The Summer Book List

Hi bookworms, how are you? Happy Memorial Day weekend for those in the States. Are you going to the beach? Summer is about upon on us now in this hemisphere, yay! We’ve been dodging rainstorms here and have been out gardening, mowing, planting, and putting in the annual vegetable patch. It’s still very green outside, which is great to see.

Recently when I was in California, I battled a maze of traffic to get to downtown Los Angeles to the Central Library and paid for a nonresident library card. Woohoo, this is great to have. It allows me a broad access to reserve ebooks and downloadable audiobooks from afar, which I can’t get here since we live rurally outside the city limits. I can get print books at my city’s library but not audios or ebooks due to something they say about copyright.

So I’m now actually a paid member of four libraries (!) — two of them are local to me in Canada and two are in the States. The Houston library is phasing out nonresident memberships so that will expire in December. As we all know library access is essential since it allows us less reliance for books on Amazon or Audible (owned by Jeff Bezos), though it’s still good to support indie book outlets when possible. I rely on the library more since we have collected too many books over the decades.

And now it’s time to reveal my 2025 Summer Book List for the reading challenge put on this year by Emma at the blog Words and Peace and Annabel at AnnaBookBel. I had over 30 books that I was considering for my list and then cut that down to 15. I decided that I would pick recently released books for the list and move my backlist reading to the fall. I chose 13 novels and 2 nonfiction and I tried to pick books that would be highly readable and less dense for summer. I aimed mostly for page-turners that you could read at the beach. I hope to read these from June until September. So here it is …. drumroll please …

• Atmosphere — is a novel from the popular author of Daisy Jones & the Six that is coming out June 3 about a woman who gets involved in the space program in the 1980s and finds unexpected love too.
• Broken Country — Set in a small English farming community in the late 1960s, this novel is said to be a doozy that involves a love triangle that unearths a couple of twists and deadly secrets from the past.
• The Death of Us — is a crime novel about a London couple that struggles with the aftermath of a violent crime and an upcoming trial.
• Tilt — is a novel about a pregnant woman’s journey across Portland, Oregon, in the aftermath of a major earthquake.
• Juice —is a survival tale set in a future Australia devastated by climate change where two fugitives — a man and a child — take refuge at an abandoned mine site but they are not alone.
• The Lion Women of Tehran — is a novel starting in the 1950s that chronicles the decades-long friendship of two Iranian women whose lives are upended by their country’s political upheaval.
• Heartwood — is a novel about the search and rescue that ensues after an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.
• The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus — is a poignant coming-of-age story about a woman who while attending the University of Edinburgh in 2006 is taken in by an enigmatic family as she discovers secrets about her own.
• So Far Gone — is a novel about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren in an increasingly divided America.
• Nesting — is a propulsive novel about a Dublin-based mother who, after years of emotional and sexual abuse, decides to leave her husband.
• Rabbit Moon — is a novel about a young American woman in Shanghai who ends up in a coma after a hit-and-run … and her estranged parents and close sister who become involved.
• Dream Count — is a novel about four African women and their joys and disappointments over time on both sides of the Atlantic.
• Audition — is a novel about a mysterious relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young man as they struggle to grasp who they are to each other.
• A Marriage at Sea — is a nonfiction true story (coming out July 8) about a young couple shipwrecked at sea, which is said to be “a mind-blowing tale of obsession, survival, and partnership stretched to its limits.”
• The Last Secret Agent — reveals the untold story about the last surviving World War II spy operating in Nazi France and her time as a secret agent.

So there you have it. I decided to go with 15 instead of 20 to leave a little wiggle room in case I meander with other books. It’ll keep me busy. What do you think of these picks? Do you see any you might like?

Cheers. Talk to you next week.