Hi,
Hope you’re all having great weekends! To those of you who read my folklore article for Teen Vogue, thank you SO much for your support—it was truly so much fun to write, and I’ve loved the conversations I’ve had with you about it! So cool to share some of the ideas that first started fledging last spring when I was TAing the Taylor class at Harvard. If you missed the article, you can read it here.
Since I spent most of my writing time this week on the Taylor article, today’s SubStack is less involved than my typical long-form essay.
As most of you know, I am a big reader—one of the #1 ways to perk me up is to ask me what I’m reading. I love talking about books and recommending them. And, so, I thought a little summer reading guide would be fun 😊 Sort of a “one nightstand” segment, expanded.
Lmk if you’ve read any of these or plan to! I assigned each of the books a song and (shocker) there’s a lot of Lana <3
Next week I’ll be back to my regular format!
Active Listener’s Summer Reading Guide
If you’re having a wistful summer and yearn for stunningly beautiful writing, read…
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
Summer reading setting: Your grandma’s back porch just past sunset, sipping tea that’s gone cold and listening to the night’s cicadas.
In 2020’s late spring, a mother tells her three grown daughters the story of the summer she dated now-famous-actor Peter Duke. That summer, however, would also be the last of her girlhood, when her life seemed to swell and flush like the ripe apples hanging on her family’s orchard trees. I loved how, as readers, we watch our narrator decide what to tell her daughters of her youthful summer romance; what of it to whisper at night to her steady and warm husband; and what she keeps for herself, and for us, alone. Filled with gorgeous, summer-spun language and subtle, but stirring, emotional insight.
Song: “Mythological Beauty” by Big Thief
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Summer Reading Setting: A solo day-date to your city’s local and overcrowded watering hole. The day is filled with more friction—and loneliness—than you hoped. Your sweat drips down your back.
A tense, often painful, novel that takes place over one late-summer weekend in a lakeside Midwestern college town. Wallace, our protagonist, is a deeply private Black and queer man navigating his nearly all-white graduate program’s cohort. We follow him across confrontations, hook-ups, and conversations, as the reality of the hostility Wallace faces distills in the lake-locked August heat.
Song: “Polly” by Moses Sumney
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Summer Reading Setting: Sitting on the aluminum bleachers while waiting for a sibling’s sports game to be over.
Twenty years after the Lisbon sisters’ disturbing, successive suicides, the neighborhood group of boys that obsessed over the girls reflect on their lives and deaths in one shared, unforgettable voice. This is one of those books written in such particular and elegant detail that certain lines haunt me as if they were my own memories. This book is so good. If you can check out an anniversary copy with Emma Cline’s preface, I highly recommend!
Song: “Sun Bleached Flies” by Ethel Cain
If you’re feeling listless, low key about to crash out, and love “women-on-the-verge” literature, read…
The Guest by Emma Cline
Summer Reading Setting: A cabana at a boutique hotel’s pool you’re definitely not supposed to be at.
A slim and spiky novel that boldly asks: What if a young woman behaved completely inappropriately for 300-pages straight? In the hydrangea-blooming languor of Long Island’s moneyed East End, Alex commits a faux-pas against her older lover and is promptly thrown out of his luxurious summer home. Instead of trekking back to NYC, where her debts have caught up with her, she scams her way across the Hamptons, freeloading from troubled teens, house-sharing young professionals, personal assistants, and well-off homeowners. Written with a torpid glamour, The Guest is propulsive—like reading about Georgina from Gossip Girl’s summer trip, if she also was kinda Ultraviolence-era Lana. Plus, the cover is so chic (shoutout Harry).
Song: “Shades of Cool” by Lana Del Rey
Luster by Raven Leilani
Summer Reading Setting: An airless train car ripe with people-watching possibilities.
Nearly every sentence in this book is surprising—absolutely precise and unflinching in its candor. Edie is aimless when she meets Eric, a married man who quickly becomes her lover. She ends up living at his house with his wife, a medical examiner of autopsies, and their adopted daughter in a bizarre twist of events. I remember reading this so quickly a couple of summers ago!
Song: “Whipped Cream” by Ari Lennox
The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
Summer Reading Setting: A plane ride back from a low-key bender with the fan blasting straight on you.
You know I had to get some Elena Ferrante in here! Honestly, I’d recommend any of her books (duh). This is the one I’m currently reading (and savoring since it’s my last new one of hers). When our protagonist’s husband suddenly leaves her, she fears transforming into the poverella, or a poor, wrenching, heartsick woman abandoned by her man. This descent, however, is exactly what Ferrante brilliantly complicates in The Days of Abandonment as we follow our speaker’s sweltering madness. Ferrante is forever my fav and, with thirty pages left, I can confirm this is another unforgettable work by her. Obviously, if you haven’t read the Neapolitan quartet (or her most recent novel, The Lying Life of Adults), summer is a perfect time to start—and to have your life changed!
Song: “Honeymoon” by Lana Del Rey
I’m in a reading slump, and I need to be totally absorbed…
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Summer Reading Setting: The top bunk at summer camp late at night, pages illuminated by your rusty blue flashlight.
An incredibly well-done mystery with an evocative setting, multiple timelines, and a compelling range of character perspectives. One August morning—camp counselors still hungover, campers still in their bunks—the 13-year-old daughter of the family that owns the camp goes missing. Fourteen years ago, her younger brother also vanished—and has never been found.
Moore does an amazing job balancing different narrators and, as a reader, it’s thrilling piecing together information (you feel a bit like a detective yourself!). The Adirondack mountain setting of the book is palpable, and the novel even comes with a map of the summer camp at the beginning. The tension between the wealthy Van Laar family that owns the camp and the working-class community who maintains it crafts a compelling class commentary. This book is like 400+ pages, but doesn’t feel like it at all!
Song: “Feel Flows” by the Beach Boys
Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley
Summer Reading Setting: Emerging from a lazy day to speed-read before you and your friends from college start pre-gaming to your best throwback playlist.
Read it before it becomes an A24 movie! (Starring Saorise Ronan and Austin Butler, which… perfect casting, tbh). One fall 2000 night at a local Berkeley college-student dive bar, Percy Marks is spouting off about music—specifically, what makes something a great “track” v. a great “song” (see caption below)? Joe Morrow, golden-boy-incarnate and aspiring musician, is the recipient of her rantings, and the two quickly strike up a collaborative artistic relationship, sometimes veering into romance, sometimes fizzling out and ignoring one another completely.
This book was sooo nostalgic for the 2000s music scene and reminded me of the becomings of my own musical taste. We get to watch Percy find her voice, both as a music critic and producer, across NYC and San Francisco. Each chapter of the book is named after a song that is featured in its plot. I had so much fun listening to the official playlist and revisiting old favorites and discovering new ones. Plus, it’s a good romance and coming-of-age!
Song: “Heartbeats” by The Knife and “The Sound” by the 1975 (It’s a book about music, so it gets two).
My Body by Emily Ratajkowski
Summer Reading Setting: Staying in on a night where all your friends are out so that you can listen to Lana and think deeply about womanhood lol.
If you’re watching Too Much, here’s your chance to read essays by the actress behind “Wendy Jones.”
I picked up My Body on the used-books sales rack at Brookline Booksmith back in Boston after reading EmRata’s viral (and insightful) essay in The Cut, “Buying My Body Back.” Her collection of essays exceeded my expectations: Ratajkowski unflinchingly reflects on her own privileges and histories of abuse as a supermodel, while also speaking perceptively to an American culture that prizes women’s beauty and punishes them for it.
I consumed Ratajkowski’s essays in one emotional night back in my old Boston bedroom—I remember choosing My Body over going out to Trina’s (huge during that era of life)! I felt so deeply seen by so much of what Ratajkowski offered, and it allowed me to look back on huge pop culture moments from my adolescence (“Blurred Lines,” for example) with more nuance. Great for fans of Jia Tolentino and sharp, self-aware cultural criticism.
Song: “A&W” by Lana Del Rey
I want to think deeply about time, art, and friendship…
Stay True by Hua Hsu
Summer Reading Setting: The closest college coffeehouse, quietly observing the summer-lingerers social dynamics and references.
In this memoir, Hua Hsu and fellow Berkeley student, Ken, are total opposites: Hsu makes alternative zines and prefers to be alone, while Ken styles himself in Abercrombie and is typically encircled by his fraternity brothers. The two, nevertheless, become close friends, bonding over movies, long drives, and their shared, yet often disparate, navigations of their Asian American identities (Ken is Japanese American and his family has lived in the U.S. for generations; Hsu is the son of Taiwanese immigrants and reviles mainstream U.S. culture).
When Ken is murdered in a carjacking, Hsu turns to writing to grasp onto their friendship and make sense of himself. This book combines incredible cultural histories and insights with the question, “who has the right to claim grief?”
Song: “Star” by Mitski
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
Summer Reading Setting: Sitting on the edge of Lake Michigan at golden hour, feet in the water, grateful to be alive, but also missing all the moments you’ve lived before this one.
Ugh. How to even summarize The Great Believers? This novel navigates two timelines: One begins in 1985 as AIDs infects Yale Tishman’s entangled, creative circle of queer friends in Chicago; thirty years later, Fiona, the sister of one of Yale’s first friends to die from the disease, searches Paris for her estranged daughter, while staying with an artist who photographed Yale and Fiona’s close-knit community during their last days.
Makkai paces The Great Believers’ plot perfectly and, if you’ve ever lived off of / stayed near the Belmont stop in Lakeview, Chicago, you’ll feel eerily rooted in place. A devastating reflection of art, friendship, loss, and memory, it also raises interesting questions on what it means for a straight woman (Makkai) to author a leading account of the AIDs epidemic—ultimately, I agree with her remarks in my copy’s afterword Q&A: it’s a story that needs to be told. And, god, does she tell it so well.
Song: “Fourth of July” by Sufjan Stevens, but also “Believe” by Cher
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? By Lorrie Moore
Summer reading setting: Midnight with your bedroom window open, the thick, oak-tree air floating onto your pilled-flannel bedsheets.
I can only think of a handful of literary passages that have moved me as deeply as the last fifty pages of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Moore’s tour-de-force of girlhood memory. Our speaker, Berie, and her best friend, Sils, work at an amusement park called Storyland in upstate, almost-Québécois New York, where they pass their time sharing cigarettes, gossip, and boy-crazy schemes.
Another split-timeline novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? asks the ever-relatable question: Why, even after a lifetime of adventure, travel, and adult luxury, do the things that happened when we were nineteen feel the most urgent and important? And how deeply do we really know the close friends that starred in that time of our lives—or, were they always just projections of who we wanted to grow up and be? What happens when we evolve beyond them, and old versions of us, but never truly forget (or outdo) how those late-adolescent days felt?
Song: “Little Green” by Joni Mitchell
Here’s a playlist with all my picks’ songs :)
If you liked this week’s post, let me know! I’m considering making “one nightstand”-style seasonal reading recs a recurring feature on here.
Prompt of the week: Would you be interested in an “autumn reading list” in October? (I’ll post a survey on Insta). Was this recommendation format fun/helpful?
Also, based on the poll I put out on insta on Friday, I’ll be writing about why we don’t have a song of the summer next week and what that means culturally. It was a close vote though! My other story ideas were a review of Lena Dunham’s new show (starring Meg Stalter) “Too Much” and an exploration of envy as a generative emotion. I’ll definitely be covering both topics in the future, so don’t worry if your vote didn’t win lol.
Thanks for reading, and support your local library!
Love,
Jen