5 reads for the end of summer
a combo of classics and contemporaries that are perfect for sweltering temps
Hello, friend.
Today, I’ve collected my thoughts around five end-of-summer reads that I think nail that hazy, overheated, totally exhausted vibe that tends to come with the end of the hottest months of the year. You know the feeling.
I have finally admitted this year I just really…um…hate summer. It’s too hot, too dry, too bright. And so I’ve stayed inside, or in the shady parts of my favorite park, the last few months — and I’ve been thinking about the books that capture that kind of summer vibe. Not the gloriously sexy or beachy. But the morose. The doomed sunshine. That “something weird is about to happen” feeling in your stomach.
When I think about that kind of summer, these are the first books that pop into my mind — whether that be for their scenery and setting or for their narrative voice or even for their subject matter. They’re all a little bit steamy, stifling, and sticky.
All of them work around themes of heat or passion or fire as well as the consequences of those things: burnout, exhaustion, fatigue. Most of them play with the tension between these extremes, featuring characters who move between states of boredom and anxiety to states of elation, joy, or lust and take us for the ride through their existential ruminations.
Take a look at my selections — and, of course, I’d love to know yours.
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The Guest by Emma Cline
This book feels like…if a character from The White Lotus TV show woke up inside The Awakening by Kate Chopin (later on this list). I don’t always read contemporary fiction, but when I do, I always hope it’ll be as good as this novel is.
After a fling with a much-older boyfriend comes to an abrupt end, a young woman winds her way through a wealthy coastal neighborhood, making convenient connections to stabilize herself during a long, lonely week at the end of summer. She’s desperate, but can’t let anyone else know that. So the story is tinged with an awful knowing: we, as readers, can see her fate as clearly as she can see it.
But unlike her, we’re not committed to pretending we can’t.
The prose languishes. The imagery is bright and depressing—even the warmest sunshine eventually becomes monotonous. The narrative tone blends summer exhaustion and overheated brain fog with unrelenting boredom and a persistent heartbeat of anxiety. And thus the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer are rendered a bit bone-chilling as we waver with the central character through alternating states of deep uncertainty and blissed out relief. The final chapter is a triumph.
American Primitive by Mary Oliver
This poetry collection by one of the best American poets who ever lived is an absolute treasure. Oliver has lots of gorgeous collections, but I pick up this one toward the end of every summer because of one poem that sets the tone for the rest of the collection for me: “Humpbacks.”
It’s a poem about whales, but Oliver somehow weaves fiery imagery and nature’s awesome disregard for humans into a poem that is wildly hopeful. The collection, as a whole, grapples with the violent tensions at the heart of America: a beautiful, often unforgiving landscape; fascinating yet dangerous wildlife; warm and cold, open and closed.
If you’re someone who finds poetry inaccessible or too strange, please please please let me recommend American Primitive to you. It’ll sweep you up into that lakeside-sun-dazed summer haze that is so worth reveling in.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
My favorite Hemingway. I haven’t read all of his work, but I’ve read a lot of it and there’s something about the voice in this novel that knocks me off my feet, takes my breath away, pulls the rug out from under me, et cetera, et cetera. It’s the kind of writing that makes you go, “oh, that’s why we read Hemingway.”
The novel opens with a tricky rumination on the pains of emasculation, introducing the predominant theme of this novel: embattled masculinity. There is much here devoted to the temptress-like energy of newly empowered women, and the enduring values and strengths of the Lost Generation.
There’s a scene on a bus that I’ll never forget reading for the first time.
My copy of the novel has been loved to literal pieces. I bought an old used paperback, in the first place, but at some point the spine broke. It’s now held together with book tape and an overtaxed rubber band I got off of a school newspaper a decade ago.
My annotations, however, still hold up; I love reading the notes that past me left for future me. Even so, I may need this jazz age edition for my collection.
Passing by Nella Larsen
This perfect, short, smart, suspenseful book is set in 1920s Harlem.
We’re going to read it together in the Closely Reading Book Club, starting on September 9—join us!
I don’t want to say anything about this book because this is one of those books that is so fun to know absolutely nothing about.
So instead, here is the first paragraph of chapter 2 — a sneak peek at the stunning prose and the sweltering temps in the novel:
“This is what Irene Redfield remembered.
Chicago. August. A brilliant day, hot, with a brutal staring sun pouring down rays that were like molten rain. A day on which the very outlines of the buildings shuddered as if in protest at the heat. Quivering lines sprang up from baked pavements and wriggled along the shining car-tracks. The automobiles parked at the kerbs were a dancing blaze, and the glass of the shop-windows threw out a blinding radiance. Sharp particles of dust rose from the burning sidewalks, stinging the seared or dripping skins of wilting pedestrians. What small breeze there was seemed like the breath of a flame fanned by slow bellows.”
Remember when I said summer is too hot and too bright? Larsen captures this precise summer burnout so perfectly in this passage. I cannot wait to read the whole novel with you!
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
If you’ve ever looked in the mirror and not recognized yourself, this story knows how you felt. If you’ve ever suffered a great divide between who you really are and who all the people around you believe you to be, this novel gets it.
Set in the Gulf Coast, in the Louisiana of the last years of the 19th century, this strange and short novel is about a woman named Edna whose views on womanhood, motherhood, gender, and politics are all evolving. And this would be a lovely experience if it weren’t for the fact that most of her new ideas clash with her Southern society and her husband. In the midst of this existential life change, Edna has a few brief, passionate love affairs and starts to wonder if she can change her life.
The prose flows in a languid, humid way—enveloping you in the air of a hot Louisiana summer as Edna’s sense of self grows and feelings of entrapment become as suffocating as the thick salt-water air.
Pressed for time? Try Chopin’s short story “The Storm” for a summer thunderstorm that inspires incredibly passionate sex. It’s a fantastic exercise in how words on a page can actually raise the temperature in a room.
Honorable mentions:
You can shop more book recommendations from my Bookshop.org page, where I’ve collected lots of favorites from books to closely read to Edith Wharton’s world and lots more. When you shop via my Bookshop page, I receive a small commission from the sale and you support an online bookseller that would never, ever send a tech magnate into outer space as a thinly veiled PR stunt. It’s a win-win!
Now, tell me what your quintessential steamy summer reads are in the comments —
and ‘til next time, happy reading!
Oh and…stay tuned for tomorrow. Our fall reading list drops first thing!
Love this list, Haley!!! You already know my feelings on The Awakening (I bore most people with waxing lyrical about it) but you really captured it here: it is such a sultry and sweltering read. Such a short novella that holds SO MUCH. And The Guest...wow. I don't think I breathed out all the way through that book! I could have easily read it in one sitting, and the amount of anxiety and tension Cline delivers throughout...
If I was to suggest a book for this list, I think it would be Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion, which made me feel similarly uncomfortable to Cline's book. I also loved Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan for some coming-of-age, wealthy South of France steaminess :)
Love the idea of capturing the end-of-summer vibe with books that reflect that hazy, overheated feeling. Will definitely get into it.