The Summer Solstice Reading List

There's something on it for everyone (except horror lovers).

Jun 20, 2024

Happy Summer Solstice!

It’s a humid 25°C and rising in Toronto this morning. I’m sitting on my deck (wearing sunscreen of course) in a pair of denim shorts and a tank, looking at my tomato plant which was ravished by the storm we had the previous night. I neglected to stake it, and, one mighty rain fall later, it has taken on a horizontal look. I’m not sure whether tomato plants can grow horizontally… we shall see. If all else fails, its beautiful leaves will serve as a hedge to keep out snoopy eyes.

With a little help from my friends ( I dare you not to hum it for the rest of the day), I’ve put together a summer reading list for you and me.

palm trees during daytime — Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

Let’s start with the books recommended by my lovely subscribers/friends:

Jenn from

Jenn’s Substack

whose newsletter features her magnificent pieces of art, recommended:

✼ A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

It’s a memoir of his time in Paris during the 1920s, if you want to brush up on your classics.

Harun Kewa

who writes Salient Wisdom, a newsletter that started off as a self-improvement newsletter but has morphed into much more that includes poetry, self-help essays and even fiction, recommended:

✼ An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

the back cover sounds exactly like a book I want to start reading this very second!

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy's time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy's conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward--with hope and pain--into the future.

Pauline, a colleague and friend of my husband recommended:

✼ We So Seldom Look on Love by Barbara Gowdy

a short story collection of love in all its many forms.

Joanne Kelleher

, my dear friend and author, recommended:

✼ Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

if you like thrillers, this one is

a thriller unlike any other in this endlessly clever, twisty story of a mother who must move backward through time to prevent tragedy from striking at the heart of her family.

I’m not a thriller reader, but I’m making an acceptation here and will be reading out of my comfort zone.

as well as:

✼ Don’t Forget To Write by Sara Goodman Confino

which sounds like a fun summer read—

In 1960, a young woman discovers a freedom she never knew existed in this exhilarating, funny, and emotional novel by the bestselling author of She’s Up to No Good.

I’ve added a few books to the list too. There’s

A romance:

✼ Funny Story by Emily Henry

Duh! Obvs! Goes without saying. I’ve seen so many reviews that say it’s her best book yet. There’s this one by

Madeline Mills

and this one by

Clara

, and they both make me just want to run out and buy the book, which I most probably will be doing. Bye for now 🚘. It looks like the perfect poolside read.

A historical novel:

✼ The Painter’s Daughter by Emily Howes

A “beautifully written” (Hilary Mantel), “fascinating” (The Washington Post) story of love, madness, sisterly devotion, and control, about the two beloved daughters of renowned 1700s English painter Thomas Gainsborough, who struggle to live up to the perfect image the world so admired in their portraits.

A literary novel:

✼ Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

Vienna, 1919. A once-mighty empire has finally come crashing down—and a mysterious young woman, unable to speak, has turned up on the streets. A doctor appeals to the public for information about her past and receives a single response, from a sanatorium patient who claims to be her father. The man reveals only her name: Gretel. But he encloses a bedtime story he asks the doctor to read aloud to her, about an Architect whose radically modern creation has caused a great scandal. The next day a second story arrives, about a Ballet Master who develops a new position of the feet. Twenty-four more stories follow in alphabetical order, about an Immunologist and a Jeweler, a Revolutionary and a Satirist, a Waif and an X-ray Technician and a Zionist. Crossing paths and purposes, their stories interweave until a single picture emerges, that of a decadent, death-obsessed, oversexed empire buzzing with the ideas of Freud and Karl Kraus. There are artists who ape the innocence of children, and scientists who insist that children are anything but innocent . . . And then there’s Gretel’s own mother, who will do whatever it takes to sing onstage at the City Theater. Is it any wonder that this world—soon to vanish anyway in a war to end all wars—was one from which Gretel’s father wished to shelter her?

A translation (that I ~~may~~ should challenge myself to read in its original German):

✼ Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

It’s the winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize, and it

—tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after.

A fantasy:

✼ Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

which I feel like everyone but me has read, about dragon riders and

the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragons.

This is the summer I’m getting with the program. The book is going into my bag! Oooh! Maybe it will be my NYC weekend plane book.

A memoir:

✼ Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace

In Another Word for Love, Carvell Wallace excavates layers of his own history, situated in the struggles and beauty of growing up Black and queer in America.
Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career on writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and the circumstances that frame it—to make sense of seeking refuge from homelessness with a young single mother, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world.
With courage, vulnerability, and a remarkable expansiveness of spirit—not to mention a thrilling, and unrivaled, storytelling verve—Another Word for Love makes an irresistible case for life, healing, the fullness of our humanity, and, of course, love. It could be called a theory of life itself—a theory of being that will leave you open to the wonder of the world

Another memoir:

✼ Coming Home by Brittney Griner & Michelle Burford

On February 17, 2022, Brittney Griner arrived in Moscow ready to spend the WNBA offseason playing for the Russian women’s basketball team where she had been the centerpiece of previous championship seasons. Instead, a security checkpoint became her gateway to hell when she was arrested for mistakenly carrying under one gram of medically prescribed hash oil. Brittney’s world was violently upended in a crisis she has never spoken in detail about publicly—until now.

And a rom com, which, like Fourth Wing, I’ve put off for long enough:

✼ Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

the log line seems completely up my alley.

A comedy writer thinks she’s sworn off love, until a dreamy pop star flips the script on all her assumptions.

I hope I’ve tempted you with a read or five you’d like to try. I know the joy of adding to your TBR list. Please let me know what you’re reading so I can expand mine too.