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Vox
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
The steamy, subversive rise of the summer novel
is the host of Explain It to Me, your hotline for all your unanswered questions. She joined Vox in 2022 as a senior producer and then as host of The Weeds, Vox's policy podcast. As a kid, one of the highlights of my summer vacation was sitting underneath a tree in my grandmother's backyard and getting lost in a book. I don't get a three-month summer break anymore, but tucking away with a juicy novel when it's hot outside is a ritual I still return to. So what makes for a good summer read and how did this practice even emerge in the first place? That's what we set out to find out on this week's episode of Explain It to Me, Vox's weekly call-in podcast. Next Page Book recommendations — both old and new — that are worth your time, from senior correspondent and critic Constance Grady. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. To find the answer we spoke with Donna Harrington-Lueker, author of Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading. Summer reading is a practice she knows well. 'As a teenager, let's just say I was a bit bookish,' she says. 'That meant that when my family went for its one-week vacation a year — which was a big treat — they were on the beach and I was in some kind of a bunk bed with Moby Dick or Siddhartha.' Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you'd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@ or call 1-800-618-8545. How did this idea of summer reading even start? Have we always grabbed books when it's hot out? No, not really. My research focused on the 19th century, and I started looking at newspaper articles, advertisements from book publishers, and the like. And I divided it into two periods: before the Civil War and after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, summer reading was constructed as a masculine practice. The idea was that men would get away from the heat and the pressures of their lives, and they should read something cool. So the essays of Charles Lamb; poetry was mentioned often as well. That all changes after the Civil War, when there's an increase in travel and tourism. The performance of summer leisure becomes an aspiration for a growing middle class, so you have many, many more people engaging in this practice. You have an increase in railroads as well. So you've got an easy way for people to get from point A to point B, and hotels begin to spring up. And as a result of that, publishers start really promoting summer reading. It takes a very specific form, and increasingly it becomes something that women do. It becomes a rather gendered space. Can you talk about that idea of performing leisure a little bit? I think that's really interesting. Publishers would advertise a variety of things as summer reading, but one of the central things was what I call the summer novel. It would be a novel that would be set in Saratoga Springs or Newport or Cape May, at a summer resort. Regardless of how wealthy or not people were, they always seemed to stay there for an entire summer as opposed to a week or a weekend. It would involve a courtship and over the course of the novel, two young people would meet, they would resolve their differences, they would visit various places, and at the end they would be married. By reading these, you'd get an idea of what these resorts were about, and you'd get an idea of how you performed leisure, what you did once you got there, and what the expectations were. So they were serving that purpose as well. There's also a good bit of fashion, so for the young woman, you'd get an idea of how you're supposed to dress. That's so interesting. So it sounds like it's serving the purpose of a mixture of a Hallmark movie with your romance but the drama and intrigue of White Lotus. Definitely the Hallmark characteristic of it. Absolutely. Were these books purely escapist, or did they get at larger themes too? One of the things that I found interesting was that yes, they are escapist in the sense of allowing you to experience another lifestyle, but they were very, very much kind of a liminal space, a space of betwixt in between. For young women especially, it's doing the cultural work of asking, 'What does it look like to have more freedoms as a young woman?' Because there was markedly more freedom — or at least as these books constructed it — during the summer and at summer resorts. You have women hiking and women going out on boats on their own and being unchaperoned, opening up vistas of freedom. Now, admittedly, at the end of all these, order is reasserted. People go back to their normal lives. Marriage as the ultimate institution of tradition gets reasserted. But for the space of the novel there are more freedoms. You have women hiking and women going out on boats on their own and being unchaperoned, opening up vistas of freedom. The novels weren't spaces that were necessarily completely out of touch either. There would be references to a very violent Pullman strike that appeared in one of the summer novels. In the preface to one about Saratoga Springs, there's questions about American imperialism. There's questions about treatment of Native Americans. And so when you take the book as a whole, it's nation-building in a way as well, and it's questioning that in some of them. What was the reaction to the rise of summer reading at the time? Was everyone just ecstatic that people were reading? The publishing industry had a very serious marketing challenge on its hands. Post-Civil War especially, you have rising literacy rates – especially among young women – but you have a very solid and profound discourse that says novel reading is evil, that it is dangerous, especially for young women. The fear was that it would be sexually arousing, that the morals would be questionable. And so you get a lot of criticism, especially among clerics and also a real fear of French novels. They were considered the most problematic. Do we still have a lot of these summer reading conventions in book publishing?
Vox
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
'I don't want romantasy, I want Heathcliff!'
Welcome to Ask a Book Critic, a members-only feature packed with personalized book recommendations from senior correspondent and resident book critic Constance Grady. To get your own recommendation, ask Constance here, and subscribe to the newsletter here. I am due with a baby at the end of this month, and anticipate many half-hour, middle-of-the-night reading sessions while feeding the babe. I would love to start a series that can keep my interest, isn't too difficult to read in short bursts, and interesting enough it can keep me from the temptation of phone scrolling. I'm not a huge fan of sci-fi and typically lean toward fiction or historical fiction. I'd definitely be open to trying some mysteries or thrillers as well if you've got ideas! Since you're looking for a historical fiction series, you should get on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall books if you haven't already, because they are just as good as everyone says. (Albeit perhaps a bit dense for midnight feeding sessions!) I'd also recommend Nicola Griffiths's Hild series, which has published two of a planned three volumes, Hild and Menewood. They tell the story of a teenage girl in medieval Britain who navigates court politics, intermittent war, and a shifting religious landscape on her journey to becoming Saint Hilda of Whitby, one of the kingmakers of her era. Griffith's got a great touch for all the tactile details of living in preindustrial England — the food, the spices, the cloth, the herbs. One of the deep pleasures of these books is watching all the different religious sects of the Middle Ages jockey for recognition from kings who will follow any god who can get them a win. If the Hild books start feeling too heavy, let's turn to mysteries. Agatha Christie can be your friend here, as can Dorothy Sayers; they both have detective series that go on forever without any appreciable dip in quality. For something more modern, Louise Penny's Armand Gamache detective novels are beloved and, not for nothing, are known for really good food writing too. I want to dive into more contemporary fiction, but struggle to find writing that appeals to my Dickensian and Dostoyevskian sensibilities. I want character-driven. I want beautifully sculpted sentences. I don't want romantasy, I want Heathcliff. I want Jane in the red room and the Demeter at Whitby. I want to hear the beat of the heart under the floor boards. I want to visit José Arcadio Buendía at the tree. I want to see the things fall apart and to know both war and peace. I'm willing to cross the genre wilderness and dive into any culture, but the writing and characters have to grab me. I have found contemporary authors I love — Anthony Doerr, Amor Towles, and Kazuo Ishiguro, for example. I know there are others, please help me find them! I can respect 19th-century taste. The contemporary author who writes the most plush, Dickensian sentences I know of is Sarah Parry. Start with her novel The Essex Serpent, which brings a contemporary psychoanalytical lens to a lurid Victorian fantasia of a plot about a massive sea serpent terrorizing a small town. It's a very rich, textured, Crime and Punishment-in-couture kind of a book. For your Slavic cravings, the novelist Elif Batuman has a degree in Russian literature and titled her debut novel The Idiot after Dostoevsky. It's a much more constrained, specific novel than its inspiration, and it may or may not be to your taste, but it's worth looking at regardless. Finally, my friend (and former Vox colleague) Tara Isabella Burton has a PhD in theology from Oxford, and she thinks a lot about both sin and Dostoevsky in her novel Social Creature. It's a very rich, textured, Crime and Punishment-in-couture kind of a book. John McPhee is my all-time favorite author — I haven't read anything by him that I haven't liked. Alas, he is very old. What are some similar fairly current narrative nonfiction books?
Vox
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
Ask a Book Critic: I want a book that won't stress me out before bed
Welcome to Ask a Book Critic, a members-only feature packed with personalized book recommendations from senior correspondent and resident book critic Constance Grady. To get your own recommendation, ask Constance here, and subscribe to the newsletter here. I need a book for my family book club — it's my turn to pick. The only rule is that the author has to be Black. I try to recommend sci-fi/fantasy or magical realism to my family when it's my pick since that's outside their comfort zones. I am going to assume you already know about Octavia Butler. (If not, she should be your first stop.) But let's not end our overview with the great Ms. Butler and what she accomplished with Kindred. A lot of talented new Black writers have been making waves in the fantasy-science fiction world over the last 10 years, and right now, there's a lot of exciting work happening in that space. N.K. Jemisin won a historic three Hugo awards for her Broken Earth trilogy, which tells the story of a mother and daughter waging war against each other on a furious, exploited, somewhat sentient planet that may be our own, far in the future. It's an absolutely titanic achievement, and it will keep your family busy should you choose to read through all three volumes. Akwaeke Emezi writes in a lot of different genres (they once told me in an interview that they started with literary fiction to make sure they would be taken seriously once they veered off into romance and science fiction), but always with incredibly precise, ferocious, electric prose. Their debut novel Freshwater uses Igbo cosmology to dramatize its protagonist's gender dysphoria and manic depressive personality, telling the story of a young girl who is ogbanje: She houses a spirit in her body, and she was born only to torture her mother by dying. Only instead of dying, she lives, and torments her mother in other ways. Victor LaValle writes fantasy with a strong edge of horror, fairy tale, and social commentary. His most beloved work is probably The Changeling, about a man whose wife abruptly begins to claim that their baby isn't really their baby, to unsettling and unearthly results. The Changeling is a good primer on what makes LaValle such a cult favorite: It blends a deeply evocative portrayal of what it's like to be a parent with creepy, spine-tingling horror, plus some choice commentary on American politics. It's also a love letter to books themselves: Our hero is a rare books dealer, and a lot of the mythology here surrounds Maurice Sendak's classic Outside Over There. The whole thing is incredibly fun to read. Finally, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's debut novel Chain Gang All-Stars was one of the big hits of 2023, and boy is it easy to see why. Chain Gang All-Stars imagines a near-future United States in which prisoners have the option of leaving jail to fight to the death in nationally televised gladiatorial games. If they survive three years on the circuit, the prisoners are free, sentence served. Almost no one ever lives that long. Across this propulsive, scathing novel, Adjei-Brenyah kaleidoscopes into the minds of people at all levels of complicity and victimization among the Chain-Gang All-Stars: spectators, organizers, and fighters alike. Almost no one he shows us is wholly innocent, but redemption is possible, if you have imagination enough to strive for it. Hope in the current age. I often read fantasy and sci-fi, but I feel like a more grounded fiction (or nonfiction) story that can encourage me to look towards hope through human stories in a more modern setting will help my mental health. One of the contemporary novels I've been thinking about lately is Lessons by Ian McEwan. McEwan writes a lot about how a single horrible catastrophe can warp a person's life forever (remember Briony in Atonement, who spends the rest of her life making up for a mistake she made as a child?). But Lessons is about a man who lives through several horrible catastrophes, and yet somehow manages to build a life worth living anyway. Lessons spans the whole life of a man named Roland, from adolescence through old age. Roland experiences tragedies both personal (childhood sex abuse, spousal abandonment) and political (the Iron Curtain, Thatcherism, Covid). Yet as dark as things can get for Roland, he still has a life full of love and warmth and companionship, and it only becomes more so as he keeps surviving each catastrophe in turn and learning what he can from it. I do most of my reading before bed and tend to fall asleep quickly; I average about five pages a night. I'm looking for something that is interesting/thought-provoking but won't make me too anxious. Something that's easy to pick up and put down but still maintains a story/theme. In your shoes, I think I would like a book short enough that I could finish it over a few weeks, even five pages at a time — I always get disoriented if I try to do a larger novel in little chunks. So you might like Small Things Like These, a brief and lovely novel by Claire Keegan. Small Things Like These tells the story of the thoroughly decent Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and father in a tiny Irish village in 1985. Making his rounds one day, Bill comes across a shocking scene in the town's Magdalene laundry, a Catholic-run institution for unmarried mothers. The Catholic Church in 1980s Ireland is immensely powerful, but Bill, with his stubborn goodness, isn't quite willing to back down from a fight.
Vox
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
'Help me find a new author with the same vibe as my old favorite'
Welcome to Ask a Book Critic, a members-only feature packed with personalized book recommendations from senior correspondent and resident book critic Constance Grady . To get your own recommendation, ask Constance here , and subscribe to the newsletter here . I'm a person who wants to read more fiction, but I get regularly (not a bad thing I guess) sucked into the big nonfiction book for the policy/chronically online zeitgeist. For example, I am reading On the Edge by Nate Silver now, and I read Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here and Recoding America before that. But I was a big fan of I'm a Fan by Sheena Patel. For we, the chronically online, I can only recommend Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This , the great novel of what pre-Musk Twitter looked like. Lockwood, a poet, was an early adopter of what we used to call Weird Twitter, and that's the mode in which she writes her novel: perverse, darkly funny, unnervingly sincere when you don't expect it to be. No One Is Talking About This features an unnamed narrator who has become famous for having tweeted, 'Can a dog be twins?' Now, her project is to write a book about 'the stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own,' a consciousness 'that you participate in, but that also acts upon you,' which is to say, the hive consciousness of Twitter. But the narrator is forced off the internet when her niece is born with severe birth defects, and her entire life is shaken up with love. This book is tender and beautiful, and it will have the side effect of not making you feel guilty for being online so much as aware of it — aware of how it feels, why it pulls to us, and how it molds our minds and bodies. I love books with unconventional female narrators, whether they are morally compromised or socially awkward/strange. For example, I've recently read Yellowface , Convenience Store Woman , and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine . While these range in subject matter, I'd love recommendations for books that feature strong first-person narration (the stranger and believably unlikeable the better) and the kinds of critiques on societal expectations these had. I keep having to rewrite this sentence because I am so excited that I can't stop myself from lapsing into capslock, but GET READY for Susan Choi's Trust Exercise . WHAT A BOOK! It's a tricky one to talk about, though. Let's keep it as simple as we can. In part one, Trust Exercise is a lovely little bittersweet tale about a high school romance gone wrong between two theater kids in the 1980s, told by both lovers in alternating perspectives. In part two, we learn that much of what we read in part one is heavily fictionalized from the events that our new narrator assures us really happened, which were much darker. (You're going to love this narrator, by the way — incredibly spiky, incredibly angry, all the while constantly asserting that she is absolutely not mad.) In part three, we finally get to something that might resemble the truth, and it is devastating. (It is also infamously confusing, but rest assured, we've got an explainer for that. Don't read it until you've finished the book!) I've really enjoyed a few Jennifer Egan books recently — Visit From the Goon Squad and its sequel Candy House and most recently her debut The Invisible Circus . I'm wondering if you could recommend another author or book worth exploring with similar vibes. I've been in a bit of a rut with reading until this trio of books and had been falling back on murder mysteries as a crutch. Don't get me wrong, I love a cozy murder mystery in the winter. But something that's literary and readable is more the mix I'm aiming for right now. Thank you! When I think of Jennifer Egan books, I think of: formal experimentation, a deep interest in how technology shapes human connections, and a preoccupation with time and its ravages and redemptions. For two other perspectives on these issues, your best bet is probably either Gary Shteyngart or George Saunders. Of the two, Shteyngart is the cynic. His protagonists tend to be losers, middle-aged men who are either beaten down by capitalism or have so internalized its logic that it has destroyed their minds. Shteyngart is never shy about making jokes at their expense. Their subsequent attempts to form connections forms the core of his witty, tricky novels. Start with Super Sad True Love Story , the 2010 dystopian novel that has only become more plausible with time. Saunders is a more straightforwardly empathetic writer, particularly in his only novel, Lincoln in the Bardo . (The bulk of Saunders's work is in short stories.) Lincoln is about Abraham Lincoln's son, 11-year-old Willie, who died of typhus while the Civil War was raging and who has, in this novel, become trapped in the bardo, the in-between place straddling life and afterlife. Willie must pass on to the next stage of being or lose his soul. It is only the great empathy Lincoln feels for the dead — as the man whose decisions have meant death for so many — that rouses the other ghosts of the bardo to guide Willie onward. It's a beautiful, word-drunk novel. If you like it, go from there straight to Saunders's great short story collection The Tenth of December and then just keep going.
