What’s on your summer reading list?

Nothing says vacation like overpacking your suitcase with books.

Hot take: the best part of a vacation happens before you even leave your house. No, it’s not when you set your work email auto-reply to “out of office” (though that does provide a sweet little buzz), it’s when you pick the books you’re going to bring along.

Summer reading, and in particular summer vacation reading, is the answer to all the previous months I spent stacking books next to my side of the bed, hoping for/dreaming about the day when I would have the time to actually read them.

Next week I’ll be flying to Greece for our annual family vacation, and I am already obsessing over which books to bring. Here’s my current list:

• Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin

  Jen Beagin’s novel, Big Swiss, is one of my favorite novels to come out in the past couple of years. It’s strange, funny, dark, and slyly heartbreaking. Pretend I’m Dead is Beagin’s debut novel, about “a cleaning lady on a quest for self-acceptance after her relationship with a loveable junkie goes awry.”

• All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation by Elizabeth Gilbert

  The author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love has a new memoir about “love and loss, addiction and recovery, and grief and liberation.” It’s scheduled to release on September 9, but I’ve got an advance reading copy (oh hello, humblebrag) so I’ll be diving in early.

• Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

  No summer reading list is complete without a murder mystery. I’ve heard that Magpie Murders is an Agatha Christie-style whodunit, so I’m curious to check it out.

• Howard’s End by E.M. Forster

  As an English Lit major, I am still bewildered that I have yet to read this beloved classic. Especially because I’m a fan of sprawling family stories, and this one follows “three families in Edwardian England whose lives intertwine around a fateful country house.”

• Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

  I love literary sc-fi, and the description of this novel ticks just about every box: “a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.”

That’s my vacation book stack! Now, I'd like to hear from you. What’s on your summer reading list? Are you packing any old classics, long-awaited new releases, or guilty pleasures?

Hit reply or drop a comment and let me know what books you’re bringing to the beach, the mountains, or the backyard hammock…

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