Friday Mood Recs: Five favorites from Paperback Summer Reading Guides past

A peek at my summer reading vibe

I’m in the process of finishing up this year’s Paperback Summer Reading Guide, and I’m really happy with how it’s coming together. This is one of the biggest projects I work on all year, and there are always some nerves with each of these guides. I wonder if I’ll find the right books and worry about disappointing those looking forward to the guide. But once I start building out the final copy, seeing all the books I love situated next to each other, I get excited again. That’s where we are now, and I can’t wait to get it into your hands next Friday!

In this newsletter, I wanted to offer a little taste of what you can expect from the PSRG by sharing a handful of books from previous years’ guides. It was hard to choose just five, but I hope these give you a sense of the variety of books and how I write about them. Today’s Friday Mood Recs post is free for all. If this sample feels like the way you like to read in the summer and want a whole slew of recommendations to hit your inbox next Friday, you can upgrade your subscription today or wait until May 23rd to purchase the standalone guide. Thanks for your support and happy summer reading season!

The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif (1999). Told in part through letters and journals (and without much expository writing!), this is a novel that rewards careful, leisurely reading. In 1900, the widowed Anna Winterbourne (that name!) expatriates to Egypt and finds herself enraptured with the culture, disguising herself as a man so she can see the parts of the country kept at a distance from proper British women. A hundred years later, nearing the turn of the 21st-century, Anna’s great-granddaughter Isabel visits Egypt to reconstruct Anna’s history and the love story that consumed her life. This slow-burning epic catalogs the perils and pleasures of love across cultures and explores the costs of colonialism. Sweeping, romantic, and entirely transportative, The Map of Love is ideal for readers who love Possession by A.S. Byatt and The Parisian by Isabella Hammad.

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa; translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder (2003/2009). A bittersweet story about friendship and found family, this novel explores the relationship between a brilliant math professor with a debilitating memory disorder and the housekeeper hired to care for him. This could have been outlandish or saccharine in a different author’s hands, but Ogawa and her translator have managed to create a quiet, beautiful, and tender story that completely drew me in–even the way Ogawa writes about math! As someone who tends to glaze over numbers on a page, she made me understand–to a small degree–the beauty in numbers and equations, especially as I began to understand the structure of the novel as something of an equation itself. This book is perfect for readers who enjoyed Lydia Millet’s Dinosaurs.

Nevada by Imogen Binnie (2013). Nevada follows the journey of Maria, a trans woman living in NYC, after her mundane life stagnates and then falls apart. Maria needs a change of pace and of mindset so she sets out on a roadtrip in a car that she may or may not have permission to borrow. Halfway through the novel a chance meeting shifts the tone and perspective of the book, and catapults Maria into a role she wasn’t expecting. Filled with insightful commentary and authentic warmth, this novel is funny, profound, and unforgettable. If you love Sally Rooney’s voicey writing, you may like Binnie’s style as well and if you enjoyed Torrey Peter’s Detransition, Baby, you’ll enjoy seeing how it’s in conversation with this cult classic.

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (2009/2015). Makina is one of those unforgettable heroines who magically comes to life in the brief span of 125 pages. Carrying two secret messages—one from her mother to her brother, another from the shady underworld of her town—Makina embarks on a journey across the U.S.-Mexico border that will change her forever. Through Odyssey-like adventures and allusions to myth and folklore, Herrera uses Makina’s voyage to explore the way language and borders can divide and heal, and completely shape our reality. If you’re interested in border narratives or stories that blend myth and reality, this is not to be missed.

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy (2015). Deborah Levy is a writers’ writer–a novelist praised by aspiring and established authors for her ability to completely consume readers with her prose. But her work is also approachable and Hot Milk is a compulsively readable, beachy book for readers who don’t want to sacrifice literary merit. The story follows Sofia as she travels from the UK to Spain with her mother Rose in order to seek the attention of an experimental doctor. This story is sensual and provocative, alternating between an absurdist tone and moments of real darkness, all written in Levy’s stunningly languid prose. This novel felt like it could be set to the White Lotus Theme Music and may be right for fans of Intimacies by Katie Kitamura.

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Happy reading!

Sara