Against summer reading
(But if you must do it, here are some hot summer reads)
The only thing I want to contemplate on a beach are beautiful tan bodies. Or wonder about the lives of old ones, lounging on portable folding chairs, who take a summer seriously because it could be their last. I want to look upon blue until it covers my mind completely. Engage in harmless gossip, waste hours. Remember my old loves and dream up new ones. Lie heavily, as Gainsbourg put it, under the sun exactement.
I understand why publishers have branded it “beach reading.” They want to reassure me that these books won’t compromise my achieved lightness of being. I can stain them with salt water, dog-ear and abuse them, lose my page in the breeze without losing the plot. This is a false promise, because the mere appearance of a book, especially a physical one, is as intrusive in this scene as an exposed skull in the idyllic pastures of Arcadia. Books are appointments to be met and demand our full presence. They cannot be ignored, at least not without some guilt. They stand sleepy in my library, waiting to possess me, holding ideas that can change me and spaces where my consciousness can merge with another’s for a sustained period of time, until it becomes a part of me. I cannot take summer reading lightly no matter how “light” it is presented to be, precisely because summertime is when we should give in to Mephistopheles’s counsel and be rid of all grey theory for the golden tree of actual life that springs ever green.
But because summer is loud in sound and color, it can also bring us sweet delight to sink deeply into a book for moments of mental quiet, be it as cars honk under our open windows, or as waves break to the laughter of children, or as cicadas frenzy on nights thick with heat and the scent of honeysuckle.
This season brings a rich selection of new titles written by Substack writers, including
’s excellent Morning After the Revolution, ’s hilarious memoir Feh, and ’s long-anticipated On the Edge, which will come out in August (and, from the looks of it, there are many more books coming from Authors Equity and beyond). I won’t resist taking some of them with me while I pack for a vacation, even if they threaten to spoil my pledge to keep bravely to the surface.
Here are those that caught our eye, and please let us know of any we missed, in the comments.
Substack summer reads
From new summer releases available to preorder to books published earlier this year and available to buy now—here’s your guide to the Substack summer of reading.
Statistician
, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything; available for preorder, Penguin Random House, August 13:On the Edge is a big, weird, complicated book. The through-line is gambling and risk, but it interprets that mandate liberally. Over the past three years, I spoke with about 200 people for the project—some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met—and read roughly 100 books. I’ve really enjoyed the whole process, even the writing process. These are subjects that I was conversant in to begin with, a more natural fit than the elections beat. (I was a professional poker player in the mid-2000s before I ever built an election forecast; in fact, it was Congress’s attempt to ban online poker that sparked my interest in politics.) But there are cool things that happen when you devote this much bandwidth to a discrete project and connect different people and ideas. The book is sort of a hybrid: there’s a lot of proprietary reporting, but also deep-dive “explainers” into everything from game theory to how ChatGPT works. And there’s a participatory element: I found myself with a seat at the table for some epic poker hands, spent a year learning the ropes of becoming a serious sports bettor, and made two dozen reporting trips.
Novelist
, There Are Rivers in the Sky; available for preorder, Viking, August 8:My novel spans centuries and continents and cultures. It tells the story of three unusual characters who seem to be very different at first glance but are linked in a surprising way.
Three unusual characters.
Two iconic rivers—the Tigris and the Thames.
One ancient poem—the Epic of Gilgamesh.
3, 2, 1…
And everything is connected through a raindrop.
A whole book built upon a tiny drop of water.
This novel is a love letter sent from my heart.
It is my love song to rivers—those that are alive and those that are forgotten.
Political journalist
, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World; available for preorder, Penguin Random House, July 23:It’s a short book, an argument really, about the way the world now works. I think of it as the opening of a discussion rather than a definitive statement. At the center of the book is a network (not an axis, alliance or bloc) of dictatorships: Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, Belarus, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, North Korea, plus a dozen-odd others who are seeking to change the international system in order to keep their regimes in power and to preserve their leaders’ wealth. They are not united ideologically. They do not meet either openly or secretly to make policy. They have many conflicts with one another.
Essayist
Feh; available for preorder, Riverhead Books, July 23:FEH, my newest memoir, began with my wanting to write about the rampant judgementalism and sneering contempt I was seeing all around me. It takes on God, Jesus, Paul Rudd, Nextdoor, social media, Schopenhauer, Wolf Blitzer and Yuval Noah Harari. And even with all those sacred cows, it felt bland… until I decided to slaughter a few of my personal sacred cows, too: to point out my own self-loathing, my own judgementalism, my own ugly habits of mind.
Chef and cookbook author
, Real Healthy; available for preorder, Ebury Press, July 11:Lots of us are looking to cut back on ultra-processed foods (UPFs), but having spoken to many of you on here, I know just how difficult it can be to avoid them in our busy, busy lives. I really hope that Real Healthy offers simple solutions to help you tackle those tricky problem areas. Find breakfasts, on-the-go lunches, snacks, weeknight dinners and sweet treats, as well as tips on having a UPF-free store cupboard, and advice on what to avoid when you’re doing your food shop.
This is your new guide to navigating those UPF pain points and cooking from scratch—Tim Spector said it was “a delicious guide to eating the healthy way” (thanks, Tim!!).
Culture and lifestyle writer
, You’re Safe Here; available to buy, Simon & Schuster:Of course I’m going to recommend my debut novel, out today, which takes place forty years in the future. In it, Maggie Endsall is quick to grab a spot on an exclusive retreat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, created by the enigmatic founder of WellCorp, Emmett Neal. Over the course of the six-week getaway, Emmett’s carefully crafted façade begins to fall away—revealing secrets that may put Maggie’s life at risk. It’s been called “dystopia at its best” (Booklist) and “a heart-pumping ride” (Publishers Weekly), with “deliciously paced storytelling sprinkled with secrets galore.”
Recovering workaholic
, Ambition Monster; available to buy, Atria Books:Apparently, one of the editors who’d rejected my jokey-bitter fuck-everything book wanted to talk to me. This was unusual, my agent said, but if I was cool with it, she’d set it up. As it turned out, I knew the editor, we’d worked together before. But I had no idea what she was going to say.
The call came on an exceptionally, almost oppressively, sunny day. I know this because I took the call outside to avoid Zoom school. I stood in the alley along the side of our duplex, a space with zero shade where it was both hottest and the reception was best.
After exchanging niceties (beans, bread), the editor got right to it: “Your proposal isn’t honest. This isn’t the book you should write.”
Historian
, Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life; available to buy (U.K.) and preorder (U.S., September 10), John Murray One:Late bloomers don’t often know what they’re preparing for. They work blindly towards their goals. Their career paths are meandering, exploratory, restricted, or full of failure. They learn in this phase, developing the skills and knowledge they will use later, but they don’t always have an end point in mind.
Vera Wang was an Olympic-level ice skater and then a Vogue journalist for years, with no thought of designing clothes. When she made the switch, she had accrued all the skills and contacts she needed.
Professor and social critic
, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative; available to buy, W. W. Norton:It’s an autobiography. It’s a story of my life, from being a kid in Chicago through MIT graduate school, through my early academic career, through my political machinations, through my various personal challenges and turmoils, through marriages and grandchildren and all the rest.
Staff writer for The Free Press
, Morning After the Revolution; available to buy, Penguin Random House:[From Bari Weiss:] Before Bari and Nellie met—and fell in love, blah blah blah—in 2019, Nellie was nothing short of a media darling. She had the right ideas, she wrote the right stories, and NYT readers ate it up.
But Nellie is a reporter. And being a reporter—a great one—forced her to confront the gap between what an increasingly zealous left claimed were its aims ... and the actual realities of their policies.
People don’t usually change their minds. At least not on big-stakes political issues, and not when their jobs are at risk, or their social acceptance is on the line. And people certainly don’t change their minds publicly.
Nellie did. And she chronicles that change in her new book.
Cartoonist
, How to Baby: A No-Advice-Given Guide to Motherhood, with Drawings; available to buy, Dial Press:
Historian
, Unruly Figures: Twenty Tales of Rebels, Rulebreakers, and Revolutionaries You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of; available to buy, Chronicle Books:I wrote a book based on this podcast! It has twenty profiles of rule-breaking folks from all around the world, the vast majority of which I have not covered on the podcast. These are all new tales! Ones I’ve been dying to share ever since I first started writing this book.
Psychotherapist
, Weathering; available to buy, Ebury Penguin:It’s a journey through deep time and ancient landscapes showing how geology can offer us all a new way of thinking about our own transitions, transformations, griefs, losses and limitations. It is about how life weathers us and makes us into new shapes. It is part travelogue of the Peak District, part therapy guide, part memoir. It is locally based but universally oriented. A regular sedimentary geology made a little bit extraordinary by attention. Full of regular human voices and ‘normal’ human experiences that we can all relate to. It draws on my years so far as an outdoor psychotherapist, and the many more behind me as an epilithic human, growing on rock.
Through it, I hope to sell you on the wonder of rocks. I hope to encourage you to honour the ‘long process’. I hope to convince you that continually weathering into form is the necessary work of a lifetime.
But you will take from it what you will, and if it ends up going unread in the TBR pile but looking pretty on your shelf with its gold-embossed ferns, then I will take that too!
Academic Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation; available to buy, Penguin Press:
Today is also the launch day of a movement in the U.S., the U.K., and other nations to Free the Anxious Generation by rolling back the phone-based childhood, restoring the play-based childhood, and reclaiming life in the real world.
If you are concerned about child and adolescent mental health, the well-being of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, or what the phone-based life is doing to all of us, please support us by ordering a copy of The Anxious Generation and then joining the movement. Here’s our vision for how we launch a movement of parents, educators, members of Gen Z, and anyone else who wants to change what’s happening to young people today.
Philosopher
, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters; available to buy, Scribner:It’s the most intellectually interesting thing I’ve ever worked on, the kind of project that has utterly captivated me night and day for years, growing from a little germ of an idea a decade ago into 264 carefully manicured pages that have bewildered and delighted me in equal measure.
But it’s been more than that. In the past, when I’ve written books, it has felt like an attempt to convince others of how I already see the world, to broadcast my existing worldview out into the literary ether. Fluke has been a different experience. Researching and writing this book has profoundly changed how I see the world—and altered fundamental aspects of my outlook on life. I hope that, if you read it, my words will sway your worldview, too.
Do you have a book coming out or that’s been recently published for the summer? Share a link in the comments below, and tell us what you look forward to reading.
 | A guest post by
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Sharp wit and irony are much appreciated. Even if I'm on my third vodka and orange juice at 8 a.m.
Love this description of yours!! 😍
“Books are appointments to be met and demand our full presence. They cannot be ignored, at least not without some guilt. They stand sleepy in my library, waiting to possess me, holding ideas that can change me and spaces where my consciousness can merge with another’s for a sustained period of time, until it becomes a part of me.” ☺️