Many of us are guilty of buying, borrowing or collecting books throughout the year to save for our summer reading. Now, with the warm weather beckoning, it’s time to dive into those beach reads—and maybe even consider a few more. Here, we round up ten new and enticing vacation books for your summer reading pleasure, from a rock star memoir to an engrossing study on artificial intelligence. There’s also a look back at yuppies in the unbridled 1980s, a moving retelling of living in the shadow of a famous artist family and a behemoth class novel in the vein of Bonfire of the Vanities.
Wherever your refuge this summer—the beach, the pool, even the loungeroom—there are plenty of new releases to help you beat the heat and find some escape. The question of whether to turn back time to 1974 San Francisco or retrace the history of reality TV is up to you.
Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation by Tom McGrath
From corporate capitalism to conspicuous consumption, the 1980s was a period of unrestricted excess. Tom McGrath, in his new biting study of the decade Triumph of the Yuppies, examines its grim underside to show the widening social and economic divide born from this deeply neoliberal era. The journalist charts how the Baby Boomer generation got political in the ‘60s, turned their attention inward in the ‘70s and climbed the corporate ladder in the ‘80s. Such a forward motion created significant gentrification in big cities that turbocharged social and economic disparities that are yet to be reconciled decades later. Triumph of the Yuppies is a searing cultural analysis of a time—bookended by the rise of conservatism and Ronald Reagan and the fall of the “Iron Curtain” and Berlin Wall—when a new corporate elite was born, all seemingly at the expense of the blue-collar man.
Under a Rock: A Memoir by Chris Stein
Chris Stein, the co-founder and guitarist of legendary band Blondie, has finally chronicled his fabled time in the spotlight helming one of music’s most iconic acts. Blondie was founded in 1974 by Stein and Deborah Harry with daring goals: abandon strict genre loyalties and challenge stereotypes of the vacant blonde bombshell. With its edgy sound, Blondie becomes one of the most disruptive acts to help “kill off” disco with new wave. But fame came with a price, as it often does, and Stein chronicles the pains of drugs, alcohol, and a debilitating chronic illness that betrayed him at the height of the band’s success. Showing remarkable candor—like acknowledging his daughter’s recent death from an accidental overdose—Stein demystifies the glamor of celebrity in favor of wrestling with the complex realities fame and acclaim brought him.
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia
The specter of A.I. looms large today. Since ChatGPT’s latest incarnation debuted in November 2022, A.I. has permeated more of our everyday internet lives. Madhumita Murgia, a longstanding technology correspondent now at the Financial Times, has been probing the technology for almost a decade and now puts forward his expansive survey of it. Code Dependent takes a global view of A.I., following the journalist as she travels the world to offer a sobering look at the underside of this generative machine wizardry. There are low-paid workers in developing countries indentured into training self-driving cars or food delivery drivers who hazard daily work in precarious conditions under the all-powerful control of an A.I. algorithm. What sets Murgia’s work apart from other recent books is her global perspective, one that unveils the insidious growth of A.I. beyond Silicon Valley and into the everyday lives of people across the world.
The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne
The Friday Afternoon Club sees actor and director Griffin Dunne—son of journalist Dominick Dunne and nephew to legendary writer John Gregory Dunne—write a bearing love letter to his fraught and famed family. The Dunne dynasty is one with a rich, rarefied and often tragic experience of the world. From living under the limelight of formidable father Dominick and legendary aunt Joan Didion to the gruesome murder of his sister, Dominique, at 22, Griffin nevertheless charts a lineage that sounds not unlike that of many families. There’s bitterness between clans, petty politics, and sibling rivalry that stitch together a revelatory retelling of the remarkable Dunne history. It might have glamorous co-stars—like Sean Connery saving Griffin from drowning or the confidence of famous friend Carrie Fisher—but illness, substance abuse, and grief make for one very universal and relatable story.
Caledonian Road: A Novel by Andrew O’Hagan
In the tradition of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, London Review of Books editor Andrew O’Hagan mounts a new high-meets-low social satire for the 2020s. Caledonian Road, much like Vanities in themes and also physical size, tells the rise and fall of Campbell Flynn. The respected academic and art critic finds himself embroiled in a literary scandal, chased by a Russian oligarch and then batting off a meddling student who hacks into his private accounts. O’Hagan is deft at incorporating much of modern life—from Bitcoin and deepfakes to Russian oligarchs’ financial foothold in London—in his Dickensian critique of society characterized by societal inequalities and capitalist hunger. London has never seemed more pulsating and alive post-pandemic thanks to this biting novel leveraging the city’s elevated cultural life with comical and luckless characters trying to survive its punishing economy.
The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary
India is currently in the throes of a general election, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi turning the dial up on veiled anti-Muslim rhetoric during the campaign trail. Writer Zara Chowdhary’s memoir, The Lucky Ones, is a sobering account of the troubling plight of Muslims living in India in recent times. It begins in 2002 with the aftermath of the Godhra train burning, where a Muslim mob set a train carrying Hindu pilgrims alight. But that headline summary doesn’t do the story complete justice, as Chowdhary shows a country steeped in decades of religious and cultural conflict, one where Islam has been increasingly demonized while Muslim citizens become disenfranchised. The memoir proves a harrowing read on one of India’s darkest periods from a survivor, offering a compelling take on the episode while also underscoring the country’s continuing brutalization of Muslim minorities.
The Coin: A Novel by Yasmin Zaher
The unnamed heroine in Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel, The Coin, is “simultaneously rich and poor.” Her father may have left her an inheritance of almost $30 million, but she is forced to subsist on an allowance controlled by her brother. It’s why we find her teaching immigrant middle-school kids the basics for extra cash. Even so, our protagonist has an insatiable taste for the finer things in life, indulging in expensive clothes and bags from Dior and Fendi—all until she gets embroiled in a questionable pyramid scheme involving the highly coveted Birkin bag. Zaher writes with spiritedness and verve, tackling issues like self-care and cleanliness to materialism and desire in a propulsive story about one woman’s sanitized ambition of never marrying with her grimy reality. New York has never seemed grubbier than in this woman’s corrupting quest for more money—even if it’s dirty cash.
Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum
New Yorker TV critic and Pulitzer Prize winner Emily Nussbaum gleefully charts the history of reality TV in her new book, Cue the Sun! While some might claim the genre was born in the late 1990s, Nussbaum makes the case that it started much earlier with the 1940s radio-then-TV programs Candid Microphone and Candid Camera. This reality TV throughline, Nussbaum argues, continued into the 1960s with the game show The Newlywed Game and 1970s docu-series An American Family. It was only in 1992, when MTV launched The Real World that the current genre format—a cast reality show where strangers live in a new or staged location—was popularized and birthed an omnipresent playbook that continues to hook decades on. Nussbaum provides absorbing details on the production of many past shows while threading eclectic cultural connections to her narrative. Cue the Sun! reveals how reality TV has long had—and indeed continues to have—an addictive hold on our viewing habits.
Banal Nightmare: A Novel by Halle Butler
With her previous book, The New Me, critics argued that Halle Butler had created one of the “definitive works of millennial literature.” The writer is back with her new deadpan novel, Banal Nightmare, a semi-college campus story seeing 30-something Moddie returning to her Midwestern town after years of cutting her teeth in NYC. Therein follows Moddie’s vain attempts to reconnect with myopic and miserable high school friends she increasingly despises as she descends into greater unhappiness. Butler has an unapologetically irreverent viewpoint, mocking everything from NPR and Hillary Clinton to contemporary academia and millennial smug politics, all to hilarious ends. As the threat of middle age awaits Moddie (and her new-old unhappy hometown pals), Butler relishes indulging in the bleakness and loathing that your 30s can foster in you after your bright-eyed and expansive 20s.
1974: A Personal History by Francine Prose
Set against the story of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, 76-year-old bestselling writer Francine Prose wrestles with a pivotal year in San Francisco shaped by a testing romance and false truths. 1974 saw the resignation of Richard Nixon for Watergate and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, all while the disastrous oil crisis wagered on. Francine retells how her life was similarly chaotic, first undone by the breakdown of her marriage and then tested by the burgeoning courtship with controversial whistle-blower Tony Russo. (Along with Daniel Ellsberg, Russo was indicted for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press.) Prose is frank about her ties to Russo, a strange bond that led to a profound political reawakening, all while she visits the key Vertigo filming locations to help understand the relationship. 1974 paints a stark and revealing portrait of a woman—and an artist—coming of age against the tumultuous backdrop of a dramatically changing America.
