Summer is finally here, folks, and with it comes that most burning of questions: which books should I bring with me on vacation?
Sadly, there is only so much room in a single suitcase, and we must all be judicious about which books we pack and which we leave at home to gather dust in the To Be Read pile.
But how can I possibly choose?! I hear you ask. It’s a conundrum that has driven many a voracious reader to madness and despair, destroying vacations before they’ve even begun. Thankfully, here at Book Marks we’ve got you covered.
Below you’ll find the best reviewed fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—from Sally Rooney, Marlon James, Karen Russell, Oliver Sacks, George Packer, Morgan Parker, and many more—of the past six months: 30 critically acclaimed titles for your summertime reading consideration. So whether you’re jetting off to parts unknown, or just hopping on a train to a nearby beach, we suggest that you start your summer holiday by taking a trip to your local independent bookstore, choosing a book from each category, and then letting yourself be swept away by some of the year’s finest writing.
Bon voyage!
*
1. Normal People by Sally Rooney
24 Rave • 18 Positive • 4 Mixed
“.. a compulsive, psychologically astute will-they-or-won’t-they love story involving two of the most sympathetic people you’re liable to meet between covers. Although hailed as a voice of millennials, Rooney offers plenty to appeal to readers across genders and generations … Rooney’s dialogue, like her descriptive prose, is slyly ironic, alternately evasive and direct, but always articulate. It cuts to the heart. She seems remarkably comfortable writing about sex—even uncomfortable sex—and she seamlessly integrates well-crafted texts, emails, and Facebook posts into her narratives like the digital native she is. Yet while Rooney may write about apparent aimlessness and all the distractions of our age, her novels are laser-focused and word-perfect. They build power by a steady accretion of often simple declarative sentences that track minuscule shifts in feelings … Although frequently heartbreaking, Normal People isn’t bleak. The brave determination of Rooney’s characters to reach out and try to catch each other with no guarantee of success—and to open themselves to ‘moments of joy despite everything’—is ultimately hopeful.”
–Heller McAlpin (NPR)
Read Sally Rooney’s “Superheroes and the Myths of American Power” here
2. Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James
20 Rave • 12 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan
“In these pages, James conjures the literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe—filled with dizzying, magpie references to old movies and recent TV, ancient myths and classic comic books, and fused into something new and startling by his gifts for language and sheer inventiveness … James is such a nimble and fluent writer … Even when he is nestling one tale within another like Russian dolls that underscore the provisional nature of storytelling… he is giving us a gripping, action-packed narrative. What the novel could have used is a little judicious pruning: As in superhero movies, the action sometimes assumes a predictable, episodic rhythm—one violent, bravura showdown after another, strung together by interludes of travel and efforts to regroup and connect the dots … With Tracker and the Leopard, James has created two compelling and iconic characters—characters who will take their place in the pantheon of memorable and fantastical superheroes.”
–Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times)
Read Marlon James’ “One Day I Will Write About My Mother” here
3. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
20 Rave • 7 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The poems from his book Night Sky With Exit Wounds expose raw hurt, love and joy, and in performing them, he demonstrated the confidence required to reveal himself. Vuong does the same in his compelling, emotional first novel … Vuong as a writer is daring. He goes where the hurt is, creating a novel saturated with yearning and ache. Little Dog is turned inside out by his search for validation, and Vuong imbues his quest with meaning that extends beyond the personal … Vuong refuses to be embarrassed. He transforms the emotional, the visceral, the individual into the political in an unforgettable–indeed, gorgeous–novel, a book that seeks to affect its readers as profoundly as Little Dog is affected, not only by his lover but also by the person who brought him into the world.”
–Viet Thanh Nguyen (TIME)
4. Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
14 Rave • 18 Positive • 3 Mixed • 3 Pan
“I wrote down the microchemical raptures I was having, one after the next, from beginning to end of this revelatory novel … The Lost Children Archives [is] a semi-autobiographical gloss that Lueselli skillfully crafts without dipping into the pedantic accumulations that sometimes overwhelm such books … It is a breathtaking journey, one that builds slowly and confidently until you find yourself in a fever dream of convergences. The Lost Children Archive is simply stunning. It is a perfect intervention for our horrible time, but that fleeting concurrence is not why this book will be read and sampled and riffed on for years to come … The Lost Children Archive contains multitudes, contradictions, and raises difficult questions for which there are no easy answers. It is a great American novel. It is also a great human novel.”
–Rob Spillman (Guernica)
Read an interview with Valeria Luiselli here
5. Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
15 Rave • 11 Positive
“Moss expertly captures the hinterland of being an older teen who is not yet an adult, splicing Silvie’s encounters with shame, curiosity, desire and fear … There is a spring-taut tension embedded in the pages, which is built up slowly by a number of means. Moss dispenses not just with speech indicators, but runs all the dialogue into regular sentences. It’s both breathless and indistinguishable from the other text … The novel gradually narrows its focus, and the ending becomes a bottleneck from which character and reader feel they can’t escape … Moss’s brevity is admirable, her language pristine. This story lingers, leaving its own ghosts, but with important lessons for the future of idealising the past.”
–Sinead Gleeson (The Irish Times)
Read an excerpt from Ghost Wall here
6. Women Talking by Miriam Toews
16 Rave • 7 Positive
“… less an indignant manifesto about sexual trauma, or a speculative celebration of female empowerment, than it is a confession of violence as something stitched into the fabric of every community, and an exploration of what it means to claim communal thought—even disagreement itself—as an inalienable human right … crackles with the energy of consciousness on every page. Its attention is tender and funny, its characters utterly distinct and alive … The novel is deeply aware of how this simultaneity—the weighty sitting shoulder to shoulder with the daily—is especially inescapable for women … Toews doesn’t just allow the trivial to live alongside the weighty, she insists on it…By refusing to segregate the mundane from the consequential, Toews implicitly argues that what we call trivial often isn’t trivial at all—that just as much truth lives inside those small moments of care and grace as in our grand philosophizing about authority and justice—and allows her characters to come to life as more than helpless victims or walking thesis statements.”
–Leslie Jamison (Bookforum)
Read an interview with Miriam Toews here
7. Orange World by Karen Russell
18 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Something is, however, not right in each of these worlds. Usually two things—one private, the other bigger, in one way or another environmental. Russell’s gift is how she braids these together, letting the private un-right-ness bob to the surface like a beacon … With each story Russell pitches a pup tent in each new universe so rapidly you almost don’t feel its assumptions getting to their dark work … These tales are not short, but they feel even roomier owing to the way Russell cracks open narrative space with humor … Russell is also the greatest user of verbs in American fiction since Annie Dillard. Dogs ‘dervish’ around kitchens. A man is ‘turtled’ into his hoody in a rain storm … The precision of Russell’s writing makes it that much easier to accept how she is tilting reality.”
–John Freeman (The Boston Globe)
Read “Looking for Home: Karen Russell on America’s Housing Catastrophe” here
8. Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed
“...one of the most original and most accomplished American novels of the decade … It’s hard to adequately describe how devastating, and how brilliant, Where Reasons End is. It’s something like a metafiction, an essentially plotless novel that asks the reader to interrogate its language, indeed, to call all words into question … [Li] succeeds, admirably. Where Reasons End is, as it must be, a profoundly sad novel, but Li never descends into mawkishness or sentimentality. She describes perfectly how the death of a loved one takes over the ones left behind, battering the survivors without rest … Where Reasons End is the rarest of things: a perfect book, a masterpiece of American fiction, and it proves beyond a doubt that Li is one of this country’s greatest writers. It’s a beautiful look at what happens when language disappears, betrays us, lets us down…”
–Michael Schaub (NPR)
Read an interview with Yiyun Li here
9. Exhalation by Ted Chiang
19 Rave • 1 Positive
“A handful of living science fiction writers have attained godlike status—N.K. Jemisin, Cixin Liu, and Ann Leckie, to name a few. But Ted Chiang is the only one who’s done it without writing a novel … oh, his stories. They’re a religious experience … In Exhalation, which could be subtitled ‘Black Mirror For Optimists,’ every story seems crafted with one objective in mind—pure awe … The three longer stories in Exhalation are Chiang’s finest work to date … Savor all nine of these stories. Read them one sitting at a time, somewhere still and quiet, and let them sink in.”
–Adam Morgan (The A.V. Club)
Read an interview with Ted Chiang here
10. Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken
13 Rave • 10 Positive • 3 Mixed
“Elizabeth McCracken holds a funhouse mirror up to the Great American Novel. Whimsy and weirdness spark at Bowlaway’s edges … As Bowlaway moves through tremendous social change, McCracken develops her characters with remarkable depth. Her sense of detail is precise but comprehensive … This is McCracken’s masterpiece, a story of reinvention: that most American of themes, the promise that’s guided a country through depressions, wars, tragedies, betrayals. The author has reframed the family saga for the misfit: that truest American character … It is rousing.”
–David Canfield (Entertainment Weekly)
Read an interview with Elizabeth McCracken here
**
1. Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
17 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed
“You know a book has entered your bloodstream when the ground beneath your feet, once viewed as bedrock, suddenly becomes a roof to unknown worlds below … If writing books is a form of making maps to guide us through new intellectual territory, Macfarlane is a cartographer of the first order … Macfarlane’s writing is muscular, meticulously researched and lyrical, placing him in the lineage of Peter Matthiessen, Gretel Ehrlich and Barry Lopez. What distinguishes his work is his beginner’s mind, his lack of self-consciousness, his physical pursuit of unlearning what he has been taught by received information … Underland is a book of dares. Macfarlane dares to go deep into earth’s unseen world and illuminate what we not only shy away from but what we don’t even know exists … Underland is a portal of light in dark times. I needed this book of beauty below to balance the pain we’re witnessing aboveground.”
–Terry Tempest Williams (The New York Times Book Review)
Read an interview wit Robert Macfarlane here
2. The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang
13 Rave • 8 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… unnervingly excellent … [Wang’s] essays are all varied lenses on what it is to be one kind of human, to be schizoaffective, to be her. As a whole, The Collected Schizophrenias provides a new and welcome map for the severe landscapes of schizoaffective disorder, of cerebral disease, diagnosis, recovery, and relapse, of the many human mysteries of the schizophrenias. The essays are resoundingly intelligent, often unexpectedly funny, questioning, fearless and peerless, as Wang makes for brilliant company on 13 difficult walks through largely uncharted territory.”
–Scott Cheshire (The Los Angeles Times)
Read an conversation between Esme Weijun Wang and R.O. Kwon here
3. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
11 Rave • 10 Positive
“Patrick Radden Keefe’s great achievement is to tell Northern Ireland’s 50 years of conflict through personal stories—a gripping and profoundly human explanation for a past that still denies and defines the future … Only an outsider could have written a book this good. Irish or British writers are tainted by provenance … [the book] handles the minefield scrupulously, dodges loaded vocabulary and allows people to condemn themselves by their actions … Humanity shines through in the small anecdotes … I can’t praise this book enough: it’s erudite, accessible, compelling, enlightening. I thought I was bored by Northern Ireland’s past until I read it.”
–Melanie Reid (The Times)
Read an interview with Patrick Radden Keefe here
4. Working by Robert A. Caro
7 Rave • 16 Positive • 1 Mixed
“.. indispensable … Through its mix of previously published personal essays, cohesively edited together with new reflections and insights, Working becomes an invaluable how-to for aspiring nonfiction writers and journalists. It’s an intimate glimpse into the anxieties and painstaking sacrifices that go into the ridiculously in-depth reporting Caro has made his name on … The research is the backbone of his books, as it would be for any historian. But the key to Caro’s success rests in his ability to bring alive the people who witnessed or were transformed by the political power he’s trying to describe … That’s the ultimate charm of Working: it’s a reminder that we should care less about whether or not the work gets finished, and more for everything Caro has given us so far.”
–Quinn Myers (The Chicago Review of Books)
5. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep
9 Rave • 11 Positive • 4 Mixed
“…what I didn’t see coming was the emotional response I would have as I blazed through the last 20 pages of the book—yet there I was, weeping … Each section of the book could stand on its own, making it feel, in a way, like three books in one. But, ultimately, Furious Hours delivers a gripping, incredibly well-written portrait of not only Harper Lee, but also of mid-20th century Alabama—and a still-unanswered set of crimes to rival the serial killers made infamous in the same time period.”
–Ilana Masad (NPR)
Read an excerpt from Furious Hours here
6. Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer
12 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed
“I doubt that any novel, not even one co-written by Graham Greene and F. Scott Fitzgerald, could have captured Holbrooke fully, and I certainly thought that no biography ever would. But now one has. George Packer’s Our Man portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory: relentless, ambitious, voracious, brilliant, idealistic, noble, needy and containing multitudes. It’s both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy, with Holbrooke strutting and fretting his hour on the stage … the book overflows with the trait that was Holbrooke’s saving grace: an in-your-face intellectual honesty that is not tainted, as Holbrooke’s was, by his manipulativeness. The result is so bracing that Our Man not only revitalizes but in some ways reinvents the art of journalistic biography.”
–Walter Isaacson (The New York Times Book Review)
7. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib
10 Rave • 7 Positive
“Riveting and poetic … Adburraqib’s gift is his ability to flip from a wide angle to a zoom with ease. He is a five-tool writer, slipping out of the timeline to deliver vivid, memoiristic splashes as well as letters he’s crafted to directly address the central players, dead and living. He is a grown man, a cultural critic, an Important Voice, but he’s also an awkward kid huddled in the back seat of the school bus, that ‘Beats, Rhymes and Life’ cassette wearing out his Walkman. He brings everything to the game, whether a cosmic vignette about Leonard Cohen or an unexpected curveball that somehow morphs into connective tissue … The beauty of being both a true fan and a professional is that you can embrace even the low points and yet analyze with pinpoint accuracy when your heroes have fallen short. And as you search for the perfect ending, you’ll realize there seldom is one.”
–Geoff Edgers (The Washington Post)
8. Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales by Oliver Sacks
11 Rave • 3 Positive
“Oliver Sacks, however, has a way of writing about his areas of lifelong interest—they include libraries, neurological disorders, botany and the history of science—that never fails to captivate me even if they are far from my own passions. Sacks possesses the crucial knack of neither dumbing down nor writing over the head of a lay reader … Much science writing for a general readership strains to explain specialized topics. For Sacks it’s more about enthusing his way to promote appreciation (and greater understanding). We get excited about, say, ferns because he is so into their beauty and resilience … If you love fascinating tidbits, this book of uncollected or previously unpublished essays is for you … neatly summarizes the extraordinary career of a brilliant translator between far-apart worlds.”
–Claude Peck (The Star Tribune)
9. A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell
7 Rave • 8 Positive
“Purnell’s account of Hall’s hectic, amphetamine-fuelled exploits never falters. It recalls Caroline Moorehead’s wonderful book, Village of Secrets, about defiance of the Nazis in Vichy France, but has an added touch of Ben Macintyre’s brio … tells a redacted life. The erasures owe as much to Hall’s secretive and mystifying nature as to official censorship so it is a marvel that Purnell, who has previously written biographies of Boris Johnson and Clementine Churchill, has discovered so much. It is a pleasure to read a biography in which the author admires her subject so warmly. This might so easily have been a pernickety, fact-finding book, but instead it is a rousing tale of derring-do. Men, women and tomboys will all enjoy the courage and initiative of Virginia Hall.”
–Richard Davenport-Hines (The Times)
Read an excerpt from A Woman of No Importance here
10. L.E.L: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon by Lucasta Miller
6 Rave • 9 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Ms. Miller gives us a thorough view of Letitia’s character as relentless flatterer, flirt and self-promoter, but also as a desperate woman, both raised-up and ruined by her relationship with a powerful but truly awful man … [These details only touch on] the details of Letitia Landon’s life as patched together and filled out by Ms. Miller, who has ably dispersed a mighty welter of deception, obfuscation and evasion … Miller quotes and analyzes [Landon’s work] with revelatory insight … In this infinitely rich literary biography, Ms. Miller treats the life and the work dialectically, each informing and shaping the other…”
–Katherine A. Powers (The Wall Street Journal)
Read Lucasta Miller’s “On the Obsessions of the Literary Biographer” here
**
1. The Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
11 Rave • 5 Positive
” … extraordinary … Love poems… are mingled with poems of grief-stricken horror… and protest… as the book winds toward its dark conclusion. Re-envisioning disability as power and silence as singing, Kaminsky has created a searing allegory precisely tuned to our times, a stark appeal to our collective conscience.”
–Craig Morgan Teicher (NPR)
Read a poem from Deaf Republic here
2. Magical Negro by Morgan Parker
9 Rave • 1 Positive
“What’s most evident in Magical Negro is that there is nothing new under the sun. What has happened once will happen again. As a Black woman, this is a lesson that Parker has inherited and internalized. A history as muddied, as denied, and as multifarious as Black history inspires an artist such as Parker to take on many different personas and former lives. She embodies popular Black icons from photographs, music, and film, as in her poem about Diana Ross. She documents her own maturation as a Black woman, which includes meditations on, and resurrections of, the past and how she was conditioned. And, finally, she remains mindful of Black people, even those she’s never known but who bear a common heritage in their faces. Magical Negro is a reminder, finally, of the cycles of Black life, and Parker, moving fluidly through time and space, is a poet unafraid to immortalize them.”
–Morgan Jerkins (The Poetry Foundation)
Read a poem from Magical Negro here
3. The Tradition by Jericho Brown
6 Rave • 4 Positive
“Drawing on the language of myths and flowers, Jericho Brown’s newest poems extol, dismantle, challenge, and enlarge the tradition … The poems of The Tradition, Brown’s third collection, are at turns tender and vulnerable, severe and riveting … The Traditioncontains love poems and elegies, poems that bring into thrilling contact the tropes of ‘traditional’ lyric—lilies, Greco-Roman landscapes, museum paintings—with an urgency borne of threat. Brown deploys ‘traditional’ lyric form, too, to make his starkest and most memorable critiques … Remarkably, Jericho Brown’s mythic retellings critique the assumptions behind them as well as the ways they justify historical and contemporary violence … The collection’s very best poems even show the violent world pressing in on the private space of erotic lyric … Brown handles his complicated and messy subjects with a strong sense of formal order and emotional restraint … The Tradition revels in complexity and self-incrimination.”
–Richie Hofmann (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Read a poem from The Tradition here
4. Invasive species by Marwa Helal
7 Rave • 2 Positive
“Helal’s first and often stellar book belongs to many categories, and to none … The volume shows her powers—and her amply justified anger … The more-than-clever opening piece introduces a form that Helal dubs ‘the Arabic,’ whose lines must be read (like Arabic) right to left as well as left to right … Helal’s title puns on the ecological concept of invasive species (like Asian carp in United States lakes) and on the notion that immigrants cannot belong here. The poet may be safe in Brooklyn now, but how many others—how many other Arabic speakers, how many Arab-Americans, how many African-Americans—are not? … Such questions generate Helal’s best work … It is a push that could, and should, open doors.”
–Stephanie Burt (The New York Times Book Review)
Read two poems from Invasive Species here
5. Oculus by Sally Wen Mao
4 Rave • 4 Positive
“… stunning … neon and imaginative language anchored in historical and cultural questions of representation, othering, inclusion and exclusion … Mao is doing the necessary work of interrogating the two-dimensionality of screens, its tendency to flatten the representation of those who, in real life, are already flattened in society: minorities and women … Mao is clever in connecting this spectacle to the digital age, and the ways that constant access to the sight of someone can lead to an absence, rather than a presence—a ghostly emptiness … These lovely questions are the Pandora’s boxes Mao’s Oculus has ambitiously opened and exploring them with Mao’s intelligent guidance is a gift itself.”
–Nadia Ismail (Columbia Journal)
=6. Soft Science by Franny Choi
4 Rave • 3 Positive
“…the collection is accessible for anyone wondering about identity, construction, destruction, and human connection in a digital world, in a world further disembodied by the Internet—and yet. The Internet is the modern gay bar. The Internet is how marginalized communities connect to one another. And Choi, as marvelously outlandish as it sounds, manages to both condemn and celebrate this most illustrious tool of society. She does so in language lyric and logical, befitting the behemoth task of taking on the world, and winning.”
–July Westhale (Lambda Literary)
=6. Lima :: Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
4 Rave • 3 Positive
“This is a book about men’s violence against women; the sutures are often literal … even pantomimed injury is, according to the logic of these poems, a result of real damage. Scenters-Zapico is at her best in lines that mingle pleasure and violence … Scenters-Zapico often creates intensity in her poems by setting up an analogy, then knocking it down, only to prop it back up … her astonishing verbal crossings reveal a mind as richly self-divided as any you will find.”
–Dan Chiasson (The New Yorker)
8. The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan
3 Rave • 4 Positive
“Nothing is taboo here. There are honest discussions about sex, drinking, and trauma … Alyan exposes her life and her roots without shame, even when her words could lead to judgment. In poem after poem, there is raw emotion, straightforward storytelling, and unapologetic truth … the reader, like the author, is never on solid ground, never entirely comfortable … The Twenty-Ninth Year stuck with me because it contains stunning lines, while being entirely about going through things and learning to cope with them … The poems here read like scars and sound like heartbreaking stories told by a friend in the darkest booth at a gloomy juke joint.”
–Gabino Iglesias (NPR)
Read two poems from The Twenty-Ninth Year here
9. Only as the Day is Long by Dorianne Laux
5 Rave
“Laux writes with startling directness of the physical and sexual abuse she and her sister suffered at the hands of her father … But there are other poems, just as frank and openhearted, that celebrate the wondrousness of sex (so skillfully that fiction writers should take note) … Beyond her admirable tenacity and spirit, Laux is just plain wise—and refreshingly unpretentious in her wisdom … Laux’s new poems arrive at the end of the collection as a perfect finale, which benefits from what we now know of her life … [Laux’s poems allow us to] understand the bewildering complexity of this act of posthumous forgiveness, as well as the staggering generosity of the poet who committed it.”
–Jonathan Russell Clark (Vulture)
Read a poem from Only as the Day is Long here
10. Swift by David Baker
2 Rave • 3 Positive
“Swift: New and Selected Poems samples eight of his collections and adds a ravishing suite of new elegies for his parents. The volume affords a longitudinal view of a sensibility that is itself devoted to observing change over time … His metaphors buckle to contain…extraordinary, delicate sight … Baker’s poems swerve with tangents and reversals, and often move forward by branching out. Sometimes you feel the tension between the torrent of language and the rigid banks of his chosen stanza forms … But Baker can also moderate tension to allow sentences and the effects they describe to unfold at their own pace … Never a partisan of any single poetic school or creed, Baker is free to toggle between tactics of attention. His forms vary depending upon what his senses perceive: jagged and tense around a mountain lion, long and languid next to a butterfly.”
–Dan Chiasson (The New Yorker)
