The Summer Reads Edition

On books, books, and more books

Colin here. A team of WITI contributors have put together picks for your summer reading requirements. Thanks to Ben Young for the idea and the corralling. 

• Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global battle for cultural supremacy by Erich Schartzel. (Rick)

• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The book that helped inspire the vision for the metaverse and coined the term. (Ben)

• The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All by Mary Childs. (Graydon)

• Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford. A wonderful book by former New Yorker fiction editor (and undercover football thug) about taking a job in a kitchen, pulling on a thread, and seeing where it takes him. (Kevin)

• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. I’ve never surfed. But this book painted the bohemian lifestyle of the surfer in such vivid detail it made me want to give it all up and go buy a VW Camper. Great audiobook too. (Kevin)

• Having and Being Had by Eula Biss. A poetic and engrossing wander through the author Eula Bliss’ discomfort and unavoidable complicity with capitalism. (Amber)

• Ministry For the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Following real world record heat waves in India-incidentally the event that kicks off this story of humanity hovering at the brink of the climate change cliff-this book feels especially important to read right now. (Amber) 

• The Summer Book by Tove Janssen. (Amber)

• The Overstory by Richard Powers. Environmentalist fiction yet so much more. (Eric)

• Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert MacFarlane. Poetic adventure science writing? Yes please. (Eric)

• A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry. Americana, smalltown epic; quietly philosophical. (Eric)

• The Black Hole Survival Guide by Jana Levin. Brief, humorous, clever, informative. (Eric)

• How Lucky by Will Leitch. Didn’t expect the Deadspin guy to write a fun, funny, and gripping suspense novel but here we are! (Ryan A)

• The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz. I read this super suspenseful novel in a flash, and the less you know before you start reading, the better. (Jason)

• Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. A fragmentary novel with carefully interconnected stories and fictional essays, perfect to pick up whenever you need something to read this summer. (Jason)

• The Invention of Sicily: A Mediterranean History by Jamie Mackay. A fascinating cultural history that places the island at the southern extreme of Europe in its Mediterranean context. (Guan)

• Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures by Max Weber, translated by Damion Searls. This new translation of the famous lectures, which came out at the beginning of the pandemic, is very good at simplifying Weber’s prose and clarifying the core ideas. (Guan)

• The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante. I came to these a decade late, but the HBO series is a perfect opportunity to finish them. A story of female friendship, belonging and leaving, and of the city of Naples. (Guan)

• Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 by Christopher Clark. Amazing story of how an obscure Swabian family came to adopt a Baltic state and create a major European empire. (Guan)

• The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity by Eugene McCarraher. Explores the concept of Capitalism as the secular religion of the post-Christian era. (Chris)

• A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje. The subtitle explains this treatise on the new agrarianism better than any summary could. (Chris)

• Bourdain by Laurie Woolever. An “oral biography” of Anthony Bourdain, compiled by his longtime assistant. A funny, illuminating, and absolutely heartbreaking account of Anthony as a human being, veering sharply away from anything resembling a hagiography. Highly recommend the audiobook experience for this book. (Chris)

• Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis. Sex! Drugs! Vulgarity! Violence! A comic book where a journalist is the… hero? (Chris)

• Dune by Frank Herbert. Exactly three perfect novels have ever been written and it is easier to commit to reading Dune once a year than it is making the same committal for The Brothers Karamazov or Don Quixote. (Chris)

• Is Paris Burning by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre. This 1965 nonfiction book details the liberation of Paris in 1944. If you love Paris you’ll love this book. (Mark S.)

• Last Call by Daniel Okrent. The story of Prohibition. This is fascinating political history. It seems like conventional wisdom now that Prohibition was doomed to fail but the optimism of the temperance movement, and its close ties to women’s suffrage, were a surprise to me. (Mark S.)

• The Dream and the Tomb: A history of the Crusades by Robert Payne. I don’t remember why I read this book and I don’t know anyone else who has read it, but I loved it. The Crusades were bonkers. (Mark S.)

• The Great Arc by John Keay. An account of the trigonometric survey of India in the 19th century. The accuracy achieved in this survey (one of the goals was to more accurately determine the size of the earth!) is staggering. It’s also where I learned the fun fact that the guy after whom Mt. Everest was named pronounced his name EEEEV-rest, with a long “e” and just two syllables. (Mark S.)

• The Rodale Book of Composting: Easy Methods for Every Gardener by Grace Gershuny and Deborah, L. Martin. (Cass)

• My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. A short, funny novel about murder. (Noah)

• Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century by Masha Gessen. A fascinating look at Grigori Perelman, the only mathemetician to solve one of the Clay Millennium Prizes and also the only one to turn down the million dollar bounty for doing so. (Noah)

• Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter. The story of Stuxnet, the code that took down an Iranian nuclear facility, is still one of the craziest stories I’ve encountered outside a spy thriller. (Noah)

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Thanks for reading,

WITI Contributors

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