Books That Are Helping Us Unplug This Summer

Below, several New America staffers share book titles—new and old, fiction and nonfiction—that they'll be devouring over the coming summer months.

Roselyn Miller

During the summer, when I’m off the clock, I make it a point to read books unrelated to my work. Don’t get me wrong: I love studying evolving workplaces, gender, and social policy—these themes make for a lot of compelling and enlightening literature (for instance, Annie Lowrey’s Give People Money, about universal basic income, and Louis Hyman’s Temp, about gig work). Still, in order to practice what the Better Life Lab preaches about work-life balance, I’m leaving the somewhat dystopian nonfiction behind for … dystopian fiction.

I’m about halfway through Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and absolutely loving it. The book is about a group of traveling actors and musicians, who band together as living art historians and preservationists out of necessity when a flu pandemic destroys life as they know it. What I really like about the book so far is that it avoids voyeuristic, fear-inducing clichés, centering the plot instead on character development and relationship-building. At its core, the book is about the idea of cultural preservation and how we’re nothing without the people who get us through tough times. It’s also about the structures that allow us to rely on each other, yet still exist safely as unique individuals. In all that, Station Eleven pulls into focus the everyday beauty of what we have now, the expansiveness of what we can still learn, and how quickly it can all be taken away.

Fuzz Hogan

Having just launched two daughters into the wilds of adulthood, Wildhood: The Epic Journey from Adolescence to Adulthood in Humans and Other Animals, by Kathryn Bowers and Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, might be coming a little late for me. But I still plan to devour its examination of how adolescents of other species face the challenges of “how to be safe, how to navigate hierarchy, how to court potential mates, and how to feed oneself.” Having done some writing on fear, I’ve learned that our amygdala, for instance, hasn’t really developed much since we forked off from rats in the evolutionary tree. So I’m on the lookout for how our seemingly sophisticated human behavior is really just that of animals with clothes. And adolescents seem like the clearest example. As my daughter and I watched Planet Earth a couple years ago, two young male Kimodo dragons were fighting like two schoolboys to “win” a female one. I turned to her and asked: “Look familiar?” “Yup,” she said.

Cecilia Muñoz

I was already a bit of a reading nerd when I started working at the White House, and the intensity of the job had the odd effect of making me still nerdier. You might think that I would’ve benefitted from reading something that took my mind away from work, but I found that I couldn’t read novels or even nonfiction that was unrelated to my job. Every day required so much mental energy that it felt too jarring to pull my head away for any length of time. So I read—and loved—a series of biographies of U.S. Presidents. This resulted in a lot of mockery from my family: “Seriously? You’re on vacation and reading about Lyndon B. Johnson?” But it was fascinating to dive into those biographies while I had a deep appreciation for the tensions of the job and the arc of history.

I’m once again capable of reading novels (and Louise Penny’s series featuring Québécois Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is on my list), but at the moment I’m spending a lot of quality time with Ulysses S. Grant, thanks to Ron Chernow’s wonderful biography. Chernow is an amazing storyteller with a gift for roping you in from the very beginning. It was, after all, the introductory chapter to his biography of Alexander Hamilton that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to see our first Secretary of the Treasury as a hip-hop hero. Grant turns out to be just as engagingly written. I’m learning things large and small. (The middle initial was foisted on him by strangers. The history of Reconstruction doesn’t at all resemble what I learned in grade school.) At one point I actually said to my spouse: “I really want to spend some serious time with my book today, because I’m kind of anxious about how the Civil War turns out.”

I may get back to novels at some point, but honestly, I’m more drawn to digging into that whole Reconstruction thing. Fortunately, David W. Blight just won a Pulitzer for his recent biography. Frederick Douglass, get ready for this nerd.

Hana Passen

This summer, I’m most excited to read All the Names They Used for God, by Anjali Sachdeva, a collection of short stories that infuse our world with elements of fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, and horror. I’ve fallen deeply in love with this genre—short stories with hints of both the fantastical and the horrific. The capsule universes of each story break open our experiences of our world to tease us with wild possibilities: Would we bother to revolt in a world in which we’ve been conquered by aliens, but the invasion was peaceful and the only change to our daily lives was that we had to undergo the (painless and non-invasive) process of replacing our hands with metal appendages? What if some of the powerless among us suddenly developed telepathic powers? With short stories like these, the world is both tightly contained and an infinite thought experiment.

Lisa Johnson

As a communications person and a human with a smartphone, I feel like I’m reading a lot of things a lot of the time. So when I think about what my brain can handle this summer, I look no further than The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s the perfect summer read: funny, quick, and lighthearted (if you ignore the whole end-of-the-Earth thing). I read it for the first time a couple years ago and couldn’t believe I had missed out for so long. I was laughing out loud on the metro, attracting many stares but also the occasional smile when my eyes found someone who understood why I was having a giggle fit on a Thursday. After this? The rest of the series—I can only imagine what my new friends will get up to next.

Julie Brosnan

After a string of racist, fatal terrorist attacks in the United States, and even in my recent second home of New Zealand, I started reading a book called White American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement—and How I Got Out, by Christian Picciolini. In much the same way that the critically-acclaimed Hillbilly Elegy brought readers into the homes and lives of certain impoverished rural families in the Midwest, this memoir charts Picciolini’s adolescence in a Chicago suburb: going through school as a fumbling outcast; being recruited, at a vulnerable age, by a skinhead leader; and becoming a violent and racist young adult, despite being the son of poor immigrants himself. My hope is that this book will help me “make sense” of the otherwise senseless acts of violence playing out in today’s world—how they come to happen, and how we might prevent them in the future.

Jay Kang

Do you ever think about the Fermi paradox on your daily commute? Mull over alien life during your coffee breaks? Look up at the stars on a warm Sunday night and shiver at the existential thought of What if we’re not alone? instead of sigh at the more mundane fact of I have to go to work tomorrow? Even if you haven’t, keep reading, anyway. This book’s great, I promise.

Take the ages-old concept—first contact with aliens—and ratchet up the stakes to 13. That’s the premise behind The Three-Body Problem, a novel by the celebrated Chinese author Liu Cixin. Drawing from the experiences of several people across a vast expanse of time—from the strife and suffering endured during the Cultural Revolution to the uncertain chaos of the future—Liu spins a multi-layer tale of conflict, showing that people are at least as much of an enemy to our survival as any extraterrestrial threat. The Three-Body Problem is a fascinatingly complex book of theory, intrigue, and politics, one worthy of rivaling the most well-known works in the genre; a must-read for any fan of science fiction—and for anyone who enjoys grappling with the biggest what-ifs of our time.

Anthony Nguyen

Did you know that Gertrude Stein employed a Vietnamese cook in Paris? He worked at the famous 27 rue de Fleurus for years. But in the end, he was relegated to a throwaway line in Alice B. Toklas’s popular cookbook. I’ve always enjoyed reading about Vietnamese history and diaspora stories, which have produced no shortage of memoirs and nonfiction works. For that reason, I always like seeking out Vietnamese fiction, which, thanks to writers like Viet Thanh Nguyen, is undergoing a new renaissance. But Vietnamese writers have been writing fiction long before The Sympathizer won its rightfully deserved Pulitzer in 2016. This summer, I’ve been reading Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, which imagines the life of Binh, that Vietnamese cook, and juxtaposes themes of modernism, colonialism, and queerness in a poignant, deeply personal way.

Hollie Russon-Gilman

Remember when summer was about relaxing on the beach—without the incessant dinging of your iPhone? Perhaps this nostalgia is partly why I’ve enjoyed reading Cal Newport’s new book, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Newport aptly titled a recent New York Times op-ed about his book, “Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us to Use Our iPhones Like This.” How did these devices become all-consuming? (The average American checks their smartphone roughly 80 times a day, some studies find.) How have we come to have such an addictive, slot-machine-esque attachment to our phones and technology more generally?

These are some of the questions that inspired me to read Digital Minimalism. Crucially, instead of merely telling us, impractically, to abandon these devices, Newport thoughtfully engages with philosophical approaches. For instance, there’s Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond experience, which reminds us that there are more ways to be happy than acquiring more money (which tends to come with its own anxieties). Newport argues that the new digital platforms we engage with these days have tradeoffs—such as having only a small value and eroding our time. He urges us to spend more time doing high-impact activities, and replacing menial yet addictive online activities with structured leisure. That sounds like a more pleasurable summer to me.