Books I'm reading this summer

I’m going on holiday tomorrow to an island that doesn’t have reception for two weeks, and I can’t wait to return changed, healed, and pentecostal about the seven different types of rest.

All I want to do is read, try to make shandies go viral, force myself to cook for others again and enjoy it, get a gorgeous tan in a skanky bikini, put on a clean dress and a jewel in the evening and go out for dinner with friends til we lose track of time. Wish me luck.

In the meantime, something for you. Here’s what I plan to read or finish this summer, and as I finish, I’ll tell you what I think.

Also, a note that these are very trendy, fairly recently released books and my quest for Autumn will be ‘back reading’ older publications. So much to read! So little time! A great excuse to put the phone on DND.

PS. What am I missing?

I missed his recent event here in Lisbon because I was up late serving the jaws of capitalism, and I was so sad to miss it. I need to re-read this and re-contemplate my life as a constant foreigner and what we’re all hoping to achieve.

Sarah is one of my favourite existential-meets-poetic writers, and her recent podcast interview about complex systems collapse has really thrown me through a loop, and then, out the other side of it, I think I am finding some existential peace.

My friend A said there’s a whole subsection of our friendship waiting to be unlocked once we can gossip about this. Plus, sorry but I love the cover.

I loved Heart the Lover, and I believe I will love this too, and I think summer is a time for reading about love even if you’re not making out with anyone at the time.

I can’t remember where I read about this (which probably means it was a post somewhere, let’s be real), but it follows five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, was recommended by Obama, and a finalist for the National Book Award.

Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize, it follows Ernaux’s 1989 diary during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an attaché to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Yes. This is exactly what I want to know about.

“An erudite first novel with horny energy” from The Guardian. That and an endorsement by Deborah Levy — all I need to know.

“Elizabeth Strout, as we have come to expect, delivers a moving exploration of the human condition—one that brims with compassion for each and every one of her indelible characters. With exquisite prose and profound insight, The Things We Never Say takes one man’s fears and loneliness and makes them universal. And in the same breath, captures the abiding love that sustains and holds us all.”

Dee co-hosts Triple J’s The Hook Up podcast and has lit up a whole world of conversation around sex and pleasure and dating in Australia that was previously largely untouched. Plus she’s so chic and cool and is devoutly into second-hand clothing. After reading Emma-Louise Boynton’s Pleasure for an upcoming interview, I’m excited to pick up this.

xo