Take a minute and close your eyes.

Picture yourself by a pool or just in a comfortable outdoor space, you have a cold drink, you’re wearing a lightweight outfit, you have the day off work, and you’re getting ready to crack open a book. This scene is exactly how I plan to be spending most of my weekends this summer!

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been thinking about what you want to read during this upcoming summer season for months now because, let’s face it, reading during the summer months has a whole different vibe than reading in the winter – you can read outdoors (for the most part), there’s usually a highly anticipated romance book scheduled for release (thank you Carley Fortune, we all say in unison), and you can read for longer since the sun is out more!

If you’ve been struggling to finalize your reading list (or you’re just looking for more recommendations), here are five books I think you should read this summer!

Descriptions and book covers are from StoryGraph.

Poison for Breakfast by Lemony Snicket

I hadn’t read any Lemony Snicket since I was a kid (hello, A Series of Unfortunate Events) so when I picked this up on a whim from the library a few summers ago, I didn’t know what to expect. I was delighted. It was a quick read that had me constantly trying to guess what happens next while also appreciating Snicket’s effortless and subtle humour-filled way with words.

“This true story—as true as Lemony Snicket himself—begins with a puzzling note under his door: You had poison for breakfast. Following a winding trail of clues to solve the mystery of his own demise, Snicket takes us on a thought-provoking tour of his predilections: the proper way to prepare an egg, a perplexing idea called “tzimtzum,” the sublime pleasure of swimming in open water, and much else.

Poison for Breakfast is a classic-in-the-making that—in the great tradition of modern fables like The Little Prince and The Phantom Tollbooth—will delight readers of all ages.”

Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

I was kicking my feet and giggling like a schoolgirl throughout the entirety of reading this!

“Six summers to fall in love. One moment to fall apart. A weekend to get it right.

They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life a decade ago, that has felt too true. Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she spends them in a stylish apartment in the city, going out with friends, and keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart.

Until she receives the call that sends her racing back to Barry’s Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek—the man she never thought she’d have to live without.

For six summers, through hazy afternoons on the water and warm summer nights working in his family’s restaurant and curling up together with books—medical textbooks for him and work-in-progress horror short stories for her—Percy and Sam had been inseparable. Eventually, that friendship turned into something breathtakingly more, before it fell spectacularly apart.

When Percy returns to the lake for Sam’s mother’s funeral, their connection is as undeniable as it had always been. But until Percy can confront the decisions she made and the years she’s spent punishing herself for them, they’ll never know whether their love might be bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past.

Told over the course of six years and one weekend, Every Summer After is a big, sweeping nostalgic look at love and the people and choices that mark us forever.”

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Such eloquent writing. This book is often one I find myself thinking about throughout the year and is an important reminder of how crucial it is for us as individuals to be connected to and respect the world we live in.

“As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.”

Streams that Lead Somewhere by Fareh Malik

I find myself gravitating towards poetry more so in the summer months, and a few summers ago, Malik’s is the collection I picked up. The writing is so incredibly visual and stunning – and I may or may not have gotten sunscreen in my eyes from crying over a few of the poems within.

“Description from Mawenzi House Publishers: Fareh Malik’s debut collection aims to explore the intersection between mental illness and social racialization. The poet dives deep into his long history with Islamophobia, racism, and other forms of discrimination. The book focuses on perseverance and the silver lining that is ever on the horizon with the expectation that you can make it out of any trial or tribulation, if you just follow your dream to wherever it leads.”

Momento: On Standing in Front of Art by Jeffery Donaldson

After reading this book I had a new appreciation for art and also for what art means in (and to) society. Momento will leave readers with questions about their connections to art while also thinking about the countless pieces they’ve walked by maybe without having even realized.

“Why do we stand in front of art and look at it? Why do we go to galleries and museums? What does it feel like? What do you expect to have happen there? How do you feel before you enter, after you leave? What do you do with all your moods, your attentions, your restlessness, your curiosity, your sense of time? How does a visit come to be in the way that a painting comes to be? Does it matter how you begin? Does it matter if you’re ready? Jeffery Donaldson’s Momento answers these questions and more by offering a poetic daydream about the curious, otherworldly, but urgent and existential experience of art, artifacts, and the buildings that house them. This little book itself is like a visit to a museum. Enter and wander as you please.”

Honourable Mentions

A Perfect Vintage by Chelsea Fagan

It is a goal of mine to one day spend a summer abroad in Europe – while that may not be feasible for me and my life right now, this book brought me right into that world for a moment of time. It was just what I needed when I read it a few years ago!

“Lea Mortimer has everything under control. As a highly sought-after consultant specializing in transforming dilapidated French country estates into boutique hotels, she relishes her freedom as a single, childfree woman. And her life is full, occupied as much by her impeccable historic renovations as by the aristocratic — and often exhausting — French families she works for.

But after the heated divorce of her closest friend and cousin Stephanie Bryce, Lea finds herself taking Stephanie and her college-aged daughter to the Loire Valley in France for the summer. As they tag along for Lea’s latest work assignment, despite their best intentions, they threaten to complicate the tightrope act of launching the hotel on time. And when Lea unexpectedly falls for the much-younger son of her boss, she quickly learns the beauty and danger of losing control.

As affairs bloom in the idyllic chateau, wars of inheritance play out between the family, and betrayals threaten even the most solid relationships. Lea realizes that it’s not just a broken heart she’s risking, but her entire, meticulously-constructed life blowing up in her face.”

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Summer … Greece … Rachel Cusk … what more could you want? Pick this book up, like now!

“A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives.

Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.

Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.”

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