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Whether you’re hitting the beach or the couch this holiday weekend, you should bring a book. There’s a flood of awesome reading this summer, and while you can’t read everything, you can find the perfect book for whatever you have planned. What follows are some of GQ’s favorite recent books—from a whirlwind tour through surfing and sobriety to a bloody horror novel set in small-town Idaho—paired with various summer moods and situations.
Best Plane Read: Test Gods, by Nicholas Schmidle
When you make your long-awaited return to air travel this summer, you will quickly be reminded that air travel is a miserable, miserable sport, so much so that you might rather go to the moon. In that case, read Test Gods, in which the New Yorker writer Nicholas Schmidle unpacks the star-crossed space tourism company Virgin Galactic. The book focuses on the test pilots tasked with turning Richard Branson's hare-brained idea—a suborbital space trip in a small rocket dropped from a large plane—into a painstakingly engineered, catastrophically disaster-tested reality. It's also about fathers, and sons, and the ways that the pilot's life can both deepen and fracture the bonds between them. You'll finish before your plane lands.
Best Beach Read: The Drop by Thad Ziolkowski
Thad Ziolkowski's ambitious new pseudo-memoir is ostensibly a book about surfing, and on a sentence level it contains some truly magical writing in the vein of Barbarian Days (in fact, William Finnegan provides the cover blurb). But it's also an addiction memoir that isn't afraid to explore the liminal spaces where the endorphin rush of the sport meets our darker compulsions. In less capable hands the wheels would squeak right off. But when Ziolkowski is on, it's hard not to feel what he's feeling. It's a science book about the things we tether ourselves to, made spiritual.
Best Bar Read: Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados
Marlowe Granados’s debut novel, which arrives stateside in early September, is a champagne-soaked, strappy-heeled guide to a summer of indulgence with a scammer-y twist. The book follows Isa and Gala, two glamorous 21-year-old grifters hustling their way through a summer in New York while doing, well, absolutely nothing. Underneath it all runs a pulsing current of tenacious resilience as the girls charm their way into cocktails on the dimes of others and slyly finagle house sitting gigs and odd jobs to bankroll their summer of revelry. Between French 75s and handfuls of caviar, Isa narrates with the wry, whip-smart bemusement of an F. Scott Fitzgerald character who woke up in 2013 with a martini and a vintage Gucci dress.
Best Page-Turner: How Lucky by Will Leitch
The first novel by the sportswriter is a literary detective story starring an unlikely sleuth: Daniel, a wheelchair-bound 26-year old who suffers from spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a disease which makes every movement dangerous. How Lucky spends time exploring how this condition feels from the inside alongside witty observations about Georgia college football culture and life on social media until the narrative engine kicks in: A Chinese graduate student has disappeared, and Daniel is the only witness.
Best Suspenseful Read: The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
Office drama gets the Get Out treatment in this debut. Nella, an editorial assistant and sole Black employee at Wagner Books, initially hits it off with her new colleague, Hazel—the other Black girl—until she begins to suspect something is off when Hazel catapults into office favorite status and a series of anonymous threatening notes that keep appearing on Nella’s desk. The book keeps you on your toes throughout: what’s the source of Hazel’s easy popularity? Who wants Nella out—and why? The unspoken camaraderie Black coworkers might share is dissected, twisted, and turned on its head in this nail-biter.
Best Read for the Middle of Nowhere: Second Place by Rachel Cusk
The long-awaited fiction followup to the Outline trilogy is about a woman living near an idyllic and isolated coastal marsh who invites a famed painter to stay on her property in the hopes that he will interpret the landscape through his eyes. (It’s based loosely on Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 epistolary book with D.H. Lawrence.) The visit turns fraught, filled with jolting moments of cruelty from the painter and melodrama from the narrator, plus frequent cutting wit. The one question that will be on everyone’s lips this summer: Who is Jeffers???
Best Stress Read: Red Pill by Hari Kunzru
If you believe that the beach is no place to relax, we recommend this increasingly claustrophobic novel about a Brooklyn writer who sets off on what’s supposed to be a restorative residency outside Berlin and rapidly loses his mind. Featuring: obsession, paranoia, vivid interludes about East Germany, a mid-life crisis for the internet age, and a cautionary tale against watching too many crime dramas.
Best Stress Management Read: The Deadline Effect by Christopher Cox
Like it or not, many of us spend time off worrying about work and slowly creeping deadlines. With the right perspective, however, deadlines can actually be a source of calm that allows you to take a break with peace of mind. Christopher Cox caught up with a bunch of high-profile, high-achieving people and organizations, like the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten or the Air Force’s hurricane response team to see how deadlines informed what they do. When you have a healthy relationship with crunch time, the book argues, you can do great work and enjoy vacation to the fullest.
Best Dinner Party Read: Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
The discourse around trans issues can focus more on theoretical questions—the difference between gender and sex, why it’s bad to deadname someone, why bathroom bills are bad, and so on—than the particulars of actually being trans. This book takes the reader viscerally inside the passions and heartbreaks and messy particulars of trans life via the story of three mostly-bourgeois Brooklynites lurching towards a kind of co-parenting situation. Detransition, Baby is juicy and entertaining—and might leave you a little more broad-minded and empathetic, too.
Best Summer Playlist Read: Tragic Magic by Wesley Brown
Originally shepherded to publication by Toni Morrison during her tenure at Random House and now reissued for a new series from McSweeney's, Tragic Magic follows Melvin "Mouth" Ellington—a twenty-something Black man, and namesake of Duke—on his first day out of prison after two years served for refusing to fight in Vietnam. While Melvin's first day on the outside and back in New York is seemingly full of reunions, flirtations, and fights, he also constantly flashes back to scenes and decisions he made before and during his prison sentence, all of which led him to where he is now. Tragic Magic is an often-dark look at gender norms, violence, and the confusion of radical movements, yet the whole novel so obviously delights in the music of language that every page retains buoyancy. It also delights in literal music, too; a jazz-inflected playlist of every song Melvin mentions is perfect for a hot summer night.
Best Pre-Trip Read: This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan
The food writer continues his career pivot to controlled substance thought leader. While his previous outing, the immensely popular How to Change Your Mind, made the modern case for psychedelics, Pollan’s latest broadens his focus to include uppers and downers. Pollan examines three psychoactive substances that occur in nature: opium, caffeine, and mescaline. The opium chapter is an amusing tale of Pollan’s attempt to cultivate opium from garden variety poppies, while the caffeine chapter will make you take a hard look at how much coffee you drink. This is Your Mind on Plants evangelizes less than How to Change Your Mind, but it’s just as thought provoking and all the better for it.
Best Vitamin D Substitute: Klara & the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Nobel laureate’s anticipated new novel is perhaps the kindest dystopian science fiction we’ve yet encountered. Klara is an Artificial Friend (AF) and glowing narrator with the appearance of Audrey Tautou in the movie Amélie, an enlightening knack for observing (and speculating on) the world around her, and a deep empathy to rival any human. She is purchased as a friend for a young girl, Josie, who has a troubling illness that often leaves her bed-ridden. Klara is solar-powered and regards the sun like a deity, so in an effort to cure Josie, she makes a pact with the center of the solar system. There is a buried dark twist that’ll knock your head into an Ex Machina-esque flurry, but this is puppy-dog-eyes emoji all the way through.
Best Glow-Up Read: Pretty Boys by David Yi
As the world slowly reopens, it’s more important than ever to be sure your eyebrows are on point. And if you don’t believe that applies to gentlemen, too, David Yi’s new book details the long history of men, makeup, skincare, and beauty. It turns out humans have used cosmetics since 50,000 BCE and the Vikings were grooming gods. Next time you put on eyeliner, remember that you’re part of an ancient tradition that goes all the way back to the pharaohs.
Best Read for a Cabin in the Woods: My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
Sneaking in right at the end of the summer is the best horror novel of the year. When a bunch of rich families move to an idyllic little town in Idaho, bodies start piling up and slasher-flick-obsessive Jade Daniels becomes convinced that a horror film is happening in real life all around her. Jones is a veteran horror writer (his last book, The Only Good Indians, won a Ray Bradbury Prize and Bram Stoker Award), and this is a loving homage to meta-horror classics like Scream and Cabin in the Woods. Hilarious at one turn and outrageously gruesome at the next, it’ll be the perfect book to read after dark over Labor Day weekend.
Best Post-Date Read: 100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell
Brontez Purnell is an Oakland legend—on top of being a prize-winning writer, he’s a rock star, the founder of a dance company, and a performance artist. His latest collection of short stories is a hilarious, non-stop series of boyfriends past, united by candid takes on love, sex, and more sex. 100 Boyfriends rings with a cringeworthy truth: the people we date (or fuck) can often be a little ridiculous. But Purnell finds the beauty and dignity in every ex. Take, for example, the nerdy Satanist boyfriend who ends up being bad in bed—not a good partner, but great for playing Magic: The Gathering on Wednesdays.
Best Read for Getting In Touch With Nature: Why Peacocks? by Sean Flynn
Sean Flynn has written for GQ about everything from incredible rescues, to harrowing disasters, to, uh, grifting nuns.He’s such a great reporter that you can forget what a brilliant stylist he is. All that skill is on display in Why Peacocks? Flynn spent years of his life and his savings on caring for some displaced peacocks, then deeply researching their insane provenance and plumage as well as their bizarre place in history and culture (Zeus makes an appearance). It’s one part love story and one part rescue tale and somehow not really about peacocks at all.
Best Multiplex Read: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino
This pulpy homage to old-fashioned movie novelizations, which looks like a mass-market ‘70s paperback, is just as much fun as the film it’s based on. It’s also not a strict retelling. While the book barely mentions the film’s bravura ending sequence, it does have lots of juicy new details about Brad Pitt’s character Cliff Booth, a boatload of trivia from the golden age of Hollywood, and critiques of German and Japanese cinema that feel suspiciously like the author speaking. If you love the movies but don’t want to go back to a movie theater just yet, this is a great alternative to HBO Max.
Best Emotional Read: Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor
If Brandon Taylor isn’t on your radar, change that immediately. The Booker-nominated novelist is one of the most exciting young writers working today, and his new short story collection, Filthy Animals, is a powerful suckerpunch right in your Feelings. Several of the stories follow a queer Black grad student named Lionel as he recovers from a suicide attempt and gets involved with a couple of dancers in an open relationship. It gets messy. Taylor has a gift for pulling readers into emotionally fraught territory and delivering them to the other side a little battered but better for it.
Best Family Vacation Read: To Raise a Boy by Emma Brown
The Washington Post investigative reporter spoke to hundreds of boys and men to research her new book about the state of boyhood and masculinity today. “I had thought a lot about the challenges girls face growing up, having been a girl myself, and frankly I think I just thought being a boy was easier. And what this book taught me is that being a boy is not easier,” she told GQ. “It's such a fraught experience for the boys and young men I spoke to, and I wish we could see that more clearly” To Raise a Boy is a great read for any parent, regardless of whether they have a son or a daughter.
Best Journey: Ramadan Ramsey by Louis Edwards
After 18 years, the author of Ten Seconds is back with a new novel. This one follows Ramadan, the son of Syrian refugee and an African American woman whose family has lived in New Orleans for nine generations. Ramadan’s father left him and his mother before he was born, and when he turns 12, he decides to track down his dad, a journey that will take him from the Mississippi River to Aleppo. Stories about sons searching for fathers are common enough, but Edwards is an extremely uncommon writer. Ramadan Ramsey is a clever, moving family novel that will transport you across the globe, even though borders are still closed to many of us.
Best Rage Read: Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
Few books pull off the twin feats of Patrick Radden Keefe’s devastating portrait of the pharmaceutical dynasty whose runaway invention, OxyContin, tipped off America's opioid crisis. First, the book is a sweeping expose that provides startling new insight into a national tragedy. Then, perhaps more impressively, it’s a carefully-told thriller of familial ambition and dysfunction. This is a drama worthy of a novel: A story of avarice and of hubris and of a vast fortune made in the merging of medicine and marketing. For decades, the billionaire Sacklers worked hard to keep all of this secret—and to keep their name off the family business. Keefe shows us exactly why.
Best Political Read: The Engagement by Sasha Issenberg
How did America get same-sex marriage? How did an idea burst into national consciousness, divide the country, and then—seemingly overnight—become so thoroughly accepted that it now seems strange that it ever inspired enormous debate? Sasha Issenberg takes us back to the beginning, noting that gay rights activists regarded marriage as a rather low priority for decades. But in the early 1990s, the issue was thrust into the political arena by increasingly powerful traditionalist Christians. “Not until opponents feared the threat of gay marriage,” Issenberg writes, “did most gay-rights leaders find it worth fighting for.” The ensuing battle is told through the activists, political strategists, and the lawyers who took up the issue across the country. Particularly fascinating is the deep-in-the-trenches reporting on the operatives who tussled covertly—like those behind a secret Mormon project to torpedo gay marriage. It's a book full of surprises, even if the happy ending is evident from the start.
