Monocle’s novel approach to creating the essential summer reading list
The key to choosing books for the summer is to match each read to a mood, setting or situation.
At its best, a summer reading list isn’t one list at all. It’s a set of options matched to conditions and mood. What you might want to read on a plane isn’t the same as what you’d want to read on a beach lounger at 16.00, half asleep and sun-drunk – or even drunk-drunk. It’s about finding books that match both mindset and situation.
Long-haul flights need scale, something big enough to swallow the hours. Poolside afternoons need pace and perhaps a little mischief, narratives you can dip in and out of without losing the thread. A warm evening on a terrace is for a story that could spark your dinner conversation. And when the rain comes, reach for something a little more weighty.
As the host of Meet the Writers on Monocle Radio, I’ve read many different books in many different places. I’ve learned the key to choosing a good book is to match it to the place you’re in and the weather in your head, not just the conditions outside. Here are 14 titles that do just that.
‘The Odyssey’
Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
Ancient Greece
Good for: Long-haul flights or beside a wine-dark sea.
Homer invented travel writing. The Odyssey tells the story of a man trying to get home and everything standing in his way. Emily Wilson’s translation – the first complete English translation of the book by a woman – presents a modern take on the ancient work with far more attention paid to the women, the enslaved people and the power structures that were brushed over by earlier translators. Read the book and you can weave it into discussions about the Christopher Nolan film that was released in cinemas this summer.
‘Jan Morris: A Life’
Sara Wheeler
United Kingdom
Good for: Waiting at a departure lounge.
Jan Morris was a prolific Welsh journalist and writer, whose work encompassed travel writing, foreign correspondence and everything in between. Sara Wheeler’s biography does justice to a genuinely singular life, including Morris’s transition, and the decades spent writing about Europe’s cities with real love and precision and questions of identity. Few people saw more of the world or wrote about it with less vanity.
‘Lázár’
Nelio Biedermann
Switzerland and Hungary
Good for: A week away, when you want a century in your carry bag.
Lázár follows a Hungarian family across a century of upheaval, from the Habsburg Empire to the First World War, through fascism, Soviet occupation and the 1956 uprising. Impressively, Nelio Biedermann was only 22 years old when the book was published earlier this year. This is a big, confident book from someone barely out of his teens and one of this year’s genuine European discoveries.
‘Baldwin: A Love Story’
Nicholas Boggs
Brooklyn, Leukerbad, the south of France and Istanbul
Good for: Relaxed mornings, coffee on the boulevard.
Washington-born Nicholas Boggs tells James Baldwin’s life story through the people who loved him and the people he loved, from mentor Beauford Delaney to Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss painter who became his first great love in Paris. The story goes from Brooklyn and the south of France to Paris, Tuscany and Istanbul, and the months at Happersberger’s family chalet in Leukerbad, Switzerland, that gave Baldwin the isolation to finish his debut novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain.
‘The Disappearers’
Marlon James
Jamaica and the US
Good for: Intellectual stimulation on the second week of holiday.
Marlon James won the Booker Prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings and he’s back on this year’s long list for The Disappearers. The latter book takes place in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1988: eight gay men gather to rehearse a play. Though they are strangers to each other, they’re bound by the one thing they can’t mention. One night a mob violently attacks the group and what follows is a story about the aftermath. This is not a gentle book.
‘The Shadow of the Object’
Chloe Aridjis
Mexico, the Netherlands and USA
Good for: An overcast afternoon indoors when you want something a little uncanny.
Chloe Aridjis grew up shuttling between Mexico, the Netherlands and the US, and that unsettled quality runs through her fiction: it’s visual, faintly eerie and never quite goes where you expect it to. The Shadow of the Object opens with a dog bite from the elderly family German Shepherd and moves through a Mexico City hospital ward, an unlikely friendship and magic lanterns. The book made this year’s Booker longlist.
Listen to a conversation with Aridjis on ‘Meet the Writers’.
‘Netherwood’
Jake Arnott
UK
Good for: Late-night reading, when you’re feeling brave.
A literary thriller built around Aleister Crowley and Britain’s occult undercurrent, including the communes, the counterculture and the folk horror lurking behind the picturesque seaside postcards. Jake Arnott has always been drawn to Britain’s alternative histories, and Netherwood is him at his most atmospheric, mixing fact and fiction. You might not want to read it alone, though: it’s pretty scary.
‘Our Last Resort’
Clémence Michallon
France
Good for: A languid afternoon on a yacht or at a resort.
A French writer’s take on an American obsession, a luxury resort in Utah, a group of cult survivors trying to rebuild and a murder. Michallon brings an outsider’s eye to a very American kind of story, which is part of what makes it work. A fast-pace read for the poolside.
‘Lust’
Erika Lust
Sweden and Spain
Good for: Sharp, sexy thinking.
The aptly named Erika Lust grew up in a Swedish household that didn’t talk about sex, then moved to Barcelona and built one of the best-known adult film studios. The book argues that porn is a mirror of society’s problems rather than the cause. Part memoir, part feminist rallying cry, Lust goes behind the scenes on the film sets, into the casting and the consent conversations, and makes the case for pleasure as something worth taking seriously. Intelligent rather than sensational.
‘All Fours’
Miranda July
USA
Good for: Reading with a book club.
Sexually frank and very funny, Miranda July’s novel takes on midlife desire, a marriage under pressure, menopause and reinvention. Pair it with Lust for the same subject from two directions: one fiction, one criticism. You will have an opinion and so will everyone else who reads it.
‘Exit Wounds’
Peter Godwin
Zimbabwe, UK and US
Good for: A family holiday or the flight home.
This one is personal: Peter Godwin is my brother. Exit Wounds moves between Zimbabwe, London, New York and Lakeville. It’s about family, war, exile, ageing parents, a marriage ending and three strong women. We’re touring Western Australia together with the book in October. If you’re there, come and have a chat. Or just buy it and I’ll get a drink out of my share of the royalties. Cheers.
Listen to an interview with Godwin on ‘Meet the Writers’.
‘Attention-Seeking Behaviour’
Aea Varfis-van Warmelo
UK and Greece
Good for: A train journey, or when you need something to argue about.
The narrator is a compulsive liar and she tells you upfront. A young London journalist, she spins outlandish stories, trying to work out where the lying started and what it has cost her. Woven through the book is a real history of lie detection, from Ekman’s discredited theory that a flash of expression gives away what someone truly feels to the polygraph’s long and shaky career in policing. Fiction, memoir and essay run together, I found it utterly compelling.
‘Astronaut!’
Oana Aristide
Romania, Greece and Sweden
Good for: A rainy day when you want something darkly funny.
Romania, 1989, the final months of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule. A detective is told to pin a string of murders on a man-eating bear rather than admit a serial killer is loose in a country where killers officially don’t exist. Meanwhile, an eight-year-old girl gets pulled into her elderly neighbour’s plot against the regime. It is dark and funny and examines what it costs to keep believing an obvious lie. Aristide is a co-founder of the Syros Literary Festival (with me and my brother), which we’ll be holding in the Hotel Aristide Hotel in Greece in April. Come along to meet Oana and many others on this list.
Listen to a conversation with Aristide on ‘Meet the Writers’.
‘Porcupines’
Fran Fabriczki
Hungary and USA
Good for: Reading at an airport bar.
Szonja arrives in Los Angeles from Budapest at 18 for what’s meant to be a summer visit and never quite leaves. The book moves between Cold War Washington, late-Communist Budapest and the bright sunshine of early 2000s Los Angeles. The title comes from Arthur Schopenhauer’s fable about porcupines huddling together for warmth and pricking each other in the process.
