Summer Reading Time

It’s summer reading time! If you’re around the Hudson Valley tomorrow (Saturday), I’ll be speaking at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, NY, at the annual “Roosevelt Reading Festival,” alongside other authors who have written recently about FDR.

So in honor of the reading festival — how great is that?! — and school being officially out across most of the country, it seemed like a good time to share some summer reading suggestions.

First, before I get into the reading aspect of this, I want to highlight two GMG-coded movies out this month as well: Pressure, about Group Captain James Stagg and the weather prediction drama leading up to D-Day, which is my favorite section of “When the Sea Came Alive” and, I think, the actually most dramatic portion of the D-Day story. Also, you’ve probably heard about Steven Spielberg’s latest Disclosure Day, which is a bookend of sorts to his extraterrestrial career trilogy of Close Encounters and E.T.  

Now onto the reading! I wanted to send along some reading suggestions, split across three categories — good summer books (e.g. books that are good specifically for relaxing reading), recent books I’ve liked, and the books I’m personally most excited to read this summer. These past few months feel like a nonfiction reader’s dream — with new books from many of the best writers working today, from Susan Orlean to Patrick Radden Keefe to Pamela Colloff to Tom Junod.

Perfect Summer 2026 Reading: 

* By the Fire We Carry — by Rebecca Nagle: I saw Rebecca Nagle speak last summer at the Mississippi Book Festival about her book on “The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land,” and purchased it immediately. It’s just an astoundingly good book — a well-written mix of true crime, legal drama, and American history. This is the book you want to read this summer — you’ll scratch your Netflix drama itch and you’ll learn some important and difficult history that you don’t know.

* Catch The Devil — by Pamela Colloff: Pamela Colloff is one of the greatest writers working right now — you’re probably familiar with her incredible pieces about death row even if you’ve never noticed her byline, and she’s so good that it’s incredible she’s never written a book until now. Her brand-new book is deeply engrossing and immensely aggravating, telling the story of one of the great con men of the US justice system. (As an aside: Despite never having met her in person, she also is one of the people who has most changed the arc of my own career and life: I remember reading her Texas Monthly article “96 Minutes,” an oral history of the UT-Austin Tower Shooting back in 2006 and being blown away by the format, and falling in love with oral history. I don’t think I ever would have gotten into oral history but for that article — and well the rest is history.)

* This Vast Enterprise — by Craig Fehrman: I had the chance to read Craig’s new history of the Lewis and Clark expedition in galleys and blurb it. So here was my blurb: “In his spectacular new book, every bit as audacious as the original expedition, Craig Fehrman rewrites our memory of the journey of Lewis and Clark, broadening the lens to show the many personalities—many long forgotten—who in 1804 made up the most daring American experiment yet. He paints an incredible, vivid, you-are-there portrait of an American nation being imagined and created for the first time and all those, from Thomas Jefferson to Native American chiefs, whose lives were forever altered by two of the most famous explorers in history.”

* This Land Is Your Land — by Beverly Gage: On the off chance that last weekend’s UFC fight on the White House lawn didn’t totally scratch your “America’s 250^th birthday” itch, this is the summer book for you. Beverly Gage, who wrote that amazing biography of J. Edgar Hoover, took a road trip across America to explore our history, how its taught, and what lessons we could learn for today.

* Running Ground — by Nicholas Thompson: I am, abstractly, about the last possible audience for a book on running, but Nick is an old friend (and was my editor at WIRED back in the day) and this memoir of parenting and his process of becoming one of the top high-intensity runners in the world in mid-life had a lot to say to me. It also has a surprising cameo for a book that’s close to my heart, Calvin Trillin’s “Remembering Denny.”

My Favorites of the Year So Far:

* London Falling — by Patrick Radden Keefe: Yea, yea, yea. This is on everyone’s list already, because Patrick Radden Keefe is surely the best narrative nonfiction writer working today. It’s a strange and winding story about the suspicious death of a young man in London and the shadowy world his death begins to unravel. Patrick is a great storyteller, sure, but it’s his writing and exacting pacing and structure that’s so wonderful to read. For me, there were two amazing and distinct paragraphs toward the end that made the whole book worth reading and wrapped it up as well as Richard Ford’s “Canada,” which I think has one of the clearest and cleanest endings of any book I’ve ever read.

* Joyride — by Susan Orlean: I read Susan Orlean’s new memoir over the winter and found it interesting and, as a writer, really fascinating. Susan Orlean’s earlier book “Orchid Thief” made an entire generation of magazine writers take up magazine writing — honestly, back when I was hiring magazine interns and staff I probably had more people cite it as their career inspiration than any other work — and so I had only ever heard of Susan as this incredible master writer, and it was interesting following her memoir how much she struggled to find her path.

* Daikon — by Samuel Hawley: This beautiful novel has a pretty simple but deeply intriguing premise: What if there was a third atomic bomb and it had been lost over Japan in the final stages of World War II?

* The Hemingses of Monticello — by Annette Gordon-Reed: I started this book alongside a May visit to Thomas Jefferson’s home (amazingly, my first!) and immediately felt that special reading joy and peace that I feel when I know I’m in the hands of a masterful and knowledgable historian who is going to wind and weave through a story that he or she knows better than anyone.

* The Most Awful Responsibility — by Alex Wellerstein: Speaking of nuclear weapons, this book about Harry Truman, the Bomb, and presidential nuclear control is one of the most revelatory and insightful books on nuclear weapons I’ve read (and I’ve read pretty close to all of them). It’s super well-written and accessible and will change forever how you think about all three subjects — Truman, nukes, and the presidency — with a few pretty important insights about our modern times as well.

* King of Kings — by Scott Anderson: As you might have seen, US-Iran relations were back in the news this spring. Scott Anderson’s well-timed history of the Iranian Revolution cleaned up on the awards list in recent months, including as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, and it covers an immense amount of very important ground about modern Iran. Plus, reading his new book gives you a great excuse to go back and read his earlier book, “The Man Who Tried to Save The World,” which remains one of my favorite books of all time.

* In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man — by Tom Junod: Looking to have some complicated feelings on Father’s Day weekend?! This is the book for you! Tom Junod is another of the Official Great Writers of Today — as John Hendrickson wrote in his own Esquire profile of Junod, “A list of Esquire’s ten most important writers in the magazine’s nearly 100-year history would probably look like this: Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron, Richard Ben Cramer, and, well, Tom Junod.” — and this book is quite a journey, as Junod tries to untangle his own relationship with his dad and his dad’s incredibly complex history. I had so many different reactions to this book — I’m not even sure it’s actually a “favorite”? but it definitely thought-provoked-the-hell-out-of-me. Plus it’s worth reading, like Patrick Radden Keefe, for the sparseness, simplicity, and structure of his words.

My Own TBR:

Lastly, I wanted to share some books I’m most looking forward to reading this summer myself — the long glory days of summer represent one of the two periods a year, along with the holidays, where I try to stretch beyond “work reading” to really read for pure pleasure, and so my list is heavy on science and topics a bit outside my normal range. I highly doubt I’ll make it to all eight of these, but I’m going to be bringing one or two of these on each of my summer trips:

* Gods of New York — by Jonathan Mahler: One of my favorite book writers Traci Thomas has been raving about this one, subtitled, “Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990,” and she pitched it like this in her own summer reading guide: “If you’re looking for an overarching history of NYC in the late ‘80s, but want it to read like a gossip magazine, this is your book. Mahler features major moments in race relations, historic events, the pissing matches between politicians, and some infamous figures who are still shaping culture today. This one is a fascinating and entertaining overview of the era.”

* The Westerners — by Megan Kate Nelson: I’ve been eagerly awaiting this book on the “Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier,” which is a subject I’ve always wanted to write about myself. Megan Kate Nelson is a super smart historian and a great writer, and I learned so much from her book “The Three-Cornered War,” about the Civil War out west, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2021.

* The Story of Birds — by Steve Brusatte: Gosh, I had somehow missed that Steve had a new book coming out this spring and the moment I saw him celebrating it becoming a New York Times bestseller, I ran down to Phoenix Books to get his latest exploring birds from “Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present.” He is an amazingly engaging and knowledgeable writer, and if you’ve never read his books on the rise and fall of dinosaurs and the rise and reign of mammals, they’re equal parts fascinating and profound. I actually drew on his mammal book extensively for my own research about the possibility and evolution of life as part of my UFO book.

* The Edge of Space-Time — by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Speaking of space! Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein — who is just a delightful social media follow — dives into “Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream BoogieParticles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie” with her new already-a-bestseller. I’m always here for space books.

* Baldwin — by Nicholas Boggs: I’m really eager to get into this new biography of James Baldwin because I often think no writer better understood or foresaw the difficult moment we’re now living through than he did.

* Hooked — by Asako Yuzuki: I read this Japanese author’s runaway hit “Butter” last year while traveling in Japan (how could you pass up “a novel of food and murder”?) and that book has turned into such a hit that her earlier work has now been translated and publishing in English as well.

* Meet You in Hell — by Les Standiford: This 2006 book wasn’t on my radar at all, but I’ve had a couple friends tell me recently that it’s quite entertaining. The subtitle promises “Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Changed America,” it’s the story of one of the biggest showdowns of the Gilded Age amid the steel industry.  

* John Doe Chinaman — by Beth Lew-Williams: This book — about the deeply ingrained and often overlooked Jim Crow-style racial discrimination against the Chinese in the 19th Century western US — won the Bancroft Prize this year, one of the top awards for history books.

That’s it for my recommendations — let me know what book is atop your own summer reading list!

GMG