WIRED’s Picks for the 15 Books You Need to Read This Summer
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Perhaps it’s something in the air, but right now it seems as though half the new books on shelves deal with the climate crisis in some way. The environment is central to at least three of the 15 books on WIRED’s latest recommendations for readers. But that’s just the start. The books on this list also cover language, Blackness, the death of facts, and dolphin handjobs. When we say there’s something here for everyone, we truly mean it. These are our picks for the books we think you should read this spring and summer.
By Audrey Schulman
Out of all the scientific scandals of the past century, John Lilley’s experiments on dolphins might just be the most colorful. Lilley, an enthusiastic proponent of LSD and sensory deprivation tanks, led an attempt to establish interspecies communication with dolphins in the 1960s. (He even injected dolphins with LSD.) As part of Lilley’s unconventional project, a young research assistant named Margaret Howe Lovatt moved into a specially built house with an adolescent dolphin named Peter and attempted to teach him English, with remarkable success. But the work was soon overshadowed by the revelation that, well … she gave the dolphin handjobs. (Hustler magazine even devoted a cover to the story.) Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House achieves something remarkable by recasting this kooky, salacious chapter in American science into a melancholy psychological drama. Schulman—whose excellent 2018 novel, Theory of Bastards, also features a female researcher developing a close relationship with her animal subjects—is a daring and original writer. Despite its sordid-seeming subject matter, The Dolphin House is a true heartbreaker. —Kate Knibbs
Courtesy of Riverhead BooksBy Carlo Rovelli
Though I lightly mocked Carlo Rovelli in a recent essay about the computer simulation we’re—obviously—living in, he’s still my favorite living—“living”—physicist. He studies just about the coolest-sounding thing in the universe: loop quantum gravity. But when he’s not trying to unify physics, he reads novels and philosophy and poetry—and in fact would say the one can’t exist without the others. In this, a collection of newspaper columns from the last several years (how many physicists do you know who write for newspapers?), Rovelli makes the point again and again: Without the humanities, there can be no scientific advancement. Only boring drivers, that is to say, stay in their lane. Rovelli actually wants to go places: places with answers. Sometimes, he even gets there. —Jason Kehe
By Mark Anthony Neal
There’s a catch-22 that comes with being the primary root of creative labor in the world: With singular impact comes the very real danger of disparagement, theft, and all-out erasure. Black culture is the most influential cultural generator of this time—so what is being done to safeguard how we remember all that is created? According to Mark Anthony Neal, an academic at Duke University, these are critical “issues related to the production, circulation, and archiving of Blackness—concerns that are exponentially heightened in the digital era.” In Black Ephemera, Neal conducts an impressive symphony of memory work. The digital frontier transformed what an archive looks like, how it functions, where it lives, and who gets access to it. These are significant factors, Neal suggests, especially when looking at “artifacts that might be thought of as literal afterthoughts—as culture not in need of curation.” As chapters diverge in theme and latitude, the book assumes the feel of a mixtape. There’s one on the pioneering Memphis record label Stax. There’s another chapter on the distillation of Black women’s trauma through pop culture, and one about how collective Black mourning is produced, shared, and preserved digitally. The whole is an impressive totem, and guide, to the importance of holding on to things forgotten in our haste to the future. —Jason Parham
By Yoko Tawada
For a book about the end of the world as we know it, Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth is awfully cheery. The story follows a band of unlikely friends as they meander across Northern Europe, though on the planet they inhabit, borders don’t really matter anymore. Their mission is to find another Japanese speaker for one of their own, Hiruko, to talk to. Her country has disappeared into the sea, and she has no one with whom to speak in her mother tongue. Far from home, she has scraped by speaking Panska, or Pan-Scandinavian, a language of her own invention that many people can make out and no one can discern fully. Living between tongues is a fact of Tawada’s biography, too. The acclaimed novelist was raised in Japan but now lives in Germany and writes in both languages (Scattered All Over the Earth was translated from Japanese). The world of Tawada’s novel looks markedly different from ours, thanks to the progression of the climate crisis. But her characters don’t really dwell on it. They’re more concerned with finding comfort and community in what’s left. Along their journey, they discover that it’s possible to not understand someone even when you speak the same language, and to use different words but still recognize each other well. —Eve Sneider
By Lina Rather
At first glance, a story about Catholic nuns in space didn’t sound like it would appeal to this committed heathen, but in the Our Lady of Endless Worlds series, that endearingly campy premise is just a jumping-off point. Its second novella-length installment, Sisters of the Forsaken Stars, is set in a distant future where humans inhabit four solar systems connected by space-bending interstellar gates. In this far-future world, some spacefarers, including the nuns, take up residence in living spaceships, built within a bioengineered giant space slug that develops interior chambers. As could be expected of any group of sisters living together, tensions abound, and almost everyone harbors a secret about their life pre-solemn vow. We first meet the sisters of Our Lady of Impossible Constellations, as they call their slug ship, in the sparsely populated fourth system, where they perform a wedding at a fledgling colony on the surface of one of the system’s habitable planets. Hearkening back to a brutal war decades earlier, they start to hear rumblings from old Earth of power-hungry politicians who seek to expand their dominion throughout the four-system reach of human settlement. Soon the sisters face added pressure from the church to conform to new standards and are summoned into the middle of a developing conflict that is bigger than all of them. Both installments of the Endless Worlds series are quick, action-packed reads that explore the bounds of sisterhood, devotion, and resistance. —Meghan Herbst
By Rachel E. Gross
For decades, centuries, the vagina was something of a mystery to the scientific community. Well, for centuries the scientific community was mostly cisgender men, and the vagina was seen as something shameful. As such, it wasn’t studied very much. Or, as several scientists told Rachel E. Gross: You can’t see what you aren’t looking for. In Vagina Obscura, Gross (a friend of WIRED) looks—looks at misguided ideas about the clitoris, at the incredible regenerative power of the uterus, at the function of the human body itself. Full of historical accounts and deep reporting, Gross’ book gives stories about vulvas the care and attention they deserve. —Angela Watercutter
By Anthony Doerr
With Cloud Cuckoo Land, the follow-up to Anthony Doerr’s wildly successful 2014 novel, All the Light We Cannot See, the awarded author seemingly cements his narrative style—intricate sagas featuring surprising connections between unlikely characters. Instead of narrating families who cross paths over a decade in war-torn Europe, this blend of sci-fi and historical fiction follows six unrelated people across multiple continents and spans two millennia–it’s light-years beyond Doerr’s previous novel. (Literally, one character is on a starship in search of a new habitable planet.) At its core, the work is an extensive love letter to literature and the nameless people who have carried and protected our cultural heritage through the centuries, preserving the stories that have given solace to unknown millions. Doerr’s characters grapple with war, climate change, epic journeys, mental health issues, an epidemic, sexuality, and the complexity of familial ties, each one finding an escape in books and playing a role in the preservation of a single fictional masterwork by the ancient Greek author Antonius Diogenes. While a prisoner of war in Korea, one character remarks, “If it’s told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.” Readers will slip easily into the space ships, the mountains, the small towns populating Doerr’s tale. Clocking in at more than 600 pages, the book is winding and at times a little dragging, but readers will come away from it with a greater appreciation for those invisible qualities that have bound human life across the ages—the love of a good story and the joy of returning home. —Samantha Spengler
By Claire Stanford
At first glance, Claire Stanford’s Happy for You seems like it could be the newest entry into a micro-genre of fiction and memoir I’d call “girl walks into tech company”—The Circle, The Startup Wife, Uncanny Valley, etc. After all, the story begins when protagonist Evelyn Kominsky Kumamoto ditches her philosophy doctorate to work for the “third most popular social media company” on a project about measuring happiness. While Stanford’s portrait of a tech company is funny, trenchant, and exactly as barbed as it should be about life in Big Tech, Happy for You is up to something else. The novel is really a meditation on happiness wrapped inside a Silicon Valley satire. It succeeds on the strength of its characterization of Evelyn, who is at a crossroads in her personal life and intent on living inside the emotional nuances her workplace is intent on stamping out. —Kate Knibbs
By Missouri Williams
So many writers of “literary” fiction these days write in unliterary ways, in clipped prose they mistake for depthful. Not Missouri Williams, whose debut novel, The Doloriad, exhibits an almost grotesque superabundance of style, sentences that sprawl and swell along with her characters, a family of overgrown, sluggish, inbred relations in a post-apocalyptic wasteland somewhere in Eastern Europe, rolling through the hazy daze of space-time with sickly purposelessness, until you, the reader, can’t take it anymore, the turgidity of both form and forms, and so give up halfway through, throw the book away, and run screaming into the sanity of sunshine, away from the hebetude and decrepitude of indulgence, of too much—yet never enough—disgusting life. —Jason Kehe
By Samantha Hunt
Shortly after Samantha Hunt’s father died, she found something strange and stirring in his desk: an incomplete manuscript. Unbeknownst to his daughter, he had been writing a novel. This text forms the spiritual and formal backbone of The Unwritten Book, a winding exploration of how—and by what—people are haunted. From ghosts to broken-up boy bands to unpleasant memories, some things have an unbearably long half-life in our imaginations, and it’s so hard to predict what those will be. Interspersed between chapters of Hunt’s prose are chapters of her father’s. Here, the right-hand page is devoted to his writing. The left, however, is blank but for her footnoted recollections of the biographical details and inside jokes she imagines he had in mind, or thoughts that his writing triggered in her. In this way, Hunt’s central theme is evident graphically, as well as in her writing: Few things are more haunting, or more creatively potent, than empty space on the page. —Eve Sneider
By Allegra Hyde
In a near-future ravaged by climate change, Willa Marks, the orphaned child of doomsday preppers, still believes the world can be saved. And not just saved—made whole again. A utopian’s utopian, she roots around the dumpsters of Boston with a Freegan collective and sneaks into classes at Harvard, hoovering up information and falling in love with an enigmatic, moody professor named Sylvia. Through Sylvia, Willa finds out about a top-secret ecological-community project called Camp Hope, which is preparing for launch on a small island in the Caribbean called Eleutheria. Willa decides it is her destiny to help Camp Hope. She boards a plane with little more than the manifesto of enigmatic founder Roy H. Adams, Living the Solution, and a zealous commitment to Adams’ vision. But the tropical commune isn’t what Willa wishes it was, and Adams is even more of a surprise. Willa’s idealism is tested as she struggles to shepherd Camp Hope’s promise into reality. The debut novel from writer Allegra Hyde, Eleutheria is a stylish, moving entry in the cli-fi canon, thrilling and thoughtful at once. —Kate Knibbs
By Maud Newton
You know a book about ancestry is going to be thorny when the author begins her first chapter by describing visceral memories of her now-estranged father’s racist, white-supremacist beliefs. In this memoir, blogger and essayist Maud Newton, her first name a pen name she adopted from an accomplished distant relative, documents her years-long attempt to trace her ancestral roots, no matter how disturbing they turn out to be. Rather than a self-indulgent exercise, as ancestry searches are often thought to be, Newton posits that grappling with the complexity of the people who shaped our parents and our parents’ parents is essential to understanding who we are, even as we discover our vast differences. At a time when hobbyist genealogists abound and companies like 23andMe offer convoluted information about the puzzle pieces of our DNA, exploring how we fit together has never been easier, or more tempting. Now, when an increasing number of people know about their medical predispositions and fifth or sixth cousins but neglect to ask their grandfathers about their mothers, Newton’s book feels painfully relevant. Thus, Ancestor Trouble is a guide to the pitfalls and lessons one might encounter on a quest to reconcile the complicated terrain of familial relationships with the simple fact of descendancy. —Samantha Spengler
By Jill Gutowitz
In the real world, Jill Gutowitz is a writer for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and even WIRED. But online, she’s the “overlord of lesbian Twitter.” This is fitting. If you’ve ever obsessed over the more Sapphic corners of pop culture (Cate Blanchett stan-dom, Lindsay Lohan’s social outings in the aughts, any movement Kristen Stewart has ever made), then you’re probably already familiar with Gutowitz’s tweets. But if you’re not, you should still read her new essay collection. In Girls Can Kiss Now, the author traces the many shifts in the discourse around queer women’s lives, from the homophobic undertones with which they were discussed in the 1990s to the viral meme-iness of them now. From Taylor Swift homages to Portrait of a Lady on Fire to “Step on Me, Julianne Moore” (actual chapter title), Gutowitz maps the current lesbian canon with a lot of humor and more than a few wonderful, and wonderfully moritifying, personal anecdotes. —Angela Watercutter
By Benjamín Labatut
Apparently, more and more people don’t believe in “facts” anymore. You might call this a dangerous development. You might also call it … literary. For what is literature but playing games with reality? In this work—one hesitates to call it a novel—Labatut writes capsule biographies of several famous physicists and mathematicians. These are real people. Who actually existed. Heisenberg. Schrödinger. Grothendieck. Yet he fictionalizes whole portions of their lives, whole affairs and despairing episodes that never actually happened. It’s messed up, because at no point can you tell the real from the fake. It's also enlightening, for the same reason. What if it was never the truth we were after, after all? What if the only thing we ever wanted was stories to believe in? —Jason Kehe
By Danielle J. Lindemann
What does reality TV say about us? That’s the question sociologist Danielle J. Lindemann poses in True Story, her new study of the genre. If your answer is “nothing good,” you’re not wrong, but you’re not exactly right either. Lindemann posits that reality TV—from gag shows to dating games to Real Housewives—is simultaneously regressive and progressive. Yes, sometimes it’s a fun-house mirror of all of our worst assumptions and biases. But it can also be a forum for reimagining how people might break out of deeply entrenched roles and archetypes. Lindemann’s text, like her argument, walks an entertaining, and often compelling, line between extremes. She sees the absurdity inherent in these shows while also examining their characters with real humanity. She puts Karl Marx in conversation with Undercover Boss. True Story doesn’t try to strip the genre of its lowbrow status. Instead, the book interrogates what we really mean when we write a show off as trash TV, and why that actually matters. —Eve Sneider
