NEW PUBLICATIONS:

Since it’s already July, some of these are already on the shelves and some of them are at the top of the charts. Sorry if I’m wrong about a couple of them. I plan to read The Hounding, Flashlight, Katabasis, Atmosphere, The Girls Who Grew Big, Run for the Hills, My Friends, and A Sorceress Comes to Call (which may be a re-release since Kingfisher’s popularity is soaring? Or just the paperback release?). I mean, I plan to read more of them eventually, but these are ones I’m either buying straight-off or have in my ARCs.

• Murder Takes a Vacation, Laura Lippman
• The Slip, Lucas Schaefer
• King of Ashes, S. A. Cosby
• The Age of Video Games, Jenn Zeid and Emilie Rouge
• The Hounding, Xenobe Purvis
• Flashlight, Susan Choi
• Bury Your Bones in the Midnight Soil, V. E. Schwab
• The Mobius Book, Catherine Lacey
• Maggie; or, a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar, Katie Yee
• Katabasis, R. F. Kuang
• Is a River Alive?, Robert McFarlane
• Atmosphere, Taylor Jenkins Reid
• A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher
• The Dry Season, Melissa Febos
• Great Black Hope, Rob Franklin
• A Marriage at Sea, Sophie Elmhurst
• Murderland, Caroline Fraser
• How to Lose Your Mother, Molly Jong-Fast
• So Far Gone, Jess Walter
• Meet Me at the Crossroads, Megan Giddings
• A Family Matter, Claire Lynch (already read it)
• The Girls Who Grew Big, Leila Mottley
• Baldwin: A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs
• The Listeners, Maggie Stiefvater
• Waiting for Brittney Spears, Jeff Weiss
• My Friends, Frederik Backman
• Mark Twain, Rob Chernow
• Great Big Beautiful Life, Emily Henry (already read it)
• It’s a Love Story, Annabel Monoghan
• Fox, Joyce Carol Oates
• Run for the Hills, Kevin Wilson
• Last Soul Among Wolves, Melissa Caruso
• The Magician of Tiger Castle, Louis Sachar
• The New Age of Sexism, Laura Bates
• Hollywood High, Bruce Handy
• Food Person, Adam Roberts
• Sounds Like Love, Ashley Poston
• Well, Actually, Mazey Eddings
• Julie Chan Is Dead, Liann Zhang

BOOKS TO GO WITH SUMMER MOVIES:

The Murderbot Diaries is now a streaming series on Apple TV+. The beloved original book series is All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, and System Collapse. There are some bits and baubles that fit into the series by Martha Wells, too. As of this past January, they have finished packaging the short books into a three-volume set, as well. You can buy each two-book book separately, and they are titled The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1, 2, and 3.

Mickey 17 came to theaters about a month ago, an adaptation of Edward Ashton’s Mickey 7. (Yeah, the title change is weird.) I will have a review of these for you soon, but I thought the book was decent and the movie I didn’t like at all, though I might have without the book.

BEST SUMMER READS OF ALL TIME:

I tried to include lots of different genres, though it is maybe heavy on those “books you should have read by now,” classics. This list is compiled from various websites with their own lists, including plenty of additions of my own.

• Call Me by Your Name, Andre Aciman
• Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (have read but not reviewed yet)
• Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
• The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
• Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
• The Known World, Edward P. Jones
• A Room with a View, E. M Forster
• Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan
• The Keep, Jennifer Egan
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Secret History, Donna Tartt
• Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Beach Read, Emily Henry
• Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
• Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty
• Daisy Jones & the Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid
• Dial A for Aunties, Jesse Q. Sutanto
• Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng
• Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
• My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
• Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
• Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver
• Red, White & Royal Blue, Casy McQuiston
• Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead
• Seven Days in June, Tia Williams
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
• The God of the Woods, Liz Moore
• The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (read but not reviewed)
• A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, Holly Jackson
• The Martian, Andy Weir
• Twilight, Stephanie Meyer
• The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
• Scythe, Neil Schusterman
• The Geographer’s Map to Romance, Indian Holton
• Isola, Allegra Goodman
• The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukerjee
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• North Woods, Daniel Mason
• Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar
• Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell
• Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
• The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkein
• A Prayer for Own Meany, John Irving (read but not reviewed)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (read but not reviewed)
• The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
• Animal Farm, George Orwell
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
• The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
• A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor
• White Teeth, Zadie Smith
• The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
• The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
• The Warmth of Other Suns, Elizabeth Wilkerson
• The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman
• In the Woods, Tana French (read but haven’t reviewed)
• And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
• Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt
• The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
• All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
• The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai
• Miss Iceland, Audur Ava Olafsdottir
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
• The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector
• Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
• Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
• Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros
• The House in the Cerulean Sea, TJ Klune
• The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
• James, Percival Everett

for June, July, and August.

• The Honeys, Ryan La Sala
• Strange Pictures, Uketsu
• Mickey 7, Ashton
• Prophet Song, Paul Lynch
• Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu
• Ghosted, Amanda Quain
• The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Foundryside, Robert Jackson Bennett
• Real Americans, Rachel Kong Zevin
• The House of Spirits, Isabel Allende
• Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
• The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, Axie Oh
• Hamlet, William Shakespeare
• The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
• The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk
• Monk and Robot, Becky Chambers

For the summer. Which of course doesn’t mean I can get to them all.

• Emily of New Moon, L. M. Montgomery
• Emily Climbs, L. M. Montgomery
• Emily’s Quest, L. M. Montgomery
• Funny Story, Emily Henry
• ADHD 2.0, Edward M. Hallowell
• The Spider-Man Handbook, Grahame Smith
• 100 Places to See After You Die, Ken Jennings
• Children of Solitude, Michael G. Williams
• Run for the Hills, Kevin Wilson
• The Road to Tender Hearts, Annie Hartnett
• The Familiar, Leigh Bardugo
• The Fraud, Zadie Smith
• Swordheart, T. Kingfisher
• Hemlock & Silver, T. Kingfisher
• A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher
• Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner
• The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson
• The Likeness, Tana French
• Brightsword, Levi Grossman
• The Magicians, Levi Grossman
• The Last of August, Cavallaro
• Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, Lisa See
• The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Julia Alvarez
• The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels, India Holton
• Iron Flame and Onyx Storm, Rebecca Yarros
• The Knight and the Moth, Rachel Gillig
• The Mobius Book, Catherine Lacey
• Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
• Fun Home and Spent, Allison Bechdel

ARCS THAT ARE FLOATING TO THE TOP OF THE PILE:

Yep, some of them are already published.

• We Do Not Part, Han Kang
• The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong
• The Incandescent, Emily Tesh
• The Phoenix Pencil Company, Allison King
• Alice Chen’s Reality Check, Loo and Young
• Hot Desk, Laura Dickerman
• First Lie Wins, Ahsley Elston
• Flashlight, Susan Choi
• The Hounding, Xenobe Purvis
• My Friends, Frederik Backman
• Fever Beach, Carl Hiaasen
• Endling, Maria Reva
• Sisters in the Wind, Angeline Boulley
• You Dreamed of Empires, Alvaro Enrigue
• Writing Creativity and Soul, Sue Monk Kidd
• The Wayfinder, Adam Johnson
• The Gryphon King, Sara Omer

BOOKS ON WRITING I REALLY NEED TO GET TO:

• A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders
• Refuse to Be Done, Matt Bell
• Get Signed, Lucinda Halpern
• Before and After the Book Deal, Courtney Maum
• Save the Cat Writes a YA Novel, Jessica Brody
• Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, Arielle Eckstut

Which was May. It wasn’t the best reading month, and I’m most enthusiastic about the first and third title.

• Worth Fighting For (Meant to Be #5), Jesse Q. Sutanto
• David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
• Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
• Bunny, Mona Awad