In the summer, I want to read books that are quick, witty, captivating. Novels that are immersive and consuming, essays that I laugh about hours after reading them, poetry that makes me feel like other people understand how beautiful and precious our Earth is. I want to feel like I too am falling in love in an Italian villa (Call Me By Your Name), plotting a murder during Classics class (The Secret History), or searching for Amy Dunne (Gone Girl). The best summer reads are the ones you truly can’t put down.

Every summer there are also books that stick out - the ones you see in every bookshop, on every beach, and, now, all over Instagram. The five books in this post - four novels and one set of essays - definitely fit that bill.

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is a book years in the making. Taddeo spent hours with the subjects of the book - Maggie, Sloan, and Lina - learning about their lives and speaking to their families and friends. Maggie’s teacher has instigated a predatory romantic relationship with her, and when she reports him to the police years later the fallout is extreme. Sloan’s husband likes to pick her sexual partners and watch her sleep with other men. Lina’s husband refuses to touch her for months on end so she begins an affair with her high school sweetheart.

To some extent I think the reviews describing Three Women as a book about sex get something wrong. There’s actually not that much sex in the book, and I read it much more as a book about fervent, desperate need. The three women desire being desired, and they desperately want to be seen for who they are. Taddeo does a good job of writing about both the feeling of desire, as well as the effects of desire dictating one’s life. The three women’s stories are pretty uneven - Maggie’s is most harrowing and captured the majority of my attention - but there are moments with each of the women that resonate deeply.

Women’s desire may not be a theme commonly explored in non-fiction writing, but I do think fiction writers have plumbed its depths time and time again. Sally Rooney’s Normal People strikes me as a book propelled by sexual and romantic desire. I also think of the character Sula from Toni Morrison’s Sula, as well as some of the other books in this post. To that extent I’m not sure how groundbreaking Three Women actually is, though I do think it’s a valuable book.

Expectation by Anna Hope

Expectation is essentially the fiction version of Taddeo’s Three Women. It revolves around three women - Lissa, Cate, and Hannah - who are all in their mid-thirties in a moment of crisis. Hannah is struggling to get pregnant, Lissa’s acting career is going nowhere, and Cate is overwhelmed by her new baby and marriage. The women have been friends for over a decade and the novel flashes back to their childhoods, their time at university, their post-grad years living in London.

My biggest problem with this book is that there was no joy in it. Where the undercurrent of Three Women is desire, Expectation is propelled by envy. The women treat each other terribly, and there are very few redeeming moments that make you understand why they’re friends in the first place. I definitely don’t think you need to “like” the characters for a book to be good, but the way in which these women were so deeply unkind to one another irked me. Hope’s stated goal with the book was to explore what happens when reality doesn’t meet our expectations, but I couldn’t help but feel she wrote the three women in quite an uncharitable way, as if the characters were actually more interesting and the friendships actually more loving and complicated than the novel allowed them to be. I “expected” the book to have enough room for love, joy, jealousy, sadness, desire, fear, and humor, but it fell a bit flat for me.

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

Like Expectation, Queenie explores what happens when life doesn’t go as planned, but it does so with much more depth and balance. Queenie lives in London and has just split up with her boyfriend of many years - they had planned a life together but all of a sudden she finds herself moving out of their shared flat for a “break.” The book touches on so much, from racism and gentrification to depression and therapy.

I appreciated the portrayal of Queenie’s friendships with other women. At times the women hurt each other - accidentally or intentionally - but there are also moments of resolution and love and humor. It’s clear why the women are friends, and it’s clear those friendships have deep roots and much to sustain them. Carty-Williams also does a great job of capturing the different registers of friendship - Queenie’s relationship with Darcy from work is very different from her friendship with Kyazike, whom she met a school.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

If you read any book this summer, read Trick Mirror. I’m a big fan of Tolentino’s writing in the New Yorker, and Trick Mirror did not disappoint. The essays in the book range from musings on molly and megachurches, to Sweetgreen and Pure Barre, to matrimony and the wedding industrial complex.

Last summer I read Mark Greif’s Against Everything, of which Trick Mirror reminds me a lot. His essay “Against Exercise” resonates with Tolentino’s “Always Be Optimizing” in particular. One of my criticisms of Greif’s collection at the time was that it already felt ten years out of date - Trick Mirror, by contrast, feels extremely prescient. Even when Tolentino writes about her childhood stint on reality television in the early-2000s, she does so in a way that feels remarkably relevant to life in 2019. I agree with all the reviewers calling her the voice of a generation - my marginalia is full of embarrassingly reverential praise.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

I’ve read enough of Colson Whitehead’s other books to know he is a writer of remarkable range (I’ve read Sag Harbor, The Noble Hustle, and The Underground Railroad, though he has written five others as well). The Nickel Boys, Whitehead’s most recent novel, is set at Nickel Academy, a fictionalized reform school loosely based on the Dozier School for Boys. The school operated from 1900 to 2011 and after its closure became notorious for its history of abuse. Over 100 people were killed at the school, and hundreds of other children were brutally abused during the institution’s 111-year history. The Nickel Boys is definitely not a cheerful read, but it is a beautifully written book.

For such a short novel, the characters and settings feel very real. Whitehead writes small moments full of vivid details - from Elwood listening to a Martin Luther King, Jr. record on repeat, to the stench of New York City during a summer waste-disposal strike. The Nickel Boys is another tour de force of historical fiction.