Summer Reading List 2026

Are you looking once again for book recommendations for your summer reading list? I’m ready to offer up some faceted gems that should keep you entertained. As usual, my list is highly weighted towards non-fiction. Let’s just dive in and see if any of these might appeal to you. For those of you who are wondering about the photo below; this is the National Library Pristina Kosovo. Pretty cool design, and no, it’s not AI!

(Photo by Amanderson 2 from Flickr under a Creative Commons license)

I only have eight books on the list this year. Sorry. Yes, I’ve been doing much less (book) reading as I needed to devote more time to other activities (see below). It’s a personal embarrassment that I frequently bring home a book or two from the library, then return them three weeks later having never cracked them open. So what have I been doing instead? Activities include political work opposing the new Fascist regime in America, volunteer work doing cancer patient support and education, and I also spend a fair amount of time crafting and releasing songs. Yes, I’m a (non-performing) songwriter. Hey, writing is writing, and I like working in different mediums. Interested in checking out one of my music videos? Check out A Subtle Nudge In The Right Direction, a swingin’ jazz number I wrote for my wife as an anniversary gift. I’ve written the lyrics and made the videos for all of the songs on my YouTube channel (which are also available on all streaming platforms), but music for just the most recent few. Talented collaborators wrote the bulk of the music and performed all the songs. These are some of the reasons I’ve had to cut way back on my Substack writing (and book reading) at a time when the rest of the world is going crazy for this very popular platform.

Here are the eight books, and feel free to share my list. My substack is FREE:

Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer by Dr. Linda Eckert (2024). This one was written by a gynecologist and vaccine expert who has international experience as a doctor. Cervical cancer can be wiped out if we are willing to make the effort, but so far the world had not had the political will to do so. Nearly all cases of cervical cancer are caused by infection with one or more cancer-causing strain(s) of human papilloma virus (HPV). The virus is a sexually transmitted infection (STI) and causes six different types of cancer in both women and men. Vaccines that effectively block viral infection first came on the market in 2006, and they initially targeted at women (although now they are recommended for boys as well, where the virus causes throat cancer as well as anal and penile cancers). The vaccine can essentially prevent women from getting cervical cancer. Despite this fact, about 350,000 women will die of this disease worldwide each year. It’s a huge problem in Africa, where routine gynecological care (and Pap tests) is not widely available, and where the vaccine is often unaffordable and unavailable even if your country health system has the means to pay for it. The author shares heartbreaking stories of a number of cervical cancer patients she has seen as a doctor, but who live in a medically and/or culturally constrained environment where they can’t easily be treated.

Even in more financially advantaged countries such as the US, women still die of the disease for a variety of reasons. They haven’t gotten the vaccine (because their parents didn’t vaccinate them before they became sexually active), or they’re poor and don’t see their doctors often, or because they hate pelvic exams and maybe don’t understand the risks associated with skipping those. Anti-vaccine activists have targeted the HPV vaccine largely because it is a sexually transmitted infection. The book is a call to arms to get health providers, pharmaceutical companies, and government health agencies on board to get the vaccine into more arms, and to enable women who are already infected to have some hope of being able to be treated. The book also provides a great deal of online and other resources for women to tap into.

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green (2025). Yes, another disease book, with a different focus and disease, but which comes to the same conclusion as Enough. The title of the book is about as clear as can be as to what you will find between the covers. I was surprised to see that this book made the national best sellers list simply because I didn’t think this was a subject that many people would care about. I still think that’s true, but what I hadn’t realized was that earlier in his career, John Green had published the massively popular novel The Fault In Our Stars, which was later made into a film. I’m sure fans of his earlier book were happy to pick up his latest offering, despite the move from fiction to non-fiction.

The book is essentially a short course in the natural biology of tuberculosis, which for many years was known as consumption (because it literally ate away at the lungs of patients). It nicely weaves this together with a look at the social impact of the disease in various communities around the world. Back before the introduction of antibiotics, tuberculosis killed about 25% of the people in the world. It affects both children and adults, and because it suppresses appetite those with active infections fade away, and in children it restricts their growth. The author also dives into the historical association between well know literary figures and the romanticization of the disease that eventually killed them. These include poet John Keats, the Brontë sisters Emily and Anne, Anton Chekhov, George Orwell, and Henry David Thoreau.

To bring the story to a personal level, Green shares stories about Henry, a young tuberculosis patient who lives in a hospital in Sierra Leone, and his personal history is heartbreaking. Unlike most infectious diseases, the bacterial the causes tuberculosis grows very slowly, and patients suffer for a very long time before they succumb to the disease. The bacteria can also lay dormant for decades before causing active disease. The book also details how the disease shaped the growth of several cities that were initially thought of as places where people might successfully recover from the disease. Tuberculosis can be successfully treated in most cases, but the drug regimen is difficult to tolerate and is not available in much of the world. A cure was first identified in the 1950s, but since then an estimated 150M people have died worldwide of the disease. As recently as 2023, the disease killed over a million people worldwide. That’s because, as the author puts it, “the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.”

American Poison: A Deadly Invention And The Woman Who Battled For Environmental Justice by Daniel Stone (2025). This book is an instant classic in the genre of environmental abuses of capitalism. It chronicles the life of Alice Hamilton, who pretty much created the field of industrial toxicology. Born right after the Civil War to a privileged family, she went on to become the first female faculty member at Harvard. She became fascinated at an early age by industrial poisons, chemicals that had various legitimate uses but, due a lack of safety implementation, caused widespread harm.

Lead had long been known in the early 1900s as a toxic substance, but its utility led to it being employed in plumbing, paint, and other industries. The fuel industry at this time was looking for an additive that could be combined with gasoline to stop the knocking sounds caused in engines by regular gas. An inventor tried a number of chemicals and finally settled on tetraethyl lead, which solved the problem nicely. A big question stood in the way of its widespread adoption: was this gasoline additive going to be toxic to people? The solution found by the captains of industry was to challenge any and all data showing that the tetraethyl lead was dangerous. Data gets manipulated. Shills for the oil companies enter the safety debate, sewing doubt about the dangers of lead despite several spectacular episodes where workers were exposed to tetraethyl lead, went insane, and died. The U.S. Surgeon General set up a “debate” on the potential toxicity of the chemical, and basically railroaded the lead opponents (with Hamilton leading the way). Tetraethyl leaded gasoline became widely available around 1923, and earned millions of dollars for the companies that sold it.

Decades later, the consequences of having used leaded gasoline started to become clearer. Lead contamination was everywhere on the planet. Core sampling showed that the contamination began the same year leaded gasoline was introduced. Areas in which there were high levels of lead were associated with both health problems and increases in crime. Efforts to get the lead out of gas were headed off for years by industry employing the same tactics later used by tobacco and opioid companies to sell their wares. Over time the evident harms became harder and harder to ignore, and in 1973 they stopped adding lead to gasoline in the U.S. It took another 30 years to stop the addition of lead to gasoline worldwide.

The book nicely weaves in Alice Hamilton’s life working to prevent environmental damage by industrial chemicals with her own personal story. She never married and lived to be 101. Being a woman in a male dominated field for her entire career, she is exposed to overt sexism time and time again. Her tenaciousness made her a popular speaker, and she was often called upon to consult all over the world on the various uses of industrial poisons. She wrote many articles and books about these dangerous chemicals. The book needed foils to work against her efforts, and executives at both chemical and automobile companies play the villains in this story. Some wind up being poisoned by the very chemicals they were promoting, including the inventor of tetraethyl lead. Highly recommended for those interested in the environment, industrial toxicology, capitalism in America in the pre-1929 crash era, and how a pioneering woman set the standard for an entire new field of science.

A minor thumbs up for The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog; And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science by Carly Anne York (2025). Science is complicated stuff, and much of it cannot be easily understood by folks who have no science background. This especially applies to basic research work, where potential practical applications of the work are not easy to predict. Science is about trying to understand the world, and that understanding may or may not be useful in making the world a better place. But often, some very important breakthroughs have sprung forth from basic research labs. This bulk of this book is focused on telling a wide variety of tales built on this theme. Sometimes practical applications were found months or a few years later, but in some cases it was decades before the utility of some discovery was understood. Politicians often poke fun at these government-funded basic research projects, and use them as a sword to try to cut basic research funding. Had that happened in many cases, important discoveries would have been either prevented or seriously delayed.

Many of the stories reflect on biomechanical principles that were uncovered by studying animal physiology. Snakes, frogs, llamas, clams, cockroaches, blackworms, whales, ducks, rats, Gila monsters, and sea coral all have had something to teach us. Many of the discoveries played an important role in medicine, including the discoveries of fluorescent proteins in jellyfish, useful proteins extracted from bacteria that grow in boiling hot springs, powerful toxins made by cone snails, and the mold that led to the discovery of penicillin. Career scientists will know many, if not most, of the stories in the book, so I’m not sure they would enjoy reading it. The target audience might be high school students to get them interested in a career in science. Or laypeople who love science even if they are not scientists themselves. The science itself is often glossed over without much actual detail, but that target audience will probably be fine with that. I’m also not a fan of including the words “Silly Science” in the title. It sounds a bit demeaning to the folks who actually did the work.

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Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry by Christie Wilcox (2016) was a fun read. There are lots of creatures that can make an amazingly wide spectrum of dangerous and deadly biotoxins. We all know about snake venom and bee and wasp stings. But did you know the platypus has a venomous spur to stab you with? Gila monsters. Jewel wasps. Urchins. Cone snails. The book’s chapters move from animal to animal, explaining the different deleterious effects of the toxins produced by that particular animal. The actions vary widely across the animal kingdom, and it’s not uncommon to have some animals envenomating victims with a large mix of toxins. These toxins can be vasodialators, blood clotting factors, factors that prevent blood clotting, agents that block nerve conduction, agents that paralyze muscles, and a wide variety of other effects.

How animals developed the biochemical pathways to produce these toxic compounds is nicely explained, and these appear to have arisen independently across species. Also covered is how the animals manage not to harm themselves with the toxins, and why some species are apparently resistant to these toxins. They can be envenomated numerous times and still show none of the ill effects that in other species would have been rapidly fatal. Stories are shared of the pain that victims suffer through in some cases, and in others the deadly compounds are injected with agents that numb the bite site so you don’t even notice you’ve been attacked until it’s too late. Some animals use venoms as defense (so they don’t get eaten, such as urchins and lionfish), while others use them as offensive weapons to take down their prey (snakes, gila monsters and Komodo dragons). Nature has been very adoptive in developing these pain-inducing and sometimes lethal weapons made by tarantulas, sting rays, jewel wasps, box jellyfish, and harvester ants. Adaptation has also been at work on the opposite end of that spectrum. Badgers, mongooses, opposums, and hedgehogs are all known to have some level of resistance to snake venoms.

One of my favorite science/humor writers, Mary Roach, had a new book out in 2025, and it’s another fun read. Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy investigates the science of body part replacements. Roach makes investigating human anatomy fun, as she has done in her previous books. Various organ systems fail somewhere along the way in our lives, and scientists have been working hard to craft replacements using a variety of techniques. Roach doesn’t hesitate to dive into all the squishy details that make the topics very interesting. She looks at replacement noses, which date back centuries, and skin replacement for burn victims. Efforts to modify “replacement organs” taken from other species (most notably pigs) and would therefore not be rejected by human hosts are discussed at length. Prosthetics, both hands and legs, are examined and she explains why patients often ask to have their damaged appendages surgically removed. The sources of replacement parts are examined in depth, where various tissues (including bones, skin, fatty tissue, and intestines) are repurposed to support other uses (such as the Brazilian butt lift). Iron lungs, ostomies, and eyeball surgeries done in the wilds of Mongolia illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of the replacement approaches used. Some of the approaches done in the U.S. but cannot be done in other countries (for economic and practical reasons), but local solutions are found. Hair replacements (via follicular stem cells) get a thorough combing over, and the latest efforts to 3D print human organs are discussed. Two key threads woven through the book are that (1) many of these techniques produce results that are really poor substitutes for the organs they replace, and (2) we are at the very earliest stages for developing much of this technology (e.g. pig organ transplants and 3D tissue printing). A thoroughly fascinating read, as are all of her books.

Think that things aren’t as good as they used to be? You’re probably right, and Cory Doctorow explains why that is in his bestselling book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse And What To Do About It (2025). Yes, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and in large part it’s all due to money. Companies are in the habit of taking good products and services and making them worse over time if they can earn more money from it. I’ve experienced this many times and I’ll share just one example. I used to use Quicken for tracking my personal financial info, and then one day, with no warning, the program lost the ability to update daily stock prices. It wasn’t a bug in the system; this feature was deliberately turned off to get you to buy a newer version of the program. This (of course) led me to abandon Quicken.

The book is chock full of stories like this, and Doctorow puts most of the blame on industry consolidation, which created enormous financial juggernauts that are just too large to care. Google search used to take you to the best answers to your question, but now it frequently offers up the best sponsored answer. “Semantic matching” technologies invisibly append brand names to particular searches, thereby slanting what it is you will see. Only Apple Apps can play the media you buy from the iTunes store. Microsoft, Apple, Meta and many other companies are taken to task for taking good products and working to make them more expensive (by forcing you to rent instead of buy them e.g. Office) or less useful (to get you to buy only their branded products). Happiest Baby designed their popular (and expensive at $1,695) rocking cradle SNOO so that, after a period time, you had to pay a monthly $20 fee to use the rocking feature. This was so the company would get paid for future offspring or from new buyers if you sold it on the secondary market. Uber algorithms “twiddle” with the pricing you are offered based on a number of factors that are never made clear to you. It’s why tech companies hate “right to repair” laws because they make it less likely that you’ll buy a replacement rather than get it fixed when it breaks. It also discusses those who seek to turn intellectual property rules into a scam, as with “trolls” who invent nothing but still seek to license questionable property. The book has a clear leftist slant (the author freely admits to this), but the cited examples do a pretty clear job of making his case for why this has gotten so much worse. Doctorow is credited with coining the “enshittification” term.

If you’re a big music fan (as I am), you might enjoy Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About The Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves by Chris Dalla Riva (2025). This author set out on a mission to listen to and analyze every #1 song on the Billboard Top 100 charts going back to the 1950s. He was looking to uncover trends in music, both how it’s written and how people listen to it. Clearly music has changed a lot since the 50’s and he covers a number of key trends. The rise of the singer-songwriter in the late 60s. The introduction of electronic drum machines. How woman and black songwriters and performers were undervalued for their contributions. The rise of synthesizer-based bands in the 80s. The coming of rap and also hip-hop. The primary focus is on the pop charts, but there are discussions about other genres, including country and even a little jazz (back in the 50’s). The book is filled with interesting stories about how certain songs came to be written, and how certain musicians came to be stars. A number of hit songs were actually not recorded by the musicians named on the label, and some didn’t contribute anything beyond smiling faces (see Milli Vanilli).

The book is divided into chapters that each cover a period of a few years. Within that period three of the best #1 songs are highlighted, as well as what the author thought were the three worst #1s (and all of the #1 songs from that period are named). The chapters, however, do not cover identical numbers of years, which makes the dividing lines seem rather arbitrary. Trends are noticed and picked apart, but there is often only a single graph to illustrate the point. The gradual elimination of key changes in most songs. The gradual increase in the number of songwriters over time. How sampling and beats came to be the norm. The conversion from analog to digital recordings took place. How digital audio workstations have revolutionized how songs are produced. How Napster, the iPod, and later Spotify/Apple Music changed how people listen to their favorite songs. How AI and Suno are changing how music is made now.

Overall, the book makes for an interesting trip down an audio memory lane. The one thing I found disappointing was the statistical analysis, which would have benefited from more rigor. And it’s kind of odd to focus so much attention on just #1 songs. I would have increased the sample size to look at maybe the top five or ten songs from each Billboard weekly listing. The author also points out that the methods used to identify the number one song on the charts itself has changed over time, from self-reported numbers from radio stations to those that are linked to actual sales or streaming numbers. This makes some of the comparisons a bit like apples and oranges. There are enough stories and nuggets about music trends over time to make this an interesting read.

Click on this link if you want to see my full Book Recommendations list (with books divided by subject categories). I’m always happy to get positive feedback but feel free to reach out with negative comments too as I am always looking to improve my writing.

Enjoy your summers!