Summer Reading List for 2025

[a human race against time]

Start the clock.

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From Memorial Day (white shoes! straw hats!) through Labor Day (no more white shoes! no more straw hats!), you want books that are engrossing, as easy to swallow as a G&T, and passably portable. Here are fifteen that fit the bill.

Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

This 1978 classic of pre-AIDS gay life in Manhattan and on Fire Island (“We lived only to dance”) chronicles the exploits of ineffably beautiful, endlessly desirous Malone and the spectacularly entrepreneurial and extravagantly deranged drag queen Sutherland. Holleran’s swooning hothouse prose is irresistible, and Dancer, I can assure you from firsthand experience, rewards endless rereadings.

Shirley Jackson, The Bird’s Nest

Though it tends to lurk in the shadows of its more celebrated siblings The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson’s 1954 novel of multiple personality disorder is a harrowing gem in its own right and, given the author’s penchant for the merciless dissection of her characters, unusually sympathetic. The beleaguered heroine, Elizabeth (aka Betsy, Beth, Bess, and sometimes Lizzie), is one of Jackson’s most compelling (and, perforce, complex) protagonists, and her formidable, hard-drinking Aunt Morgen makes for a memorable foil.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

When was the last time you read—no, really read—Carroll’s 1864 fever dream, complete with the pictures (Sir John Tenniel’s) and conversations its rabbit-hole-diving heroine finds essential in a good book? The relentless wordplay is relentlessly delightful, and anyone who was ever a child coping with a bossily absurd world will identify with peevish Alice (well, no more peevish than anyone else in the story; the entire Wonderland crew is delightfully, ruthlessly unpleasant). You probably already own this one in a volume pairing it with its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, which is less frisky than its predecessor and far more eerily creepy and unsettling. Proceed at your own risk.

Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express

Whenever I go to London, one of the first things I do is pick up a Dame Agatha novel at the book stalls just below Waterloo Bridge and make it my traveling companion. I cite the tour de force Orient Express here because it’s one of my all-time favorites, but, really, you can’t go wrong with nearly any of Christie’s myriad labyrinthine mysteries, Poirot-oriented (sorry) or not.

Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls

Sleazy, gossipy, oversexed, and absolutely (I’ll use this word only once) unputdownable, Jackie Susann’s 1966 megabestseller (31 million copies sold and counting, it’s virtually the McDonald’s of pop lit) is a grotesque showbiz roller-coaster ride, and if your experience of it goes no further than the 1967 film adaptation starring Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke (as Neely O’Hara as Judy Garland), Sharon Tate, and (in a role abortively played by the real Judy Garland herself) Susan Hayward as the Ethel Merman–ish¹ Helen Lawson . . . well, brace yourself. The novel’s a dozen times more lurid (complimentary).²

Miss Susann and Miss Garland in happier days.

E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

Leaping from the delightfully ridiculous to the delightfully sublime, let me praise Forster’s 1908 masterpiece masquerading as a caprice, a novel, from where I’m sitting, that tells us far more about longing, love, the human condition, and all that other good stuff than the more solid, stolid, self-conscious Howards End. Plus you get to visit Italy and

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OK, enough.

Speaking of caprices, I started out writing this bit of throwaway fluff just to see how long it would take me to summon up and sum up fifteen novels without, as Shepherd Mead once put it, really trying but also without resorting to the assistance of AI, ahem, and thirty-three minutes into the effort I’m reminded that I don’t like writing—or doing anything, really—while watching the clock or otherwise under the gun, so having made my pointless point, or at least part of my pointless point, and highlighted five novels going on six, and, I assure you, not having aspired for prose any more elevated than a cliché-spouting bit of computer-generated generative detritus might devise (nor having revised anything; I just did a quick once-over to make sure I hadn’t committed any typos), I’m going to go make myself some lunch or something.

But what the heck, I thought you might find this partial effort amusing, and, really, the novels I’m recommending are, truly, great reading for the summertime (or any other time).

(Also, now you’ve seen how I write when I don’t care how cheaply and gaudily I’m writing.)

Six more great reads, for all months and weathers, are right here.

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P.S. Do, if you’re so inclined, hop over to my website and check out the merch, plus information on how to purchase signed copies of Dreyer’s English (they make a great Father’s Day and/or graduation present, y’know)!

1. En dash alert!

2. Post-publication addendum: Possibly I’ve already told this story—I tell it with some frequency—but I once asked a friend—a prolific, talented, and reasonably successful author of literary (though hardly stuffy) fiction—whether it ever occurred to him to just bang out a Jackie Susann novel and make a fortune. To which he replied: “If I could, don’t you think I would?” Adding: “You can’t fake what she does.”