“Summer is here, and the time is right for . . .” READING!
By Scott White
Community Liaison and Staff Reporter
Martha and the Vandellas has been saying it since the 1960s about the summer ideal of free and easy living exemplified by dancing in the streets. But, for folks like me (and, maybe you), the pleasure of summer, when we vacation or just have a bit more leisure time on our hands, is getting more time to just . . . read. And read what I want to, not what I have to.
Like most of you, I have lots of work-related reading. In my case, it can be fiscal budgets, press releases trying to promote someone or something, court and police records, and on and on. Though I always am reading for pleasure, it is summer that seems to trigger the itch to read a book I’ve been wanting to read or to explore others’ suggestions.
In my three prior “summer reading” columns, I’ve always suggested books I have read and loved, thinking about what would entice someone to add them to their summer list. Many of you have emailed or grabbed me on the street with your own suggestions, and a lot of those I’ve since read.
This year, though, I thought I would share my own 2026 reading list . . . I don’t know if I’ll make it through. If not, I’ll carry the unread ones over into my fall or winter reading list.
So, here is what I’m hoping to enjoy between now and Labor Day. All are available at the Woodford County Library.
“Angel Down,” by Daniel Kraus. This won the 2026 Pulitzer for fiction. Kraus uses the mode of magical realism to tell the story of five soldiers who discover a wounded fallen angel in No Man’s Land. What is particularly intriguing is that Kraus uses a single-sentence structure to explore a variety of themes as the soldiers fight over possession of the angel.
“Vigil,” by George Saunders. This is the newest novel by Saunders, primarily known as a master of the short story, and follows his Booker Prize-winning “Lincoln In The Bardo.” Here, Saunders again explores the world of the dead and dying via angels and “death guides” who visit an 87-year-old oil tycoon on his deathbed. Given the wonders of his writing, this is first on my list.
“Land,” by Maggie O’Farrell. For my money, one of the very best novelists working today, and one of the finest Ireland has ever produced . . . an island well-known for its accomplished writers. Reflecting back on her own family’s history, O’Farrell’s story is of a surveyor and his son contracted by the British government to map a part of post-famine Ireland in the mid-19th Century. The work is necessary for the surveyor to be able to pay his own rent on the land he and his family live and farm. Reviews say to expect her toiling over the fraught Imperial history between the two island nations (with Britain utterly dominating, arguably, even today) and father-son relations.
“London Falling,” by Patrick Radden Keefe. The famed New Yorker reporter and writer, whose last book “Say Nothing” explored Ireland’s “Troubles” and won a bushel full of awards, turns his reporter’s eye and literary pen to a remarkable crime story in contemporary London. He explores the bizarre story of an ordinary young man from a good family who assumes a false identity, becomes involved in London’s Russian mafia and presumably kills himself. If it is half as good as what I’ve read by him, this should be a thrilling page turner.
“John of John,” by Douglas Stuart. Maybe one of the most expected supernovas to hit literary fiction in the last 10 years is Stuart. His first novel, “Shuggie Bain,” won the Booker Prize, and his second, “Young Mugo,” which appeared on several annual “Best” lists, explored the lives of protagonists who were gay, estranged, impoverished and born and reared in Glasgow, Scotland. But to restrict Stuart’s work to “queer fiction” is to miss that his storytelling and theme-exploration are far more universal, exploring the joys and desperation nearly all of us experience. Here, Stuart focuses on a father and son living in the remote Scottish archipelago in the Irish Sea, the Outer Hebrides (which I have visited!). His son returns home to help with his dying maternal grandmother while tiptoeing around his relationship with both his father and granny.
So, that is the list! If I can knock them all out, then I am certain to have an entertaining and enriching summer . . . which I anticipate, and hope, will also be suffused with lots of grandchildren time where I’m hoping to begin reading Harry Potter with my oldest.