What are Vox staffers reading in the dog days of summer?
Whether you like it or not, summer’s not quite over yet. There are still many days of sunshine and miserably hot temps ahead. To round out the rest of your summer reading list, our staffers share their favorite books they read this summer, for you to enjoy on a sandy beach, at a neighborhood cafe, or maybe just anywhere with AC.
As an inveterate gossip, I really enjoyed Griffin Dunne’s memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club. Dunne’s dad Dominick is a summer novel staple (maybe you too want to lay on a beach and read about how society ladies were mean to each other), but it turns out his rakish actor son has lived a life of fun fodder. From his childhood attending parties alongside Sean Connery to his best-friendship with Carrie Fisher, the book is full of glamour, family feuds, mistakes, and at least one visit to an orgy.
It also provides a front-row seat to one of the most devastating domestic violence murders in the American public consciousness, as Griffin navigates life after his sister Dominique’s murder. While he leans a little heavily on his father’s past writing for those sections, an anecdote from the set of Johnny Dangerously — the now-mostly forgotten Michael Keaton movie Dunne filmed at night while attending the trial during the day — brought surprise tears to my eyes.
—Meredith Haggerty, senior editor, culture
My great friend Tyler invited me to join his book club. He works at our local high school, which means I now get to be part of literary discussions with the English teacher who I had during my freshman year! I’m excited to learn from everyone in the group, and also from the other teachers I didn’t get the chance to have back then. This past month, we read The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. I’ve really enjoyed his poetry collections and other novels, but this has become my favorite book of his by far. It’s about a teen who’s struggling deeply while living in a declining town in Connecticut. He’s literally pulled back from the edge by an elderly widow and he ends up becoming her live-in caretaker. The bond they form is beautiful, and the story also dives into his experiences working at a fast-casual restaurant, which is deeply relatable to anyone who’s worked in a similar environment. His writing is immensely poetic and continues to leave me thinking about dignity, memory, class, and survival.
—Gabby Fernandez, associate director, audience
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, which I recently completed, was one of the best books I’ve ever read, it’s essentially War and Peace for the Eastern Front of World War II. The book follows various Russian characters, including one central family, dealing with the chaos and horrors of the Nazi attacks, while also grappling with the ongoing traumas of Stalin’s purges and continuing repression, and the moral compromises that life under authoritarianism entails. It’s harrowing, moving, and fascinating.
—Andrew Prokop, senior correspondent
The Upcycled Self by Tariq Trotter, better known as Black Thought, for layered storytelling that reads like a song, is quintessentially Philly, and pairs well with a warm summer evening on the porch.
—Devi Lockwood, editor, policy, politics, and ideas
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar! It’s an enchanting little fable about language and song and sisters, and every sentence was made to be read aloud — I really recommend doing so.
—Kim Slotterback, copy editor
I just finished the new novel from writer Gary Shteyngart, whose last name I definitely spelled right on the first attempt. Called Vera, or Faith, it’s another Shteyngart near-future semi-dystopia comic tour de force, a genre for which I believe he is the one and only writer. Set far enough in the future that there are self-driving cars with grouchy personalities and chess-playing AIs capable of emotional conversations, but close enough to now that upper-middle-class Manhattan parents are still obsessed with getting their kids into the right colleges, Vera tracks a kind of familial awakening for a 9-year-old girl named Vera grappling with a family that’s falling apart and a country that’s outright collapsing over Trumpian nativism gone wild. It’s Shteyngart, so of course it’s funny — he may be the one novelist who is actually amusing on X — but what makes it break through is Vera, who will take her place among the great precocious protagonists of literature. Move over, Holden Caulfield.
—Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director, Future Perfect
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! was the kind of read that left me altered. The ending hit with such force that I immediately flipped back and read it again. And again. Wait — did that just happen?? It’s a novel filled with ghosts, grief, conversations between Cyrus, the novel’s narrator, and imagined versions of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Beethoven Shams (a brother who doesn’t even exist) and a fateful plane crash that killed his mother. Akbar’s poetic voice handles sticky subjects like American and Arab politics and Muslim religion with both empathy and force. This book is beautiful. I’m still thinking about it. I might always be.
—Paige Vega, climate editor
After seeing it rec’d repeatedly, I recently picked up Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population, a sweetly feminist sci-fi novel originally published in 1996. It follows an elderly but still spry woman, Ofelia, who’s spent decades living with her family and others in a small, experimental human colony on a faraway planet. When the project gets axed and all of the colonists are ordered to return home, Ofelia decides to stay behind, so that she can finally be alone, for once. Solitude all too often gets framed as an awful thing, but here it’s full of joy and replenishment. Ofelia comes into her own once she no longer has to concern herself with the societal strictures placed around women, or with the way other people constantly underestimate her because of her age.
Except then, of course, everything changes — when the cute neighboring aliens show up.
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One of the best things about Elatsoe, Darcie Little Badger’s 2020 young adult fantasy slash murder mystery, comes when the protagonist tells her family that her dead cousin has just ordered her to solve his murder. Instead of the skepticism you might expect, Ellie, aka Elatsoe, named after her powerful great-six, or sixth-great-grandmother, gets nothing but support and assistance from her family and friends, as they all band together to help Ellie and her ghost dog Kirby solve the mystery.
As Lipan Apache, Ellie and her family move through a world full of magical realism, where mythological, European, and Indigenous folkloric creatures all coexist with modern society; fairy rings, for example, are massive teleportation centers that get treated like airports. Ellie herself draws on her own magical powers, and the stories of the past, to help fight the all-too-human monsters threatening to uproot them all. This is a book full of surprises, delights, and profound humanity. Little Badger won the Locus award for best first novel, and it’s easy to see why.
—Aja Romano, senior culture writer
This summer I enjoyed reading Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, a short satirical novel about a millennial expat couple in Berlin who become increasingly dissatisfied with their lives. They’ve carefully curated their apartment and careers and social circle to reflect their aesthetic taste. But try as they might — from popping pills at art parties, to taking up refugee activism, to becoming digital nomads in Lisbon and Sicily — they can’t shake the feeling that life is passing them by. The book also reminded me of Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists in documenting the pursuit of happiness in an age of aimlessness.
—Avishay Artsy, senior producer, Today, Explained