ruling political party, the RPF, are not just corrupt but also dangerous. Although Rwanda’s economic development has made Rwanda a success story that Western governments like to look to, Wrong argues that the advertised rate of economic development is both fabricated by the Kagame dictatorship and also masks a repressive political regime that crushes dissent within and beyond its borders. Kagame has sanctioned the surveillance and murder of political opponents around the world, including the murder of his friend and former external chief of intelligence, Patrick Karegeya in South Africa, which centers Wrong’s writing. Wrong’s book is a fascinating and well-researched piece of journalism about a Machiavellian political machinery.
Bad City - Paul Pringle
Paul Pringle is an investigative journalist for the Los Angeles Times. This book is an expansion of his Pulitzer Prize winning story series about the incredible corruption in leadership at the University of Southern California. In April 2016, Pringle received a tip about a drug overdose of a young woman in a fancy LA hotel. Present at the scene was Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the head of the USC medical school, not as a doctor, but as the girl’s drug supplier and enabler. A few weeks after the overdose, Puliafito quietly stepped down, and USC moved on like nothing had ever happened. But Puliafito continued his relationship with the girl, supplying her and her friends drugs while maintaining his medical license. Pringle, intent on getting to the bottom of the story, could never have imagined just how far the cover up would go, stretching from the president’s office of USC to the city government of Pasadena and LA County. The corruption even extended into his own newsroom, where leadership attempted to block the publication of his story for over a year, violating every imaginable code of journalism ethics. I’d heard about the Operation Varsity Blues scandal at USC, but was shocked to hear about the depths of corruption and malfeasance present at USC and amongst the LA elite.
White Hot Hate - Dick Lehr
In 2016, Dan Day and his son were exercising in a local park. Looking to cool off for a minute, they walked into their local library where Dan noticed a pro-Palestine poster on the bulletin board. Surprised to see this in his small hometown of Garden City, Kansas, Dan decided to bring it to a friend he hadn’t seen in a while, but had seen posting on Facebook about the threat of Muslim terrorists. The next day, Dan was invited by this friend to a barbecue, which he discovered was actually a recruitment meeting for a local branch of the Three Percenter militia, a right-wing, white nationalist militia. The FBI approached Dan to learn more and at the end of their meeting asked him to do something dangerous - join the group and become an informant. Dan, a gun-toting conservative, saw that the ideas the Three Percenters were espousing were dangerous and so, based on a pervasive feeling of patriotism, went undercover.
Soon after joining, Dan is introduced to an even more extreme faction of people in the Kansas State Militia who see the growing population of Somali refugees and immigrants in Kansas as a plot by ISIS to destroy America. Their response, they decide, should be to blow up an apartment complex primarily housing Somali refugees. What follows is the harrowing true story of Dan’s involvement with this group and his work with the FBI to foil the plot. It is a fast-paced and fascinating book, as well as a terrifying look at white nationalism and the ever-present threat that hateful ideas pose.
Wastelands - Corban Addison
In rural eastern North Carolina, the hog farming industry is king. One of the biggest producers of pork within the United States and across the world, the farms provide regional jobs while lining the pockets of pork barons. A consequence of these farms, however, is a horrible stench that permeates throughout the region, coating the surfaces of everything it touches, including the homes and livelihoods of the mostly poor Black families that live near the facilities. Although more modern pollution reduction techniques exist, heavy lobbying and deregulation efforts have made it so that they are not required, effectively reducing the quality of life for local residents. Wastelands is about the legal fight to hold the hog industry to account led by the residents and their heroic legal team. Spanning nearly a decade, the book has the feel of a true crime legal thriller based on the level of detail used to describe the play-by-play of the legal strategy and subsequent trials.
Looking for more summer reading guides? Check out my previous summer reading recommendations below.
