You Want to Read My Book of the Summer

Are looking for an all-star read or are spending time outdoors

Hi friends,

First, a PSA: If you have a Spotify premium account, you can listen to 15 hours of audiobooks every month. That’s roughly a book and a half (for me, at least). I mention it because I’ve heard from a ton of big readers who pay for Spotify who had no idea of the benefit (AKA, this is not an ad).

If this makes you want to give audiobooks a try, some of my faves are Jenny Holiday’s Canadian Boyfriend, I Killed Zoe Spanos by Kit Frick and How Not To Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz.

Quick reminder:  the auction to help East City Bookshop come back from flood damage closes tonight.

And, now, what to read if…

You Want to Read My Book of the Summer

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

Liz Moore’s Long Bright River, a gripping murder mystery set against the opioid epidemic, is one of my favorite books of the past few years. I’m baffled by its exclusion from the NYT Top 100 list. It set what I thought was a nearly impossible bar for her follow-up, but The God of the Woods clears it with space to spare. It’s my favorite book of the summer. A searing mystery set at an Adirondacks summer camp, spanning two timelines and including at least a half dozen points of view, it blew me away.

Early one morning in August 1975, a counselor finds an empty bunk where one of her campers, Barbara Van Larr, should be. Barbara isn’t your average teenager. She’s the daughter of the wealthy couple who owns the summer camp, whose first-born son, Bear, disappeared fourteen years earlier.

Moore seamlessly alternates between the two timelines, in a narrative that includes long-kept family secrets (my favorite phrase in a novel’s description), simmering class divides between the Van Larr’s and the blue-collar community they live in and a fully immersive setting.

This is one of those books that had me sneaking pages whenever I could. When I got off the metro on my way from work with just 20 pages left, I sat on a bench to finish it before walking home. The next day, I loaned it to a coworker. Otherwise I would have began an instant reread. (I should mention I’m far from the only one who’s declared The God of the Woods the Book of the Summer. It’s popped up everywhere from former President Barack Obama’s summer reading list to the Indie Next list selected by bookstores.)

You’re Looking for an Out-of-this-World Read

Light Years from Home by Mike Chen

Fifteen years before Light Years from Home opens, Jakob Shao and his father disappeared while on a family camping trip. Days later, the Shao patriarch reappears, convinced his son has been abducted by aliens. The Shao daughters — Evie and Kass — responded to the trauma differently. Kass is convinced her screw-up brother ran off, but Evie has teamed up with a group of alien conspiracy theorists looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

When Evie’s pals discover an unexplainable event not far from where Jacob first vanished, she tentatively reaches out to her sister after years of silence. Their family reunion grows more complicated when their brother reappears, speaking of an intergalactic war. Is he mentally unwell or was he really abducted? With the FBI — and possibly an entire space armada — hunting Jacob, the Shao’s need to quickly find a way to fix their issues, and finally address the past.

I continue to work through — and be delighted by — Mike Chen’s backlist after listening to Quantum Love Story at the beginning of this year. He excels at telling human stories — in this case, a family saga — with speculative and fantastical elements.

You Explored the Great Outdoors this Summer

Fuzz by Mary Roach

I am more of an “outside” person than an “outdoors” person, but I still thoroughly enjoyed Fuzz, Mary Roach’s exploration of what happens “when nature breaks the law.” She takes readers along as she attends a conference for animal-attack forensics investigators, installs a vulture effigy and gets mugged by a macaque. Underlying these offbeat and often funny experiences is an attempt to understand how people and wildlife can live together.

My favorite anecdote from the book is about Saudi Arabia’s attempt to build a camel-proof car because of the number of camel-caused auto accidents there. I’ve broken out this new fact dozens of times since reading it.

Fuzz is marked by Roach’s characteristic humor (the San Francisco Chronicle called her “the Deborah Vance of science writing”) and she has a real gift for explaining complex concepts in clear easy-to-understand language. Come for the entertainment, stay for the new factoids.

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