Summer Reading Recs from Chronicle Staffers
Beach time is coming, so I asked my colleagues what to read. Here’s what they suggested:
Emma Pettit, senior reporter: “Couples by John Updike: Ten couples, at least four affairs, and one Massachusetts small town.”
Brock Read, deputy managing editor: “Modern Nature, in which the iconoclastic British filmmaker and gay-rights activist Derek Jarman, having gone public with his HIV diagnosis, decamps for his cottage on the coast of Dungeness and throws himself into gardening as an act of meditation and mourning. Sometimes beatific, occasionally bitchy, frequently mesmerizing.”
Alison Krug, reports editor: “My go-to summer re-read has been Shark Heart, by Emily Habeck. A woman’s husband begins to turn into a shark, and there’s a lot of paperwork involved. I read a particularly devastating NYT review of it and picked it up that day on my way home from the office.”
Jenny Ruark, deputy managing editor: “I’ve only just discovered the poet Ross Gay, through his book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. I’m not usually drawn to free verse, which he favors, but his ebullient, earthy, humane poems are a powerful antidote to gloom and doom.”
Evan Goldstein, managing editor: “Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America. Before Charlie Kirk and Christopher Rufo, there was William F. Buckley Jr. His 1951 bestseller, God and Man at Yale, established the template for conservative critiques of academe — a template still relevant today. Sam Tanenhaus has written a sweeping, decades-in-the-making biography that spans 1,000 pages and more than a half century of American political history.”
Anais Strickland, copy editor: “I’d recommend Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, Dream Count, which focuses on the lives of four women. It was a heart-wrenching read that left me reeling and raving at times because of what the characters endure.”
Scott Seymour, senior art director: “A Really Strange and Wonderful Time: The Chapel Hill Music Scene, 1989-1999 by Tom Maxwell. A history of the North Carolina music scene as ’80s ‘college rock’ transformed into the massive indie-rock scene of the ’90s, featuring the Mammoth and Merge Records labels and bands like Superchunk, Ben Folds Five, Southern Culture on the Skids, and Squirrel Nut Zippers.”
Stephanie Lee, senior writer: “I recently finished Women of War by Suzanne Cope, which tells the true stories of four women in Italy who were part of the antifascist resistance during World War II. It’s a timely read! At the moment, I’m loving Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar, a hilarious, eye-opening account of why America’s obsession with parking is destroying our cities. And I’m about to start re-reading Virginia Woolf’s classic Mrs. Dalloway in honor of its 100th birthday.”
Eugene McCormack, copy editor: “I recently discovered Steven Millhauser’s 1972 novel, Edwin Mullhouse, a fictional biography of a boy-genius writer who dies at 11, narrated by his obsessive friend. It’s dark and funny and gives an accurately unsettling view of childhood.”
Evan Kindley, associate editor: “Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance. A lyrical, subtle 1978 novel about the agony and ecstasy of gay life in lower Manhattan between Stonewall and AIDS.”
Alex Kafka, senior editor: “The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum, by Daniel Oberhaus. The author, a former writer for Wired and a consultant for deep-tech startup firms, is certainly no technophobe. But he has serious and well-argued reservations about the medical, philosophical, behavioral, and privacy implications of fast-growing AI-based psychological apps and data sets.”
Jason Lee, copy editor: “Much of my pleasure reading is pop-culture focused, so I’ll recommend two books from author Sam Wasson for true movie nerds: The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, which details the director’s unrelenting quest to launch his American Zoetrope production company and gives an extraordinary behind-the-scenes account of filming Apocalypse Now, and The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, a fascinating deep dive into 1970s Hollywood and the making of an American classic.”
Dan Berrett, senior editor: “The Overstory, by Richard Powers. It reframes humans’ penchant for seeing themselves as the planet’s main (and only?) characters, and shrinks to proper size their obsessions, self-regard, and conception of time.”
For my part, I’ve just finished a volume of three D.H. Lawrence works I’d never read before: the novella St. Mawr and the short stories “The Woman Who Rode Away” and “The Princess,” collected in a Penguin Classics edition. All are set in New Mexico, where Lawrence lived for some of the 1920s. I was impressed by the introduction by James Lasdun, whom I hadn’t really heard of; I Googled him to discover that in 2013 he wrote a tremendously disturbing essay in our pages about being stalked.
