8 books to read this summer
For many, the longer, slower days of summer mean a little more time to get lost in an absorbing book. Friday on the PBS NewsHour, NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan and New York Times books editor Gilbert Cruz join Jeffrey Brown to reveal their summer reading picks.
Here’s a roundup of some of their favorites. These answers have been lightly edited for brevity.
“The Five-Star Weekend” by Elin Hilderbrand
She’s a summer staple. This is an author who has written almost 30 books, most of which are set on Nantucket Island. She’s a perennial bestseller. This one involves a recently widowed food blogger who brings a bunch of friends together on Nantucket to sort of help her heal.
– Gilbert Cruz
“Crook Manifesto” by Colson Whitehead
[Colson Whitehead] is a two-time Pulitzer winner. He’s won for very serious books about the Black experience in America, “Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys.” But he’s worked across many genres, and he has written a heist novel, and this is a sequel to that heist novel, “Harlem Shuffle,” which came out a couple of years ago. That novel was set in 1960s Harlem, and this one is set in 1970s Harlem. And if you know anything about New York in the 1970s, it was a grimy place, a dangerous place, but it was also a very exciting place.
– Gilbert Cruz
“Good Night, Irene” by Luis Alberto Urrea
Usually [Luis Alberto Urrea] is writing about issues of the U.S.-Mexican border, but here he’s drawing on a story that derives from his mother’s experiences during World War II. She was a volunteer with the Red Cross, she was a so-called Donut Dolly. She and another woman rode around in a truck delivering coffee and donuts to servicemen. … His mother followed Patton’s army behind the lines in Battle of the Bulge. So we’re getting a Herman Wouk-type big history, but also with a lot of twists and turns and very affecting.
– Maureen Corrigan
“I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home” by Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore, there’s nobody like her the way she plays with language, her kind of warm but absurdist view of life. She’s telling a double story here. One is a story set in the 19th century and it has something to do with Abraham Lincoln. So, anybody who’s read George Saunders‘ “Lincoln in the Bardo,” this kind of has that feel to it… . The other story she’s telling is very up to the minute about a young man who’s lost his lover.
– Maureen Corrigan
“Silver Nitrate” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
This one is set in the 1990s Mexico City film scene. It stars a sound editor, her best friend who is a soap opera actor, and this cult horror director that they come across who believes he’s been cursed by a piece of film that a Nazi occultist handled. It’s spooky and it’s scary, but it’s also set in Mexico City. So you have both the cool and the hot.
– Gilbert Cruz
“Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett
I’m looking forward to… Ann Patchett’s “Tom Lake,” in which she kind of plays with Chekhov’s three sisters. These are three sisters who isolate at a family cherry orchard during the pandemic.
– Maureen Corrigan
“Be Mine” by Richard Ford
[Richard Ford is] bringing his Frank Bascombe novels to a close. … I love his writing. And to think that he’s sort of saying farewell to this character whose life has followed his own through the seasons of his own life is really touching.
– Maureen Corrigan
“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride
This novel is set in the 1970s in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a Jewish and African-American community. But a body is found under the floor of a building site.
– Maureen Corrigan
Source: PBS NewsHour
