50 Books to Read This Summer
It’s June, almost halfway through the year, and what have you read—other than several thousand tweets? If you’re like most people, not much, what with work, child care, mindless TV bingeing, plunging down Instagram rabbit holes, stressing about current events and stressing about stressing. But that’s what summer’s for, right? Catching up? We’ve organized this year’s notable releases (with some 2017 spillover) according to genre. Note: Given our tumultuous times, we’ve provided a bigger-than-usual collection of thrillers and crime novels, because nothing distracts from an annus horribilis like bloodbaths and skulduggery.
NOVEL APPROACHES: International imaginations run wild
The Overstory, by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton & Co.) Powers is the least known of America’s greatest novelists, perhaps because he frequently weaves science into his art. If you haven’t read his previous 11 books, start here, with this astonishing and ingenious tale of nature’s salvation—and our urgent need to save it. You will never look at a tree the same way again.
The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea (Little, Brown and Co.) The Mexican-American de la Cruz clan is messy, in the best way, and so is this book, with Urrea’s vivid, visceral prose propelling a noisy celebration of promiscuity and sorrow, joy and hate, birth and death. A sprawling, life-affirming, multigenerational epic.
The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin (Penguin Random House) Could you change your destiny if you were told the day you will die? Four siblings spend 50 years grappling with that knowledge—a cunning premise for a bittersweet novel that became an instant best-seller when it was released in January.
The passing is racial in this reissue of Larsen’s 1929 novel, one of only two the author wrote before sinking into obscurity. The story of two light-skinned friends—one of whom chooses to pass, marrying a bigoted white man—is elegiac, horrifying and shockingly ahead of
