Six Summer Reading Lists for Six Kinds of Readers

As a kid I really hated summer reading. It felt like a scam. Homework disguised as something else to keep us inside while everything fun was happening outside.

What I really hated was that photocopied sheet, often on yellow or pink paper for some reason (anyone else have that too?), that came home on the last day of school like a parking ticket. June stretched out in front of me, but somewhere in my backpack was a piece of paper informing me that I also owed somebody a book report on Animal Farm.

But somehow I, a grown adult who can read whatever he wants whenever he wants, find myself wishing for the thing I always hated: I just want someone to tell me what to read.

That’s the dream now. Hand me the photocopied sheet! I’m standing in a bookstore with millions of titles, eleven open browser tabs of recommendations, and a to-be-read pile that has achieved structural load-bearing status.

The problem, of course, is that the old summer reading list had one fatal flaw, and it’s the same flaw that made us hate it: it didn’t know anything about us. Everybody got the same sheet. Interests, tendencies, personalities be damned! So I put a little read your color twist on this whole summer reading list.

Six lists for six very different kinds of readers. Honoring their core desires with every pick.

Because readers are not all looking for the same thing. That’s like the whole reason I started this silly Read Your Color thing. Some readers long for connection — to fall in with the people on the page. Some long for intensity, to be gripped so hard they’re still reading at 3 A.M. Some long for wonder, to be transported somewhere vast. Some long for clarity, to finish a book smarter than they started. Some long for meaning, to go deep and sit with the hard questions. And some long for surprise: to encounter something they didn’t know a book could do.

Six longings. Six kinds of readers. One of them is yours.

Which means the summer reading list can finally be done right. Not one list for everyone. Six lists, one per color, each built for the reader YOU are.

So I’ve got three books each: one for June, one for July, one for August. I went deep-cut on purpose, because you don’t need me to tell you about the books already stacked on the front table of Barnes and Noble.

Your assignment is below. Find your color. Buy (or check out) the books. The choosing has been done for you, which — I can now say from the other side of childhood — is not a punishment at all!

Green readers read to understand. You want books that illuminate how things work — the world, systems, people. You want it delivered clearly and grounded in reality. Here’s your summer!

JUNE — The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery A naturalist befriends the octopuses at the New England Aquarium and ends up asking what consciousness even is. This is Green reading at its most purely pleasurable: short chapters, warm water, and you will spend the whole month making whoever’s nearby listen to octopus facts. (You’re welcome, whoever’s nearby.)

JULY — The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides Captain Cook’s final, fatal voyage — exploration, first contact, empire, navigation, mutiny of the spirit — reconstructed with total clarity by one of the best narrative historians most readers haven’t met yet. This is the big one. Bring it on vacation and disappear into the eighteenth-century Pacific for a week.

AUGUST — Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner The secret history of water in the American West. Read it in August, when the West is burning and your lawn is dying, and the entire landscape around you snaps into focus. You will never look at a reservoir, a river, or a sprinkler the same way again — which is the whole Green bargain: a book that permanently upgrades how you see the world.