like steam off the asphalt.

I lap swim at a public pool in the middle of a park. During the summer, it’s really too hot here for people to use the park in the midday sun, so that’s when the grounds crew comes through with their lawnmowers, cutting the dry grass that smells like hay. Last week, I was swimming, crawling really, cutting a slow figure through the water, feeling the sun on my back — when I lifted my head to take a breath, I could smell fresh cut grass and chlorine and I thought to myself, this is what summer should smell like.

The heat of summer in the desert feels endless, it compresses things, time. But I was in Vegas last weekend celebrating my birthday and realized I had walked down the same street in the summer of last year and the heat had absolutely crushed me. Now, I was moving through it seamlessly, like steam off the asphalt. I was surprised by how unbothered I felt. But, of course, it’s been a year — I’ve adjusted, changed, grown more tolerant. I can walk into the heat rather than away from it.

I am not sure what I imagined my life might look like at forty — I’ve lived so many lives at this point that forty feels both a radical demarcation and a banal continuation. But the life I am standing in presently is a rich one, and one I am very grateful for. I have a loving husband, a desert home, friends, creative pursuits, a decent job, and a view of the mountains. Perhaps I imagined my life at forty might be more like a sunflower when it’s turned out to be a prickly pear — both beautiful, but hardly related. Mostly, I feel like I am still getting to know myself, but things look promising.

I have been leaning into books that feel like summer lately and Slanting Toward the Sea by Lidija Hilje was an unexpected favorite of the season. The protagonist, Ivona, divorced the love of her life and college sweetheart, Vlaho, a decade ago. Now, in her late thirties, she finds herself still in her hometown, living with her ailing father, and a friend to Vlaho’s new wife, the auntie to his two children. Only when Ivona meets someone new do the dynamics of their tentative triangle shift dramatically and the past is pulled violently into the present.

Books that use setting as a secondary character are some of my favorites and Hilje paints a lush, picturesque landscape of Croatia, from the olive groves to the port towns to the local cuisine. Croatia comes alive as a turbulent being that both crushes Ivona’s dreams and gives her a second chance. So much of the book is grounded in place that I could see it all quite clearly, despite never having visited (outside of watching Below Deck Med).

The chapters of the book alternate between past and present, so the reader learns the entirety of Ivona and Vlaho’s love story and the secret that tears them apart while also experiencing the intense yearning Ivona still holds in her heart for her former love. As a lover of Jane Austen, the yearning really did me in. I love to yearn. And this book captured the emotion in a way many modern books tend to miss.

“It seems to me we’ve always been, and always will be, two islands bathing in the same sea with our backs to each other — him facing the sun, me facing the moon, both of us resenting the light the other got. But one of those lights has gone out already, and now the other one is fading too. I guess where it leaves us, then, is in the dark.”

While Ivona might not be the most ‘likeable’ character, I found her to be relatable. The childfree eldest daughter expected to handle the majority of the familial drama, a late-thirties divorcee who finds a grey pube and has a minor crash-out, the feeling of being almost forty and needing to make a substantive change before time is up, the desire to be absolutely wrapped up in love. Of course, many of her decisions are simultaneously frustrating, but I still found myself rooting for her. Slanting Toward the Sea really is a pretty perfect summer read to pair with a pool or beach day.

Right now, I am reading On Earth as it is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia (definitely not a beach read) for my book club and I’m perusing the recently released 2026 Booker longlist. I have a few more ‘summer books’ I hope to make it through in August as well — namely, the Eve Babitz letter collection, Too L.A. — but, I am also hosting family for week and celebrating my husband’s birthday at the lake, so August promises to be another full and sultry month.