Wondering what to read next? You'll find lots of good stuff in my summer reading roundup. Fiction, non-fiction, memoirs. I've got something for everyone, including six must read novels, like Trust by Hernan Diaz and Kiley Reid's campus novel, Come and Get It.
The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell
In this, her third, book, linguist and keen culture observer Amanda Montell teaches us about cognitive biases like manifestation, the halo effect, and the sunk cost fallacy. If you’re unfamiliar with these concepts this is an entertaining and highly digestible introduction. And even if you are somewhat versed, Montell has such a way with words, she makes the concepts more memorable, describing, for example, confirmation bias as “the crooked detective helping you work backwards to find the right clues.” Or, repetition as “a cognitive Tums, aiding in informational digestion.” Light, fast, fun and informative.
James by Percival Everett
If ever there was a book that needed to be rewritten, it’s Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In James, Everett unshackles the episodic, exhausting, and (in my opinion) highly overrated classic from its dusty perch, by telling the story of Jim the slave’s escape from the perspective of Jim himself. This Jim—who calls himself James—is wise and perceptive and highly literate. And he’s on a mission to buy his wife and daughter’s freedom. As the novel progresses, so does James’s concept of self and slavery and what’s required of him in order to reclaim his story. It’s nuanced and witty and wise. What classics should be.
Unshrinking: How to Face Fat Phobia by Kate Manne
In 2022 I read Entitled, Manne’s treatise on the cultural effects of male privilege. Manne is a philosopher, whose work is deeply rational and well researched, much like the work of fat liberation activist Aubrey Gordon. What’s striking about Unshrinking (and what distinguishes it from other works on fat liberation) is the rip current of (thoroughly justified) rage in every page. Manne has fucking had it with diet culture and fat phobia and the fascist control capitalist culture exerts over bodies just trying to exist in the world. And I’m 100% here for it. Highly recommend.
Fi: A Memoir of My Son by Alexandra Fuller
In 2018, Fuller’s seemingly healthy 21 year old son, Fi, died suddenly, with no evident cause. This is her memoir of the year that followed and how she navigated her grief. With a distinctive narrative voice, Fuller has written many memoirs—perhaps the most notable being Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight about her childhood in Rhodesia. Fi is the first I’ve read, and while it’s hard to say I enjoyed bearing witness to the grief of a mother whose son was close in age to my own, I admired the way she voiced it. There is something about Fuller’s sardonic style and wit that, despite how raw and honest and specific the details of her storytelling (and the details are raw and honest and specific), still left me with the sense that she’s withholding or out-writing the truest truth about her experience.
Tell by Jonathan Buckley
This is a ride. A self-made “squillionaire” named Curtis goes missing several months after an accident that may have resulted in some kind of brain injury. A screenwriter—tasked with writing the man’s biopic—has been interviewing the people who knew him to get his story straight. Tell is a transcript of one such interview (over multiple sessions) with the man’s gardener, a keen, opinionated, and no-nonsense (or so she says) observer. It’s through her POV that we learn about Curtis's life and the characters who inhabit it and try to piece together a narrative that makes sense. If your brain can tolerate ambiguity and enjoys playing with squirmy concepts like truth, perception, intuition, and meaning-making, this is a carnival chock full of fun house mirrors. I loved it.
Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane
I love discovering a great author after they’ve written over a dozen novels. My friend Justine hipped me to Dennis Lehane and this title from 2023 was available in the library, so I gave it a go, despite the fact that Lehane’s work is billed as “crime fiction” (not a genre I’m typically down for). Small Mercies is set in Boston in the 1970s during the busing crisis. The daughter of a single white mother from the housing projects goes missing on the same night a young black teenager is found dead on the subway tracks. As the girl’s mother tries to find her, the city is erupting in violence, and the local mob is doing everything in its power to keep control of the narrative. Small Mercies is a "crime thriller" in much the same way Frederik Backman’s Beartown is a book about hockey. Thematically rich and beautifully written, it is that and so much more.
Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential by Tiago Forte
This one’s not for everybody. Or maybe it is. I am deeply enthused about the field of personal knowledge management (PKM), I just didn’t know the field had a name before I read this book. As a field, it's fairly new, but organizing your shit is as old as time. I've developed a pretty intuitive system for organizing information and things that interest me, so reading about Forte’s method was validating. While my approach is a little less rigorous, Forte got me thinking about the information I've collected as more of a system, and I’ve started making more and more connections between the different bits and bobs I’ve collected ever since. If you’re interested in making more of the things you read and learn, and applying a bit more structure to organizing your thoughts and inspiration and plans, you might find this an interesting place to start.
Sweet Days of Discipline by Flyer Jaeggy
My friend Amy said this book arrived at her house and she had no recollection of ordering it. It was weird, she said, and she didn’t know what to make of it. Couldn’t decide if it was good. So I read it too—it’s short, a novella really—and, sure enough, it was odd. A sinister, near sociopathic, first-person portrait of an alienated youth spent entirely in European boarding schools. Our narrator, a wry, observant and simmering lesbian, becomes obsessed with a self possessed (perhaps sociopathic?) Parisian boarder. A new student with flaming red hair and flagrant daddy issues enters stage right. Triangulation. Celebration. Longing. Strangeness. It’s a bit Lolita—without the men. More questions than answers. Curious. And weird.
Committed, On Meaning and Madwomen, A Memoir by Suzanne Scanlon
Similar to how Leslie Jamison explored her alcoholism through a literary lens in The Recovering, Scanlon processes her experience with mental illness—and a lengthy stay in a mental hospital— through the lens of feminism and literature. Committed asks, among other questions, “what is lost when the humanities are separated from modern medicine?” And how are we meant to process our own stories without the context of storytellers who have walked in our shoes? The tragedy—and, I suppose, moral—of Scanlon’s story is that her so-called sickness was simply the unprocessed trauma of her mother’s terminal illness and death. She was a child when her mother died, and everyone knew her mother was dying except for Scanlon herself. No one talked to her about it. Before or after. Literature is a way of talking. Of being in dialogue with the past. Through this exploration, Scanlon has a realization that resonates deeply with me, “I wanted love. It was that simple. I got sick, I sometimes think, because I needed care, love. And I did not know how to get it, to receive it.”
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
I loved this. Reid’s first novel Such a Fun Age was terrific, and I enjoyed this one even more. A commentary on identity and consumerism, capital and power dynamics, set on the campus of The University of Arkansas, this very funny and entertaining novel of ideas (though I don’t know if Reid would like that characterization) is told from multiple perspectives: a visiting professor and journalist researching students and their relationships with money, a deeply responsible and rule abiding resident advisor in a scholarship student dorm, and the socially awkward student who lives in the single next door, who is struggling to overcome the recent tragedy that precipitated her transfer to U of A. The novel’s obsession with language and dialogue (including interior monologues) and names, place it squarely in my wheelhouse, but even if you’re not similarly obsessed, the characters are so realistically drawn and the shit that comes out of their mouths so funny and horrifying and perfect, you can’t not enjoy watching them muddle through the weird domesticity of dorm life on their way to “adulthood”:
This Must Be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell (author of Hamnet and the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, among others) is an extraordinarily versatile and gifted writer. This novel is the story of Daniel Sullivan, an American married to an ex movie star who is raising her son and their two shared children in the Irish countryside. Life is good for Daniel until a secret from his past triggers a domino effect of self destruction. The novel is ambitiously structured, shifting perspectives and bouncing back and forth in time, which can be a lot to keep track of, but it comes together beautifully at the end. I struggled a tiny bit with Daniel’s core angst—finding it not 100% believable—but the story as a whole and the quirkiness of the characters was worth the investment.
All Fours by Miranda July
This was our July book club pick—the “it” book du jour—about an artist, mother, wife in mid-life crisis, who instead of taking the soul-altering cross country trip she had planned, installs herself in a seedy motel 45-minutes from home, where she transforms her life in a very different way. I was afraid this would be an irritatingly horny riff on “women deserve the space to explore their sexual fantasies even when society says they’re past their prime”, but no. While it is (ahem) sexually provocative, All Fours is also a deft, humorous, and multi-layered exploration of human desire, possession, freedom, self actualization, monogamy, menopause, and what it means to know and be known by each other. Pretty masterful.
Trust by Hernan Diaz
Well, hot damn. This is a brilliant novel. The Pulitzer Prize people weren’t fucking around this time. And what a perfect book for our times—unspooling the events and perceptions and personal relationships precipitating the 1929 stock market crash using two forms: fiction and memoir. Diaz is an artist and a mastermind, who (and I’m going to quote the jacket copy here, because it’s perfect), “elegantly puts four competing narratives into conversation with one another. At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.”
Say More: Lessons from Work, The White House, and The World by Jen Psaki
I’ve been a Jen Psaki fan girl since she first took the podium as Biden’s Press Secretary, so I was eager to hear her account of her time in the White House (she worked for John Kerry and Barrack Obama prior to becoming the White House press secretary—and this memoir covers all of it). Say More is a quick and entertaining read, but it sort of straddles the memoir and business advice book genres in a way that feels unnecessary, telling you a story and then reiterating the lesson you’re supposed to take away from it. Not sure if the editors needed more copy to fill out a slim manuscript or they're running low on faith in America's intellect--but I could have done with more memoir and less
The Fifth Season by NK Jamison
A multi Hugo Award winner, Jemison is revered in the world of fantasy and science fiction, and a friend of mine who doesn’t typically read science fiction recommended her books highly. So. I gave this one a go. And after all 465 pages, I can safely conclude that if this is the best fantasy has to offer, fantasy is NOT my jam. I can appreciate the world building here, but I simultaneously find it wildly annoying, like every fifth word is written in Hungarian. It takes me out of the story when I keep having to double back and figure out what the hell is going on. Despite Jemison’s obvious talent, my brain does not have the patience to play the fantasy game.
The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
Published in 2018 this is a 500+ page saga, about a young girl whose father, a Vietnam veteran and former POW, moves her and her mother to live off the land in the Alaskan wilderness. He’s an anti-establishment doomsday prepper—and a violent motherfucker—who beats his wife and grows increasingly unhinged as the years go on. While carrying the secret of his violence, his daughter falls in love with Alaska, as well as a boy named Matthew, who happens to be the son of the wealthiest man in their remote town. Jealous of this man’s wealth and standing, her father forbids her to be with Matthew and all hell breaks loose from there. It’s a sweet story, simply told (though Hannah’s novels are marketed to adults, this could easily have been marketed to young adults). Occasionally I’d catch myself eye rolling at the novel’s earnestness, but it was a pleasant escape nevertheless.
Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham
This novel wins on two counts: first, the title, which is worth the purchase price all by itself. Second, Carlotta. The most unique and fully (completely, utterly) rendered character I’ve ever read. What a voice. Carlotta is a trans woman re-entering society after twenty years in an all-male prison in Ithaca, New York. The bulk of the novel takes place during her first 24 hours out on parole, morphing from Carlotta’s interior monologue to a third person account and back (and forth) again. Hannaham is a genius, and this work—which feels like a novel length short story—is a hell of a ride.
Alchemy by Rory Sutherland
Subtitled “The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Business, Brands, and Life”, Alchemy is about how to think creatively, looking beyond logic to uncover the real reasons people think and behave the way they do. Sutherland stresses the importance of asking the right questions, testing assumptions, and allowing yourself TIME to do what looks to most people like nothing (I am very good at this). People occasionally ask me what books I’d recommend to an aspiring strategist or copywriter; and while I generally recommend reading widely (psychology, sociology, political science, history, economics) and following your curiosity, I will definitely be including this in my recommended “strategy canon”. It’s excellent. (Also worth noting that the audiobook version is read by the author, who is a great reader.)
The Measure by Nikki Erlick
Imagine a world in which each person on their 22nd birthday receives a box containing a string, the length of which corresponds to their lifespan. It's up to the individual whether to open the box. This is the premise of The Measure, in which the boxes start arriving for the first time, on a random day, their provenance unknown. Chaos ensues as “short stringers” and “long stringers” and those who choose not to look at their strings, consider their fates. This is mainstream fiction, so while the premise is highly compelling, there’s not a whole lot of subtlety in the writing, which is stylistically about a notch above Danielle Steele. I would love to see what Murakami or Hernan Diaz or Honoree Fanonne Jeffers would do with the same premise, the implications of which are so much more complicated and far reaching than the author was able to justice to.
Very Good Copy by Eddie Shleyner
Schleyner is a professional copywriter and author of a popular newsletter also called Very Good Copy. This book is a collection of “207 Micro-Lessons in Thinking and Writing Like a Copywriter”, which also happens to be the book’s subtitle. It’s thoughtful, digestible and chock full of important lessons for writers, many of which were familiar to me, and most if which bear repeating. I’ve already added this to my list of books to recommend to aspiring copywriters and strategists.
Have you read any of these? What did you think? And what are your recent must-reads I might be missing out on?
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