Summer 2025 Reading List

Is it bad if you've lost the attention span to read a book?

There’s a thought that’s been knocking around my head for a bit that goes something like this—if you’ve graduated from college, you should be able to read a full length novel. Something about this opinion of mine doesn’t exactly sit right with me. It reeks of something holier than thou, like guilt tripping a new mom or saying audiobooks don’t count as reading. I was talking to my friends Claire recently (both named Claire) about signs of intellect in other people. Basically, what makes you find someone smart? One Claire noted that a sign of intellect is being open about what you don’t know and to being wrong when faced with additional information. I thought that was pretty neat. If I seek to be smart, I should be more open to changing my own mind, especially about opinions of mine that give me the ick. Why do I care if people aren’t reading? Are people not reading? Who are these people I claim to care about?

I remembered a piece in the New Yorker by Nate Immerwahr I started about the crisis of our diminishing attention spans. Admittedly, I read a few paragraphs then scrolled away. I do that a lot but I noticed it this time because I was embarrassed that I couldn’t find the attention to read a whole article about how I don’t have an attention span. Anyway, I did go back and read the whole thing and I encourage you to click away and do the same.

If the general consensus is that our phones shrinking our attention spans is horrible, Immerwahr takes a different route. He compares the panic over shrinking attention to the panic over the iron stove replacing the open fire (the end of communal conversation), or, the concerns of eighteenth-century priests that long novels were mental junk food. They thought people should be paying attention to religious study, not literary novels. Immerwahr made many great points that I don’t want to bastardize by summarizing here but one that stood out most to me is that attention is a form of discipline, thus, dictating what others ought to pay attention to is a way of disciplining other people. All the hoopla about lack of attention takes away from the real risk of smartphones on, as he says, “The overheating of discourse, the rise of conspiratorial thinking, and the hollowing out of shared truths.”¹

So maybe I’m not taking issue with the fact that fewer people are reading full length books. Who am I to say how people ought to spend their precious attention? Maybe they’re just swinging on a swing or making a long recipe or laughing with friends or otherwise paying attention to their lives? Could that be a more noble sort of presence than reading a book?

If it’s condescending to worry about this great vague mass of ‘other people’ as Immerwahr implies, I’ll worry about myself. I want to be a great writer for reasons that are beautiful and pitiful, egomaniacal and noble, so I read. If I have the mental capacity to read, it’s a good sign for the state of my mind—I’m calmer and able to take my time to make meaning rather than rushing to hollowed out conclusions. When I exercise self discipline to read more complicated texts, I’m rewarded with a great field of possible meanings I can make. My best friend is learning to teach reading and sent me research about why it’s good for young people to read full novels. A line stood out to me: “Reading novels trains the brain to visualize, develop, prune, and remember key ideas as the story progresses.”² I just love the use of the word prune here like a complex novel is a great tangled garden and I trust myself with the shears.

I’m obsessed with an eighteenth-century art form but I don’t want to be hostile to the current moment, running around like a chicken with its head cut off (or Nathanial Hawthorn at the iron stove) about all the wrong things. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We do know that getting hijacked by these devices as an adult feels difficult but for younger kids it’s nearly insurmountable. What’s a better balm for that feeling than reading? It’s in reading novels that I’ve come to understand that a fear of technology, novelty, and time’s quick passage is something others before me have experienced. A lot of those scared people have become writers, trying to figure out their questions and quandaries through story.

If you feel the same way, here’s a list of summer reads to get you started. If you’d prefer to spend your time paying attention to something else, hell ya.

LONG BOOKS -

• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty

  • It follows a group of cowboys as they move cattle from Texas to Montana. It came out in the 80’s and won a Pulitzer. I would never have read something like this except Jia Tolentino said it was the perfectly immersive vacation read. It takes a long time for the world to be built out (as my Dad said when I recommended it to him, there are a lot of cowboys talking) so be patient with the first 200 pages. If you’ve already read it, I saw Jia Tolentino recently recommend the Cazalet series by Elizabeth Howard read back to back.

• The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

  • Speaking of writers processing their anxiety about the current moment, this novel perfectly captures the precipice we are at. If you know me, I’ve already recommended this to you but if you’re just meeting me, hi!

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

  • I actually started this in high school but my mom told me how it ended and I didn’t want it to end that way so I never finished it. I’ll read the whole thing one of these days.

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

  • I told myself I couldn’t say I was reading Middlemarch on the internet until I was over halfway. I’m over halfway. I won’t say too much because what else really needs to be said. I find the chapters to be zoomed out in the first half and then in scene in the second half so if you want to give up on the book, just don’t do it in the first half of a chapter.

• My Brilliant Friend & Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

  • Her favorite book is Middlemarch and there’s a tv series that goes with it. I loved this book when I was in a period of not reading very much, it got me back into reading again.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

• The Sisters by Jonas Khemiri

  • I might be biased because Jonas was my thesis advisor, but this is one of the books coming out this summer I’m most excited for

BOOKS TO HELP YOU GET BACK INTO READING - If you’re in a reading rut or reading your first book in a long time, start with something addictive and extremely popular with accessible sentences

• Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

• The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue

  • If you’ve already read it, she just came out with another one called Skipshock

• Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

• Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

  • A woman marries an older man after his wife dies and moves into his fancy house 1930’s England. She becomes obsessed with his late wife. It’s suspenseful and dark, really so good.

• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

• Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  • I mean, it’s called pop music for a reason.

• Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

• Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malindo Lo

  • A queer coming of age story set in 1950s San Francisco. The author, Malinda Lo, is also on the frontlines of resisting book banning.

• God of the Woods by Liz Moore

  • There’s a great interview on Emma Copley Eisenberg’s substack with Liz Moore about plot

• I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuinston

  • This is the book I read to fall asleep when I have anxiety. It takes place in a very peaceful high school world.

EURO SUMMER VIBES - these books are hot, passionate, sometimes violent, and mostly not set in America

• Geovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

  • I think my favorite book of all time.

• Call Me By Your Name by André Caiman

• Loved and Missed by Susan Boyt

• Good Girl by Aria Aber

• Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

  • The novel follows an interpreter at an international criminal court, the themes explored are perfectly right for this moment.

• 10:30 on a summer night by Marguerite Duras

  • A couple, their child, and another woman go for a roadtrip through rural france… What could go wrong?

• A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

  • Told by a writer in Seattle and a teenager in Japan in alternating parts. The whole thing feels like one long fine meditation

• Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald

  • It’s Great Gatsby on a eurotrip.

NEW ENGLAND SUMMER VIBES

• Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

  • I love this book. Each chapter, one woman shows up in a story set in the same small town in Maine. I would reread it anytime. It’s really everything. If you’ve already read this one, I’d recommend the I am Lucy Barton series by Strout.

• The Wedding by Dorothy West

  • A family preps for a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard. I was introduced to this book from Brandon Taylor’s craft class on the novel of manners.

• Fire Exit by Morgan Talty

• The Guest by Emma Cline

  • A gal with issues gets lost on the Hamptons for many days. I swallowed it whole. Love her sentences.

• My Train Leaves at Three by Natalie Guerrero

  • Again, technically New York but I’ve been following this writer for a while and I’m excited for her debut novel set in Washington Heights

• Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej

  • A writer in her twenties is in love with an older choreographer and spends a lot of time at his summer house in western Mass, very sexy summer descriptions

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

  • Ok this is New England vibes if you’re from Cambridge like me but it’s not exactly what you’re thinking of. Two friends at MIT make a video game and their lives intertwine from there. If you’ve already read it, her other book A Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is also on my list)

• Little Children by Tom Perrota

  • It’s set in a suburb exactly like Belmont, MA, things get messy between parents at a playground. Also a great read if you’re in a rut or looking for something to really grab you.

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I hope you have such a happy summer of reading (or doing whatever you want)! To finding some time for quiet and trusting your powerful mind to make meaning.

xo,

Zoe

1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/27/the-sirens-call-chris-hayes-book-review

2. Dickinson and Neuman 2006