How I Built My Ruthless Summer Reading List

I acquire far too many books, usually under the theory that I will get to all of them someday, “someday” being the most elastic of reading time frames. Some of my somedays have lasted decades, and many more have yet to end.

The illusion of someday is sustained in part by the anticipation of summer, a magical place of reduced obligations and infinite time, when all things unread will find their moment in the sun. And so I engage in a ritual as intrinsic to the season as bug bites, flash floods and heat advisories: assembling a summer reading list.

It’s a stressful exercise for me, one that often spans several months. Between my job as a columnist and my forced labor on a literary prize jury, there are already many books I am required to read each year. This makes selecting a handful of additional books — ones I’ll read just because I choose to — especially hard. There are few slots left, so I can’t just crack open a meh book under my beach umbrella.

This is not Nam, this is reading; there are rules. I avoid the best-seller lists (too obvious), the “most anticipated” lists (too eager) and brand-new books (too soon). I skip books by my colleagues in journalism, ostensibly because it’s hard to pick favorites, but really because I need a break from all that. I’m also reluctant to take any book that a friend has given me as a gift; if I don’t like it, I might start questioning the friendship. And no Oprah or Reese picks for me — those books are doing just fine without my $29.95.

Instead, I scan the unread portions of my own shelves obsessively, day after day, no matter if my vacation is months or days away. I’ve developed three categories of books to take to the beach, and each year I try to pick at least one from each. It’s not as simple as selecting fiction or nonfiction, mass market or highbrow, classics or trashy. The categories reflect personal guilt, professional necessity and, finally, the quest for enjoyment untainted by obligation.

Category No. 1 is made up of the I’ve Always Meant to Read This Book books. Perennials here include “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr, “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison and “The Omni-Americans” by Albert Murray. I want to read them. I plan to read them. I tell myself I will read them, just not right now. Someday! (I’ve meant to pick up “The Bluest Eye” ever since I read Morrison’s “Beloved” as a freshman in college, and that’s when George Bush was president. The first President Bush.)

Category No. 2 is dutiful to the point of being unavoidable: It’s the Someone Who Does What I Do for a Living Really Should Have Read This Book books. These are titles I’m embarrassed not to have read yet, omissions I normally keep quiet among my history- and politics-obsessed friends. (I used to be a book critic, which renders my discomfort even more acute.) For example, I’ve often started but never finished David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest,” about how we got into Vietnam, and just this past week I finally bought “The Guns of August” by Barbara Tuchman, about the path to World War I. Meg Greenfield’s posthumous “Washington” fits the Should Haves, too, though I suppose I could cross-list it with the Meant Tos. This category contains an excess of war and government and journalism books, but that’s the air I breathe, so I try to add at least one from this batch (but no more) to my beach bag.

Category No. 3 is the most enjoyable, by definition. It’s the This Book Is Just for Fun books. “The Plot” by Jean Hanff Korelitz has been in this group since it became a thing in 2021, and this might be the year. (I’m a sucker for books about books, and the sequel, titled “The Sequel,” is already out, so enough time has passed to dabble in the original without being too obvious.) Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies” has been on the brink for a while — a British journalist I respect once told me it’s the best Waugh, though I still love “Scoop” and “Decline and Fall” — but I’m not quite feeling it for summer 2025. Someday, for sure.

Throughout the year, I create a beach book pile, first in my head, and when that gets too crowded, at home. I might add two contenders one day, subtract one another day and watch the options slowly expand. My pile might peak at a dozen or so; when it starts to teeter, I know it’s time to trade away some prospects.

“What I Saw at the Revolution” by Peggy Noonan doubles as a Should Have and a Meant To, so it sits on the stack for a few weeks. But it gives way to Jaime Bayly’s “Los Genios” (“The Geniuses”), a Just for Fun novel about the relationship between Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez. I enjoy Bayly’s fiction, but I’m hesitant, my instinct being that it’s better to read great books by great writers than to read great books about great writers. So Bayly relinquishes his spot to Vargas Llosa’s own “El Pez en el Agua” (“A Fish in the Water”), a memoir that could conceivably check off all three boxes at once.

Sometimes two books get caught in a literary death match, for no other reason than they occupy the same category. Ben Fountain (“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”) and Anthony Marra (“A Constellation of Vital Phenomena”), are both promising Meant Tos, and they’ve been staring each other down for the past few years. I have no idea how those two books became an either/or but as far as my summer reading goes, there can be only one.

I have some other peculiar no-nos. I love single-author essay collections, but not for the beach. I prefer to range across multiple collections at once — reading a piece by Hitchens one day, one by Adler another and one by Vidal the next — so I can’t take any one of them on vacation. And no popular presidential biographies, please. Nothing against the Meacham-Beschloss-Kearns Goodwin Industrial Complex, but there are enough of those on every towel I see, and I prefer my beach week to feel like no ordinary time.

I keep culling and sifting; it’s not just about the individual books I choose, but also how they will feel together, one after another. I need a mix of voices and ideas and eras and styles, and even lengths. A good short book is a nice reward for reading an intense long one.

Who makes the cut?

Over the years, this system has worked out well. I’ve read Louis Menand’s “The Metaphysical Club” at the beach, as well as Margo Jefferson’s memoir “Negroland” — both definite Meant Tos. I’ve plopped down on the sand with Garry Wills’s glorious “Nixon Agonistes” (a Should Have if there ever was one) and with Nora Ephron’s wicked “Heartburn,” which I started as a Just for Fun before I realized it was also a definite Should Have. (“Marry me and you will never again have to listen to someone tell you who he thinks the next assistant foreign editor of The Washington Post is going to be” is a line I’ll never forget, especially these days.)

I’ve read “The Captive Mind” by Czeslaw Milosz (an absolute Meant To) with the Atlantic Ocean lapping my feet, and I’ve delighted in Clive James’s “Unreliable Memoirs” (it’s weird that a writer of his skill could ever be Just for Fun, but he’s that, too) as my kids dug sand moats a few feet away. Katie Kitamura’s spare “Intimacies” kept me company during the day, and Flannery O’Connor’s dark, stark “Wise Blood” kept me awake at night.

My approach to selecting summer books is idiosyncratic; I don’t recommend it for everyone, or really, for anyone but me. If you’re not sure where to start, it’s fine to stick with Just for Funs, for example, or to reread old favorites. (Every time I return to Louise Fitzhugh’s “Harriet the Spy” and “The Long Secret,” I discover something new about the books, about Harriet and about me.) And rather than seek out books that reflect your particular experiences or worldview, delve into stories far removed from your own — and then revel in that shock of recognition when you find a sliver of yourself in a distant person, place or moment.

OK, it’s time. I’m off on vacation this weekend, and I think I’ve got my list. Fountain won his standoff with Marra. Vargas Llosa’s memoir made it, too, a small tribute to my compatriot who died this year. Korelitz’s “The Plot” will reveal its secrets. V.S. Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River” will find the ocean. James Baldwin will shake his dungeon with “The Fire Next Time.” And a Should Have, one that’s been on my shelf so long that I just peeled a Borders’ discount sticker off its cover, will at last have its day: “All Too Human,” by George Stephanopoulos.