Feed Me's Summer Novel Reading List.
Happy Lonesome Dove Summer.
Good afternoon, everyone. Free letter today.
At the end of April, I asked my readers to respond to three brief questions about novels meant to be read during the summer. I wanted to hear about the absolute best summer novel reading experiences you’ve had in an effort to curate both a master list of recommendations as well as some beautiful vivid memories from your past summers of reading.
As always, you delivered in spades. For today’s letter, I’ve edited and packaged the responses into what I’m thinking of as a sort of optional summer-reading curriculum. Maybe you’ll be inspired to read others’ most-recommended novels. Or maybe you’ll be inspired to replicate the experiences in which they were read — the settings, circumstances, or life events that made those reading experiences so memorable that they pop to mind even many many years later. I hope people star it, keep it, mark it unread over and over, print it out, pass it forward, and discuss in the comments.
In total, I received 200+ responses*. Up top are some of the titles that received multiple votes—henceforth regarded as Feed Me’s Mount Rushmore of novels to be read during summer. I was surprised by how many recommendations were from the last 10 or so years. And also surprised that Lonesome Dove—a 41-year-old, 843-page epic Western, set in the mid-to-late 1870s—is the decisive “winner” among Feed Me readers. I’m interested in finding something from the backlist to start my summer reading off. I don’t know if I’m ready for Lonesome Dove quite yet, but maybe, on account of my trip to Cannes Lions in June, I’ll start with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night. My friend Dan says it’s the only novel to read before a first trip to the French Riviera.
That’s enough of a windup. Happy Memorial Day. Happy Lonesome Dove Summer.
*Some books were excluded from the list because they were non-fiction.
“I read it while crashing on a twin air mattress in my friend’s living room in Portland, Oregon. I can still feel it deflating beneath me. I kept my camera off during Zooms so I could read through them and brought it to the socially distanced park with a blanket and a 6-pack of sour beers.” - on The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Before we dive into the results, there was a shortlist of people whose summer reading appetites I was curious about. Below, Hannah Kingsley-Ma, Joe Scarborough, Krithika Varagur, Jake Bittle, Natasha Stagg, and Molly Pepper Steemson share some memories of their favorite novels to be read during summer.
“The phrase Single Best Novel sends a shiver down my spine because I love a lot of books, well, not equally, but without a clear hierarchy, and having to identify a number one makes me wonder if I’ve ever read a book before. But I can tell you one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years was Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt.
I read it when I was home visiting my family in San Francisco, where they all still live and where I grew up, and I bought a copy at Green Apple Books, which was the bookstore of my childhood. I remember finishing it lying down in a patch of grass on a rare sunny summer day in Golden Gate Park, maybe stealing some quiet moments away from my sweet nephews, and just being blown away by this book’s clear-eyed, earth-shattering wisdom, the way it wrote into both the urgency and difficulty of certain strains of familial love.” - Hannah Kingsley-Ma
“A lifetime ago, I spent the summer of my senior year going on a high school trip to Europe. It was one of those slogs where students got to see 30 countries in 29 days for 28 dollars. It was a uniquely miserable experience that exposed me to some of the worst parts of Europe’s remarkable cities.
My best memory from that trip may have been spending nights inside our battered hostels, listening to shouts of “Yankee, Go Home!” while reading Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic novel The Stand.
The 1978 novel (eerily enough) starts with a weaponized flu that escapes a government lab and kills most of the world’s population. King masterfully describes the horrors of the unfolding pandemic, while taking readers on a journey that starts inside a Lincoln Tunnel hellscape and ends with a final showdown between good and evil on the Las Vegas strip.
In those 800 or so pages between, the characters move across an unforgiving landscape while survivors pass time by recalling the indescribable thrill of a Yankees-Red Sox game, as well as other uniquely American moments. The Stand is a book packed with magical pop culture references that made this American kid miss home even more. - Joe Scarborough
“Far and away my best summer reading ever was The Three-Body Problem sci-fi series by Cixin Liu. I started them in 2019 on a wonderful vacation with a friend on the Turkish island of Bozcaada, near the ancient city of Troy, and was completely sucked in, transported, obsessed. Then I panicked and tried to slow down because I needed them to last through my subsequent trip, which I was dreading (through no fault of the great nation of Albania). I managed to stretch out the third volume, which explodes the premise on a log scale, to two whole days on the “Albanian riviera” and when I finished, brief euphoria was trailed by an unspeakable comedown. I wished for days, maybe weeks, afterward for a nonviolent amnesia-inducing event so I could read them again for the first time. I don’t think science is there yet, but if the experience awaits you, I am envious!” - Krithika Varagur
“I read Gwendoline Riley’s First Love during a London heatwave. I read most of it on Hampstead Heath, under an oak tree, with my head resting on the thigh of the man I was seeing at the time. It was ninety-one degrees. I read him anything brutal, scatological, cruel—like an exorcism. I finished it at one a.m. that night, alone, in a bath that had gone cold.” - Molly Pepper Steemson
“I immediately thought of reading Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann poolside at the author’s own summer house, as the guest of a house-sitter a few years ago. I’m sure the timing was calculated, but I remember it as kismet, and the book itself had this lively, drunk-feeling melancholy that was perfect for the season and seclusion. By another coincidence, the book was reissued just last month, I think, with a great intro by Geoff Dyer.” - Natasha Stagg
“I’m not sure it’s the best novel I’ve ever read during the summer—I read Proust during the summer—but the one that comes to mind is Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler. A lot of people confuse summer books with beach books, but they aren’t the same. A summer book has to be something you can read in massive daylong chunks, like at the beach, but it should also be something you can dip into while waiting for someone to meet you at dinner and then gush about to them when they show up.
This book is a classic of Canadian literature about a family of Jewish bootleggers in Montreal. It has the joy and ambition of both Dickens and García Márquez, it’s long but not too long, and no one has ever read it, all of which makes it a perfect summer book even though it takes place in some quite cold locales. I read my parents’ copy for the first time as an adolescent. I found another copy on a stoop in the summer of 2020 and read it for the second time then, right around the time that New York opened fake outdoor dining, in a lot of little bursts at makeshift tables on Canal Street or Vanderbilt Avenue, and then in gorgeous draughts at my wife’s family’s home in Door County, Wisconsin. I can recall specific pages that I read while sitting inside a screened-in porch at that home listening to a sultry thunderstorm explode all over the house.” - Jake Bittle
And now for the main event…
The most-recommended summer novels (and memories associated with them) from Feed Me readers.
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (8 mentions)
“It was August, summer was winding down. I was on NJ Transit coming back from Spring Lake, reading the last 150 pages of Lonesome Dove. It was a weekday, I was supposed to be working on the train, but I couldn’t put the book down. I had spent the past four days physically at the Jersey Shore, but spiritually on a cattle drive to Montana. 800 pages later, as the train pulled into Penn Station, I finished the book, crying. I had work to do, summer was over.” - Natalie
“One of the best memories: taking long walks with my dad on the Cape and talking about the book all summer. He had watched the series in the late ‘80s but not read the book. As I reached the end, I got copies for him and my husband - they both read it, so I kept half-living in the book’s world into late summer and fall, even after I finished it.” - M., art historian
“Reading on lunch breaks, after work with a cocktail in hand in pub gardens, and by lamplight into the wee hours of the morning to keep reading— I couldn’t read it fast enough, whilst simultaneously never wanting it to end.” - Bella
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (5 mentions)
“Staying up late with room service and instead of the usual cable TV, My Brilliant Friend!” - Nicole, Film Executive
The Guest by Emma Cline (5 mentions)
“I was in Nantucket, surrounded by a bunch of multimillion-dollar homes and gleaming green lawns. I felt like an outsider there—like the protagonist of the book in the Hamptons. I couldn’t put it down and read it compulsively in the shade of a big oak tree on my boyfriend’s sister’s lawn.” - Maja, Social Media Specialist
“I was at Pacifica Beach with one of my best friends on an unusually hot summer day (well hot at least for SF) eating crunchwrap supremes from the Taco Bell Cantina that overlooked the dunes. I’d just told her in the car ride over that I was moving to LA. I was dreading this talk for weeks, knowing that telling her meant it was really happening. So we sat there on the sandy towel with the sun in our face and the waves lapping ahead of us and read our books, both not knowing the next time we’d do this again but content that we’d always have this day and this moment.” - Margaret, Communications
“This book felt like coming home. My friend described it as a feeling she just wanted to stay in for a while.” - on Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
Normal People by Sally Rooney (4 mentions)
“I remember reading it while on the subway on a hot day coming home from work. I was so engrossed in the story, so lusty yet anxiety-inducing. I remember feeling like I was so clearly in a different world than everyone else on the train car. Like no one could comprehend the magic I was reading before me. It was unlike any story, any writing I’d read before. I’ve been obsessed with Sally Rooney ever since.” - Makena, PR Consultant
“I read it in London where it was THE book of the summer. Everyone had it open on the Tube or at the parks. I felt like I was part of a wider collective. It was a fun feeling.” - Anonymous
Summer Sisters by Judy Blume (4 mentions)
“I was on a plane. I distinctly remember wondering about Martha’s Vineyard and being jealous that I had never been there (still haven’t!).” - Caryn, stay at home parent, volunteer extraordinaire
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (4 mentions)
“Sitting in my hammock in the backyard in a relatively new city during golden hour. Feeling completely lost and unhappy with where I was at but trying to trust the plan. This book felt like coming home. My friend described it as a feeling she just wanted to stay in for a while. Summery, sweet, and immersive.” - Sophia, Social Media & Marketing Consultant
“I read it in the park near my house, the afternoon summer sun shining. Last summer, my mother was diagnosed with cancer for the fourth time, this book tells the story of women as individuals and mothers in a beautiful way.” - Elizabeth
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (3 mentions)
“I had actually just moved to Brooklyn and was starting a job in a few weeks time; it was such gorgeous writing and it made me feel connected to my new home in unexpected ways (and also sometimes funny ways...my apartment is in Brooklyn and on a long walk after reading I saw the ‘A Shoe Grows in Brooklyn’ storefront.” - Claire
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (3 mentions)
“On the Santa Barbara beach reading after talking to a seal.” - PE Analyst
“Hair dripping down my back. Feet up on a teeny tiny white plastic chair. A cold beer. A small plate of chips. A gorgeous book in hand. The feeling of unencumbered joy.” - on The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (3 mentions)
“Read it, loved it, moved by it. Couldn’t shut up about it so my boyfriend nominated it for his book club, and they all loved it, obviously. Deep enough for an emotional pull, small enough to take to the beach. Need more late night wine and oysters in my life.” - Eliza, strategist
“I read it in an afternoon at my friend’s family’s summer house in the Hamptons. She was studying for the LSAT and I, left to my own devices, found the book on her aunt’s bookshelf. I sat by the water and was consumed by it. I think the contrast between the light, peaceful environment, and how lucky I felt to be there, and the darkness and shame Baldwin describes so beautifully, made it feel very intense. I haven’t gotten it out of my head since.” - Rachel, journalist
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (3 mentions)
“I cracked it open on a lazy evening at my family’s lake house in Michigan in July. I could not look away. It was the perfect setting to read a mystery set at a summer camp - I was surrounded by woods and a small lake outside, completely quiet other than cicadas chirping, complete darkness outside the windows. Everyone went to bed and I stayed up late reading under a plaid blanket and a reading lamp. I felt so immersed — the suspenseful and uneasy moments were so heightened.” - Anonymous
The Secret History by Donna Tartt (3 mentions)
“I read it while crashing on a twin air mattress in my friend’s living room in Portland, Oregon. I can still feel it deflating beneath me. I kept my camera off during Zooms so I could read through them and brought it to the socially distanced park with a blanket and a 6-pack of sour beers. I rambled about every detail to the friend I was living with who truly did not give a fuck but kindly put up with me anyway.” - MacKinley, writer
“On a divorced dad vacation in Florida (where you have one week in June with him and the rest of the summer is with your mom).” - Anonymous
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (3 mentions)
“I was on Platis Yialos in Sifnos (bury me in Sifnos!!!). 4 pm. End of season. Locals abound. Breezy. Sun beaming, but in a soft 4 pm - 6 pm kind of way. I had just swam the length of the beach and was wrapped in my sarong that I use as a towel. Hair dripping down my back. Feet up on a teeny tiny white plastic chair. A cold beer. A small plate of chips. A gorgeous book in hand. The feeling of unencumbered joy.
Sun soaked and tipsy, I finished the book right there on the beach and felt a staggering sense of loss when I turned the final page. If my memory serves me right, I clutched the book to my chest and stared out at the ocean. Perhaps grief? Love is worth the loss, they say… I think this is one of my happiest, most content moments I’ve ever experienced?” - Lauren, Workplace Experience Manager
“This novel reminds you that you’re fine, it reminds you that everyone is a little fucked up, and it’s great motivation to get out and get into some trouble while you’re in Spain.” - on The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Books that received 2 mentions:
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
“Anna Karenina was in the background (foreground, even) of so many of my summer memories last year. She was with me on the beach, in the evening sun on my balcony, on trains and ferries, on park benches. Summer calls for epic literature; a thoroughly developed, densely packed universe you can immerse yourself in for an extended period of time. A book that makes you reach for it over your phone when you’re lazing in the sun, complicated characters to absentmindedly daydream (and worry!) about when going about real-life tasks. Only drawback is its weight, but I found this to be an effective forcing function: If you lug around a heavy book while out and about, you’re more likely to read it, so the lugging around doesn’t feel wasted.” - Emily, freelance editor/translator
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I read it on the beach in Newport after touring Rosecliff, the mansion used in the Robert Redford version of the movie (the best). I like reading it at the end of the summer, which is when the book ends, after covering the promise and hope of things like summer and love and the American Dream. I think it gets better the more you read it, too (especially if it isn’t for a class!)” - Alissa, editor
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
“I remember quitting weed. I rung in my newfound freedom in college (and coping with the 2016 election) by smoking weed more or less every day. The book helped me immensely in quitting.” - Sayer
“I went to Maine by myself for eight days in early September, ostensibly to work on my book, but more to escape the aftermath of a breakup and various entanglements. I turned off my phone and email for that whole time, which now seems kind of crazy. And I basically just drove to little towns around where I was staying, went hiking in Acadia, ate lobster, sat on beaches where it was already getting too cold to swim, and read Middlemarch. I was totally engrossed in it. I remember one afternoon sitting at the top of a hike in Acadia reading about Dorothea and thinking, damn, does it get better than this? I was sort of as miserable and as happy as I’ve been!” - Sophie, writer
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
“Alone at the Rockaways with a beach juice from Rippers in hand. Sun out in full force. Skin completely salted over from intermittent dunks in the ocean. Pure bliss.” - Emily, Publicity Director at Penguin Random House
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
“I was chilling poolside at the Edition South Beach devouring the savage story. The only thing that pulled my nose out of that book for a few seconds on that trip was my now-husband asking me to marry him.” — Ray, Bartender/Stand Up Comic
The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
“I was 19, and in-between my sophomore and junior year at UCLA, I wanted to study abroad in Europe like the rest of the cool kids, I couldn’t afford to, I had never left the United States, so I set up an Au Pair gig in the south of Spain. I begged my grandma to buy me a one-way flight, she did, I went, it was magical and it was lonely. I lived with a local family, I spoke zero Spanish before moving, I knew no one, I brought 3 books. I knew Hemingway was good for the summertime, easy words, easy sentences, lots of self reflection. I read it while lying by the community pool while the children played and while lying on the beach of the Mediterranean coves. This novel reminds you that you’re fine, it reminds you that everyone is a little fucked up, and it’s great motivation to get out and get into some trouble while you’re in Spain.” - Nina, Fintech
Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“At school - summer term in Ann Arbor - with the boyfriend I was madly in love with at the time. Sitting on the porch of an old rickety rental house.” - Dani, stay at home mom
Single-mention books
(94* additional books that a reader called their best summer novel)
“I remember being on the subway on my way to my Midtown summer internship reading 20 pages every day and walking into the office with this brick of a book in my hands.” - Brunella, reporter
All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker
The Ambassadors by Henry James
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
Another Country by James Baldwin
“I remember reading it on the subway, feeling super sticky and sweaty, and sobbing uncontrollably, rolling into the West 4th Street station on the F because it is so emotionally devastating.” - Anonymous
The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Before We Were Strangers by Renée Carlino
“I was in Palma, Mallorca on a day bed with the doors open over looking Esglèsia de Sant Francesc. The breeze was breezing, the church bells were belling, and my lover was cooking dinner while I lay reading Big Swiss. I was so swept up in it that when dinner was ready I felt like when parents rip their children away from electronics and they have this dazed lost in another world look about them. Can’t quite return to present moment. I tried to return, but the language was not returning to me. A fight ensued, both of us fleeing to separate ends of the small apartment. I extended an olive branch. It was Big Swiss, like a snake wrapped around my brain. He wasn’t interested so I left to cool off over a walk and rosé in the heat of a Mallorcan night. Sitting alone at Cappuccino, an Italian man offered me a cigarette and another glass of rosé. After showing me pictures of his children he asked for my number. I vengefully gave it to him before he predictably leaned in for a kiss. Which I denied! Obviously! Fighting the clock, my feet scurried me across the slick cobblestones. Returning to the apartment, he told me I smelled of smoke. We always fight in Mallorca.” - Chloe
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
The Changeling by Joy Williams
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
“The breeze was breezing, the church bells were belling and my lover was cooking dinner while I lay reading Big Swiss. I was so swept up in it that when dinner was ready I felt like when parents rip their children away from electronics and they have this dazed lost in another world look about them. Can’t quite return to present moment. I tried to return, but the language was not returning to me.” - on Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez
“I brought the novel to Portugal with me — a friend and I were attending another friend’s wedding in Mafra. There are two photos of me with it on the beach in Ericeira: In one, I’m reading while standing up at the edge of the water, in another I’m sleeping with the novel split open over my face.” - Erica, writer
Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos by Nash Jenkins
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
“The book was a high school graduation gift from my (now late) uncle. I remember receiving it and knowing nothing about it, but he told me the book had a huge impact on his life. I remember cracking open the book in the middle of the summer before freshman year of college, and the speeches (especially the closing one) being unlike anything I’ve ever read. The book is one of the most impactful I’ve read, both because of who I got it from, and because the characters and behaviors are universally observable.” - Anonymous, investor
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
The Great Chimera by M. Karagatsis
Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly
“It was recommended to me by a British boy I went out with while on vacation, really adding to the summer of it all. The chaotic family and general humor of the book made me laugh aloud in bed back at home. The great rec from someone I shared a fleeting connection with reminded me what summer is all about: lovely moments are enough.” - Hannah, journalist
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
“My dad read this to my brother and I when it came out (I was ~7 and my brother was ~5). We lived in the desert beneath the Red Mountain in Ivins, Utah with an un-landscaped backyard and a giant desert field behind that. That whole summer we dug holes in the backyard, measuring them with our shovels like they do in the books. My brother even started eating raw onions haha. I reread the book last summer for the first time since and it held up perfectly. 5 stars for a perfectly heartfelt and innocent short summer read.” - Kaleb
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Hurricane Summer by Asha Bromfield
I’ll Take Manhattan by Judith Krantz
Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich
Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau
“I started devouring it at a UES wine bar on a sweltering Friday night around sunset. Door and windows open, really crisp rosé with fat drops of condensation, beautiful prose about a hot Barcelona summer. Andrews writes many rich descriptions of food and wine, so it paired well with the setting. A man started flirting with me, but I scared him off when I said my favorite books were all about 20-something-year-old women struggling. He left me alone and I dove back in, poring over shame and pleasure and everything in between.” - Claire, journalist
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
The Pairing by Casey McQuiston
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
“One hot July weekend, I was riding Metro North to visit my parents when an older gentleman saw what I was reading, leaned over, and said: ‘It takes patience to get through that one. But it’s incredible, isn’t it?’ I had been living inside of the book for weeks—it was a pleasurable toil, but a very solitary one—and felt a shimmer of magic to be connecting with a stranger over it, somewhere along the Connecticut shoreline, nearly a century and a half after it was first published.” - Anna, novelist
Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow
The Return Journey by Maeve Binchy
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
“I remember finishing this book in late August as the summer was winding down. I was staying at a friend's house in Southampton and we stopped by her grandpa’s house for a drink before dinner. For context, the main character in Rules of Civility is a Katherine who loves gin. I too am a Katherine who loves gin. Anyways, we walked into his backyard where he and his group of older gentleman friends were sitting at a table by the pool. They handed us a a gin on the rocks. Here I was on one of the last nights of summer drinking gin by the pool with a group of men from a different generation. It felt like kismet.” - Katherine
Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
“I was still child-free and renting a place in the Hamptons up by the bay with my wife and another couple. Picked it up at Sag Harbor Books (in Sag Harbor, where else) without knowing anything about it, which is a rarity for me, thinking it would be fun to read a book about Sag Harbor while in Sag Harbor, and it ended up being one of the most moving and well-written books I’ve ever read. It’s also hilarious, and the perfect encapsulation of a time and place. Colson Whitehead has since become one of my favorite authors.” - Anonymous
Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
“Fueling my existential dread on a Cycladic beach.” - Kevin, architect
Summer Crossing by Truman Capote
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki
Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
“On an air conditioned subway car commuting home on the hottest day of the year.” - Martin
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
“Oh, I love this question. I was in Cape Cod (Yarmouth / Harwich area) for the first time with my boyfriend. After eating crab egg benedicts on the beach (with minimal seagull interruption), I only put the book down to reapply sunscreen or tell my boyfriend about a funny plot point. I remember feeling so grateful for having the ingredients for a perfect day at my fingertips: a gorgeous breakfast and a Jennifer Egan page turner all while on the beach with my favorite person.” - Deanna, Communications Director
The Wedding People by Alison Espach
Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
The World According to Garp by John Irving
One more thing:
highly rec Cheever’s short story the swimmer to anyone who liked The Guest. I feel like the two protagonists could know each other
Oh man I’m bummed I missed this, having read 140 books last year I have to throw my favorite book of all time in the ringer— A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving. My dad loved this book so much my brother was named after it! Also have such fond memories of reading The Bee Sting by Paul Murray all throughout London last summer and gasping so loud at the ending page the person on the tube next to me asked me about the book and I ended up giving them my copy right then and there.