Midsummer Reading Check-In

It seems impossible to believe that it’s August already, but as the fall looms around the corner, I wanted to send a second round of summer reading suggestions and some books I’m looking forward to diving into as the next month unfolds.

First, one exciting update on my reading list from the start of summer: Pamela Colloff’s CATCH THE DEVIL has now been released and is officially a New York Times bestseller (hooray!) with a rave review by the great Ted Conover, all of which is a way of repeating myself: Go read this. It’s really good, haunting, and fascinating. You can also listen to Pamela be interviewed by Traci Thomas on The Stacks, in an excellent discussion about the ethics and craft of this type of true-crime reporting. (And if you don’t know who Ted Conover is, go read NEWJACK, where he went and worked as a prison guard in Sing Sing for a year and wrote about it.)

Now the latest:

I’ve been slowly making my way through my own summer-reading pile, including Beth Lew Williams’ JOHN DOE CHINAMAN and currently, Megan Kate Nelson’s THE WESTERNERS, which I’m enjoying thoroughly and is richly researched and written — and quickly realizing that I won’t make it through anywhere close to the whole pile, alas. In Radnor, Pennsylvania, for a June wedding, I wandered into Main Point Books, and picked up the new book by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries, which I loved. I think Glaude is one of the most important historians working in our age, and I’ve learned so much reading him in recent years. This book was terrific, as expected, and challenges a lot of our “pleasant” history.

Beyond that nonfiction, I just finished the copyedits for AMERICA IN 25 REVOLUTIONS and gave myself a week’s fiction-reading break while the book turns into page proofs, during which I have plowed through in rapid succession three fantastic novels.

First: The most exciting reading news — there’s a new Babs Dionne novel! You may remember that THE SAVAGE NOBLE DEATH OF BABS DIONNE was on my “2025 Best Books” list:

In early July, the sequel — which is actually a prequel — came out: WE WILL SEE YOU BLEED. I read this one in just two days and it was every bit as good, rich, nuanced, evocative, and well-paced as the original. Babs Dionne is one of the greatest and most memorable characters I’ve come across in years, and Currie’s ability to carry her just-as-well through a second book is very impressive. I still suggest you start with the SAVAGE, NOBLE DEATH first, but if you did read that, dive right into WE WILL SEE YOU BLEED.

In an apropos trip to New York City this past weekend, I also read and enjoyed the newly released third installment of Colson Whitehead’s “Harlem trilogy,” THE COOL MACHINE, which carries forward the story of furniture-store-owner-slash-master-fence Ray Carney into the 1980s. (The first volume HARLEM SHUFFLE, which starts the story in the 1960s, made my “2022 Best Books” list.) The entire trilogy has been a delight, again with this wonderful set of characters that move in and out of Carney’s life across stories and decades, and the books are as much the story of New York’s fall and rise and the evolution of Harlem as they are crime novels. Taken together, the trilogy’s arc is a thoughtful meditation on the arc of one’s life and career and a life well-lived. Similarly, definitely start at the beginning with HARLEM SHUFFLE if you’re diving in for the first time.

The other novel I’ve been reading this week has been Walter Kirn’s UP IN THE AIR, the novel upon which that George Clooney novel is based. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the fun things about Burlington is that our local Fletcher Free Library places shelves of used books for sale at local bakeries, restaurants, and coffee shops, and I grabbed an original hardcover of Kirn’s book off the shelf a couple weeks ago at August First, one of the three places I would describe as “my favorite local bakery.” UP IN THE AIR is an amazing artifact of 1990s travel and particularly pre-9/11 air travel.

I haven’t started it yet, but at the same time I purchased WE WILL SEE YOU BLEED and THE COOL MACHINE at my local indie Phoenix Books, I also picked up COUNTRY PEOPLE, the new book by Daniel Mason, author of NORTH WOODS. I came late to NORTH WOODS, which was one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2023, and only read it this winter, but loved it and it will surely make my favorites-of-the-year list this year.

Now on to a couple upcoming books to keep your eyes’ out for:

This week, Traci Thomas at The Stacks pointed out an upcoming book that hadn’t been on my radar: Joby Warrick, a longtime national security writer for the Washington Post, is publishing THE JACKAL: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World's First Super-Terrorist. A “Carlos the Jackal biography” has been on my own books-to-write list since approximately 2010—and I was realistically probably never going to get to it—so I’m thrilled that a talented reporter has taken it on and cannot wait to read this. Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, is mostly forgotten now in the post-9/11 age, but as the subtitle says, he was the original international terrorist, responsible for all manner of assassinations and bombings across a wide range of political causes and terror groups.

The amazing and recently-Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore also has a book coming in August, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ARTIFICIAL STATE, which the publisher describes as a “passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.” Lepore, of course, is best known for her amazing sweeping American histories, but she’s been a regular and thoughtful critic and historian of technology as well, like her 2020 IF/THEN.

Lastly, coming right at the end of the summer, is Kai Bird’s AMERICAN SCOUNDREL, co-authored with his wife and longtime researcher Susan Goldmark, a new biography of Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer who looms in the background of both McCarthyism and Donald Trump’s rise in New York. There’s probably no better biographer working in the country right now than Bird, who did of course AMERICAN PROMETHEUS, about Oppenheimer, as well as biographies of the Bundy brothers, CIA officer Robert Ames, Jimmy Carter, and more. This will surely be one of the biggest books of the fall, and I can’t wait to read it.

Hope you’re getting a chance to do some fun summer reading too!

GMG