Books for Summer 2022: Our 44 picks for right now, from satire to horror to biographies
Look, this summer, read whatever you want.
Don’t listen to me. Indulge your whims. It’s been a few summers since you could comfortably relax on a beach, towel to towel with strangers, and just lose yourself in a long book for a couple of hours. Not entirely sure you can do that now, either. But it’s likely. So read the collected works of Proust. Or the collected works of Nora Roberts. Read comics (the finest ones right now are smarter than many novels). Read self-help, or if you’re in tune with the coming dystopia, read something darker and devoid of help.
Like the climate itself, our cultural climate is as fluid as it has ever been.
Once a season defined by escapist, light reads, summer is still that, plus a world of variety that acknowledges: Not everyone has a beach or time for a long book. What follows are 44 titles (new or coming soon), ideal for the warmest months of the year, with an eye on the many moods and scenarios of summer, now to Labor Day:
SUMMER LAUGHS
There was a time I would be excited by a new David Sedaris book, but somewhere in the past 20 years, while his autobiographical snapshots stayed as mordant and funny as ever, a familiarity set in. “Happy-Go-Lucky” ($29, Little Brown) is like a reminder of an old friend who can still make you laugh out loud, but with a poignance now. Subjects include the ugliness of his father, art school in Chicago (“if you could draw Snoopy on a napkin, you were in”) and entitled fans.
“I could feel the trouble but I couldn’t put words to it,” Isaac Fitzgerald writes plainly in his rowdy, more traditional memoir, ($27, Bloomsbury), about a childhood of homelessness, told without piety or violin strains of uplift, but rather, an embrace of the chaos of just getting by.
