Summer reading, if you ask me, should meander, without a plan. Pick up, put down, misplace, leave crusty with sand or warped with humidity. Fall is for rigor, winter for hunkering down, spring for peering ahead, but the right summer read is a promising dirt road in a field. Someday, when I open a bookstore and the big bucks roll in, I’ll shelve titles in very narrow categories, ensuring no one finds anything — except what they didn’t know they wanted. This summer survey will be my trial run.
A lot of what’s here is due to be published over the next six weeks.
Some, released in spring but better for summer, are out now.
Sorry, I don’t know where travel books are, but over there …
More Chicago Than Chicago: Soon as I finished Peter Orner’s “The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter” (Aug. 12), I emailed the Highland Park native: Has there ever been a more Chicago novel? He said, living in Vermont, he gets his dose of Chicago however he can. Boy, does he: The title refers to Karyn Kupcinet, daughter of Chicago writer Irv Kupcinet. She was found dead in 1963. Orner starts there, then veers to conspiracy, Skokie, podcasts, the Cape Cod Room. It’s a blast.
Don’t Drink the Water: Why wait to find out what dismantling environmental regulations will mean? “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals,” by the terrific, underrated investigative writer Mariah Blake, traces the unholy conspiracy between DuPont and the United States government to downplay the effects of indestructible chemicals in household products, tap water, etc. It‘s a small-town horror movie that also happens to be true. Ditto for “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers,” by Caroline Fraser, whose Laura Ingalls Wilder bio, “Prairie Fires,” took a 2018 Pulitzer. Tough to classify and not to be missed: a history of the Pacific Northwest’s most infamous, paired with a touch of memoir and a fascinating linking of homicidal tendencies with childhoods marked by industrial waste.
Inspired by Celluloid: “King of Ashes” (June 10), by crime writer S.A. Cosby, at the peak of his powers, nods quietly to “The Godfather,” though at times, it’s more ambitious: The controlling son of a small-town Southern crematorium owner, whose wife disappeared years ago, returns to the family business, only to find it indebted to another family, of killers. It’s rousing, queasy — and being adapted by Steven Spielberg and the Obamas for a Netflix series. (Read the book first.) “The El” (Aug. 12) wears its influence more overtly: Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., an Indigenous writer of Chicago fiction, transplants the grimy 1979 New York classic “The Warriors” to the CTA, and a Native gang member navigating hostile territory, a very ‘70s Chicago, and, well … Alice Cooper.
Faith and Loathing in Chicagoland: “My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy” reads like remembering itself. Poet Edward Hirsch recounts ‘50s-‘60s suburban Chicago through bursts of memory, dialogue, jokes, stray images, doctored wedding pictures, no one in homeroom listening to announcements, your age in relation to the construction of the Edens Expressway, etc. It’s a lot of fun, gathering steam with a poignance that wallops. “Pan” (July 22), by Chicago’s Michael Clune — of the harrowing 2013 memoir about heroin addiction, “White Out” — finds suburban Chicago childhood as an ethereal, cultural testing ground for a student convinced his panic attacks are linked to Greek myth, and a vaguely menacing clubhouse called the Barn. Just as impressive: “The Nimbus” (June 10), the debut novel of Robert P. Baird, a University of Chicago Divinity School graduate. The setting is a Chicago campus, the premise is a child who glows, though like Clune, Baird grounds the uncanny in notes of faith, philosophy, resilience.
Doorstop Biographies: “Baldwin: A Love Story” (Aug. 19) is sure to devour the last days of summer for James Baldwin fans. It’s the first sizable bio in decades, and Nicholas Boggs’ approach (alternately inspired and frustrating) is to tell the author’s life through Baldwin’s relationships with lovers and collaborators. Not including William F. Buckley Jr., who famously debated Baldwin on race in 1965 (the subject of TimeLine Theatre’s hit play last February). Sam Tanenhaus’s “Buckley” illuminates that episode, and more — the Whittaker Chambers biographer uses the conservative lodestar as a main street cutting through ideology, with off-ramps for Nixon, Joe McCarthy, but also Disney and the failure to address AIDS. It’s a brick, and a well-paced road map to 2025. Ron Chernow, the contemporary king of doorstops (Hamilton, Washington), is back with “Mark Twain,” which plays the greatest hits, with an emphasis on unpublished papers, Twain the iffy businessman, Twain the fame addicted, and Twain the unknowable Zelig.
Spiritual Complications: If Chicago’s contribution to the papacy has you curious about faith, “The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s” is a must. Paul Elie, one of our finest thinkers on the connections between religion and culture, bookends this history with Bob Dylan’s evangelical era and Sinead O’Conner’s pope protest, using the intervening decade for a virtuosic revisiting of “Last Temptation of Christ,” Madonna, Robert Mapplethorpe, Prince, making a smart argument for how the ‘80s introduced a new secular age. Struggling to believe is the focus of “Sorrowful Mysteries: The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century,” Stephen Harrigan’s story of the 1917 “miracle” in Portugal, in which the Biblical Mary was said to have visited three children. Harrigan, mixing memoir and history, traces the fallout.
Girl, So Confusing: Take a second to admire the titles: “The Girls Who Grew Big” (June 24) by Leila Mottley, and “Clam Down” by Anelise Chen. Inside isn’t bad either: Following her viral hit “Nightcrawling,” Mottley finds a new path for coming-of-age tales, sketches of young moms, wound together with heartbreaks and pushback. (If you’re tempted to see its characters as “reckless,” one mother warns, “you clearly haven’t ever had to learn how to massage gas out of a baby’s stomach before you learned the basic laws of physics.”) “Clam Down,” billed as a memoir, tinkers so cleverly with form, I kept forgetting it wasn’t fiction. After a divorce, the author takes her mother’s typo-filled emails to heart: She will, indeed, clam down, adopting the humble crustacean as a model for her future, pulling inward. A break-up tale, natural history and family story. Totally original.
A History of Violence: Bryan Burrough, whose “Public Enemies” became a bestselling account of the Days of Dillinger (and later a Johnny Depp movie), offers a sort of prequel with “The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild,” a fleet deconstruction of American history perhaps known better as folklore than truth. His subjects — Butch Cassidy, Dodge City, etc. — were not fables, and their reality was occasionally nastier, and Midwestern. (Wyatt Earp, a part-time Illinois bartender and pimp, was nicknamed by local newspapers “the Peoria bummer.”) “Charlottesville,” in its own way, brings a simmering “High Noon”-esque unease to its retelling of August 2017 and the “very fine people on both sides” who converged over a Civil War statue. Despite being a decade removed, journalist Deborah Baker discovers a “Gimmie Shelter”-ish, era-defining immediacy, and decades of backstory to a seismic event often reduced to tiki torches.
Genre Redux: Want to read something fun this summer? Smart? But also classic? Valancourt Books, one of my favorite small presses, just reissued six works by Robert Bloch, born in Chicago, raised in Maywood, who went on to write “Psycho,” the basis for the film. He was also one of the most influential scary writers of the 20th century. Start with short stories: “Pleasant Dreams,” from 1960, collects 15 pulpy tales of witches, devils, ravenous houses. If you’re thinking crime: Picador just started a three-year-long reissue of 70 novels by Georges Simenon, whose Inspector Maigret became known as the French Sherlock Holmes, with a little Chandler angst. Start here: “The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien” (1931), in which the stakes are primarily Maigret’s guilty conscience.
Histories You Don’t Know: “The American Game,” by sports writer S.L. Price, is one of the year’s best, a look at the colonialism, elitism and the future of lacrosse, from its WASPy image to an Iroquois team intent on entering the 2028 Olympics under their own Native flag. “Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age” (July 22) hits Chicago’s sweet spot: Architecture and scandal. Specifically, the friendship and whispered-about love between architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (whose best-known Chicago work is Lincoln Park’s “Standing Lincoln”). “Dining Out,” by former Chicagoan Erik Piepenburg, begins with the Lakeview’s long-gone Melrose restaurant, then reveals how LGBTQ+ patrons were shaped by diners, pancake houses, coffee shops. “The Afterlife of Malcolm X” by Mark Whitaker is the sort of lively cultural history I’d love more of — not a biography, but a study of how one voice resonates through culture.
Hollywood Histories You Don’t Know: Ignore the glib title: Bruce Handy’s “Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies” is a shrewd elevation of the genre to the status of noirs and Westerns, reserving a chapter for the North Shore classics of John Hughes, and not missing anything, from Andy Hardy to “Dazed and Confused,” “Cooley High.” Similarly, “Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness,” one of the year’s best, skips a dull scholarly take for a sharp, clever critical reading full of drama and anecdote and surprises: Did you know that the reviled Hays Code, which shut down studio treatments of gay people (as well as profanity and violence) for 34 years, began with a meeting at Loyola University?
How Well Do We Know Anyone: Catherine Lacey was a Chicago writer, but as with her previous tear-downs of fiction and biography made evident, and “The Möbius Book” (June 17) makes thrillingly personal, rooting her is a waste: Lacey here uses the fallout of a relationship with another Chicago writer as a path to friends, faith and understanding how narratives curl, never ending. Susan Choi’s “Flashlight” is her best novel yet, and though it isn’t a mystery, I hesitate to say much about its story of a kidnapped father, other than: If you feel little connection to geopolitics right now, you will after reading this portrait of a family splintering between Korea, Japan and the U.S.
Fighting Illini We Have Known: The Washington Post’s Pulitzer-winning critic Robin Givhan won’t be the last biographer of late Chicago-based, Rockford-bred designer Virgil Abloh, but “Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh” (June 24) sets the standard with a reverential, necessarily digressive tour of how an influential polymath, architecture student and Kanye collaborator refigured how art, inclusivity and fashion meld. Likewise, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’ “Allan Pinkerton: America’s Legendary Detective and The Birth of Private Security” is not the first history of how a Scottish native built a private security (and union-smashing) empire in suburban Dundee, but it’s a fresh look at the man’s complicated, contradictory politics.
Your Fourth of July Read: “Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service” doesn’t shout summer, but these portraits of federal workers — by Dave Eggers, Sarah Vowell, Michael Lewis and others — headline commitment (NASA), brains (Department of Labor) and decency (National Cemetery Administration), with such humor, it’s the civics lesson that could recruit smart people, someday. “So Far Gone” (June 10) is “True Grit” by way of “Big Lebowski,” rippling in 2025 disgust. Which means it’s both hilarious and desperate. The always underrated Jess Walter (“Beautiful Ruins”) sculpts an indelible outcast, Rhys Kinnick, former journalist. He punches his MAGA son-in-law, ditches his cell phone and retreats to a cabin — until his grandchildren are taken by a militia. As a summer read, it’s an escape, and a sharp stick in the eye.
Funny Ha Ha: I hate the word “humorous.” It’s always used by the least funny people. “That’s How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor” is funny. Roy Wood Jr. of “The Daily Show” on bombing at the Apollo. A group chat about West Virginia toilets. Grandmas who say: “I don’t like people hovering over my shoulder when I’m working.” Read slowly, savor. Same for “Steve Martin Writes the Written Word: Collected Written Word Works by Steve Martin.” Truth in marketing: A wonderful compilation of his short novels (“Shopgirl,” “The Pleasure of My Company”) mingled with a great assortment of his New Yorker works. Sample line: “I started with the phone book. Looking up Mensa was not going to be easy …”
Thoughtfully Gruesome: Nobody’s ever accused Evanston-based Daniel Kraus of phoning it in, and his latest novel, “Angel Down” (July 29), is even more audacious than “Whalefall,” his 2023 hit about a man inside a whale. This one, set during World War I, follows soldiers who find, yes, an angel. Kraus’ prose boldly resembles a prayer — bursts of liturgy, each paragraph starting with “And,” then fairies and gore. “Salt Bones” (July 22), the debut novel of poet Jennifer Givhan, finds Persephone and Demeter in a parched, barbed Underworld, just shy of mythical: As children go missing on the Mexican border, a mother is seeing images of a beckoning horse-headed figure.
Smart Writers Waxing on About Random Stuff for a Discrete Amount of Time: How else to describe 50 years of eclectic work from the New Yorker’s Jamaica Kincaid? “Putting Myself Together: Writing 1973 —” (Aug. 5) collects essays on daffodils, her native Antigua, Diana Ross, all in that inimitable plain-spoken voice. “Life and Art” is a smart title for the preoccupations of novelist Richard Russo, whose great subjects (dusty towns, idiot relatives, the trouble with writing about your neighbors) get the same inviting treatment in these warm essays as they do in his rich novels, at a fraction of the length. “The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich” (even better title) gathers a decade of stories by New Yorker writer (and Tribune alumnus) Evan Osnos on the grotesquely wealthy. A profile of Mark Zuckerberg. How to hire a pop star for a birthday party. The country club crowd’s nose-holding embrace of Trumpism. Support groups for disgraced investor bros. You will throw this book across the room — albeit, lovingly.
Graphic Memoirs: Alison Bechdel’s “Spent: A Comic Novel” is just vaguely fiction. It tells the story of a Vermont cartoonist/pygmy goat farmer named Alison Bechdel, whose memoir (like the real Bechdel’s “Fun Home”) becomes a smash, changing her relationship to family and neighbors. It’s also a funny skewering of cultural pretense — on the right and left, though most cuttingly on the left. Conversely, Jeff Lemire’s “10,000 Ink Stains” (July 15) is the most straight-ahead cartoonist memoir in ages: Known for his wistfully-illustrated indie hits such as “Black Hammer” and “Sweet Tooth” (adapted as a popular Netflix series), Lemire mixes in work-in-progress and prose to show how a creative life swings daily from the stifling (“X-Men”) to the exhilarating (“Essex County”).
Not Murder Podcasts: Rich Cohen, Glencoe native, Connecticut resident, prolific chronicler of the Bears, the Cubs and the North Shore, is never short on good bingeable books. “Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story” only resembles tabloid fodder. It’s a color guard of red flags above a Connecticut town (like Glencoe, only wealthier), within a disjointed marriage, among “American aristocracy,” leading to the ugliest of deaths. More eccentric but no less lurid: Matthew Gavin Frank’s “Submersed: Wonder, Obsession and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines,” a fascinating mash of crime narrative, psychological profiling and a peek inside the same misogynistic, all-consuming inventor culture that led to the Titan submersible implosion — a history of obsessives who, as Frank writes with a wink, “were not always the best of influences.”
Losing Touch with Reality: The hero of Lincoln Michel’s “Metallic Realms” is Michel Lincoln, the intense No. 1 fan of a sci-fi writing group that doesn’t take itself quite as seriously. Shifting between the tales they churn out and squabbles that intrude on friendships, Michel builds an elegant homage to imagination. Speaking of creativity: “An Oral History of Atlantis” (July 29), is the first story collection by Ed Park, whose 2023 novel, “Same Bed Different Dreams” was rightly a Pulitzer finalist. Here, life choices are charted while trying to remember a phone password. A wife on Ambien floats through a surreal mirror life. A man in apocalyptic Manhattan tries to retain any shred of normalcy, like rereading “The Chicago Manual of Style,” in the hope that “civilization can start anew.”
Difficult Music: “Nothing Compares to You: What Sinead O’Connor Means to Us” (July 22), the passion project of Chicagoan (and co-editor) Martha Bayne, is an overdue assemblage (by Megan Stielstra, Neko Case and others), touching on protest, resilience — the ways O’Connor’s career, as Stielstra puts it, “lives in the body.” The hard part is dissecting a legend without soiling a mystery. “Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of ‘Born to Run’” (Aug. 5), by Bruce biographer Peter Ames Carlin, shows the unapologetic awe familiar to Boss appreciation, but his meticulous recreation of a struggling artist crafting his own mythology sings. Likewise, “The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership That Rocked the World” (Aug. 5) is no addendum. Peter Guralnick’s beloved two-part Presley bio was definitive, but here, a great writer complicates old accusations of exploitation lobbed at Parker, using a ton of unreleased letters.
Misplaced Gems: That Nettie Jones’s beuatifully scandalizing “Fish Tales” — bought by Toni Morrison when she was a Random House editor — could be lost for 41 years seems impossible: There’s enough coke, orgies and power dynamics in this fearless party-girl novel to fuel canonization for decades. While you’re at it, also slip Nan Shepherd’s “The Living Mountain” into a beach bag. First published in 1977, but written during World War II, this lovely reissue recalls the ocean of Rachel Carson and woods of Annie Dillard, yet in the Scottish mountains, giving a taxonomy of place, and a stirring long stare at nature. As Shepherd writes, “life pours back.”
If You Loved “The Studio,” You’d Love: We know Hollywood may as well be Mars. But “The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood,” by Matthew Specktor, son of CAA agent Fred Specktor, is shades stranger, a goodbye to a lifestyle, drawing in criticism, fiction, history, family tales — excitingly original. “Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly” (June 10) is not the gonzo Hunter S. Thompson tour of LaLa Land it’s being sold as. It’s oodles more measured, employing the rise and fall of Spears for a humid, sleazy invite to the ninth circle of hell, where tabloid press reside. If you’ve considered trailing Brad Pitt, this will change those plans.
Buzzy, Buzzy: What says summer more than a novel about friendships splintering while on vacation? Hal Ebbott’s “Among Friends” (June 24) works a spell reminiscent of John Updike’s, showing how class angst and way too much familiarity can sever the bonds between a pair of families at a country home. Dwyer Murphy’s “The House on Buzzards Bay” (June 24), in keeping with his underrated thriller “The Stolen Coast,” inserts a David Lynchian dreaminess into a whodunit about a tight group of college friends reuniting on Cape Cod. There’s a vanishing, then an intrusion.
Tried / True / Terrific: The latest Laura Lippman, “Murder Takes a Vacation” (June 25), is what publishing calls a “cozy,” as in cuddly. A grandmother, assistant to Lippman’s Tess Monaghan P.I., attracts an unlikely beau in Paris. Lippman, like Stephen King, or Megan Abbott, brings such an assured voice, you don’t mind the familiarity. Luckily, Abbott is comfortably back with “El Dorado Drive” (June 24), about a pyramid scheme that pulls several women into a dangerous bond. “Never Flinch,” King’s annual offering, brings back investigator Holly Gibney for another Midwest riff on hardboiled detective fiction. It’s flabby, even for King, yet so reliably King — it’s pretty cozy.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
