What We’re Reading This Summer
Summer loosens its hold on the calendar. The days stretch, the reading slows, and a book becomes the best kind of company: the one you choose entirely for yourself.
This is what the women of SWS are reading this summer, and why each one might belong in your bag too.
Five women, five worlds, five titles, one shared passion for reading.
I Who Have Never Known Men — Jacqueline Harpman
Forty women live in a cage underground, watched by silent guards, with no memory of how they arrived. The youngest among them, who has never known the world above or the touch of another life, becomes our narrator. When the doors open onto an empty earth, what follows is a spare, hypnotic meditation on solitude, time, and what makes a life a life. Written in 1995 and rediscovered by a new generation of readers, it is the rare novel that stays with you long after the final page.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
Arthur Dent’s morning begins with a bulldozer at his door and ends with the Earth demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. What follows is the wittiest tour of the universe ever written: improbable, absurd, and quietly wise about how little we understand and how much we pretend to. Keep a towel to hand. Some summers call for a book that makes you laugh out loud on a lounger, and this one has been doing exactly that since 1979.
Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? — Linda Nochlin
Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay changed the way we look at art, and at who gets to make it. Rather than answer the question in its title, she takes it apart, showing how academies, studios, and patrons were built to keep women out long before a single canvas was ever judged. Slim enough for an afternoon, sharp enough to reshape a conversation. For anyone who moves through galleries and wonders whose names hang on the walls, it is essential reading.
Yesteryear — Caro Claire Burke
Natalie is a tradwife influencer with millions of followers and a ranch in Idaho that exists mostly for the camera. Then she wakes, one ordinary morning, in what appears to be 1855, with no nannies, no production crew, and no way home. Caro Claire Burke’s debut is satire with a pulse: a sharp, suspenseful look at the stories we perform online and the cost of believing them. The summer’s most talked-about first novel, and a conversation waiting to happen at your next dinner.
Whistler — Ann Patchett
An English teacher in her fifties crosses paths with her former stepfather at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, forty-five years after a snowy road changed both their lives. Ann Patchett’s new novel is a quiet marvel: two people looking back on the choices made for them and by them, on memory, bravery, and the small moments that turn out to hold everything. Tender and precise, it is a book about being truly known by another person, and how that alone can change a life.
Save this list. Pass it on. And tell us: what is on your reading table this summer?