Summer reading 2026

This summer I did the adult summer reading program at Melrose Public Library: Under one reasonable definition of "summer," here are the books I read this summer, in chronological order: Sartor Resartus Everything We Do is Music Notes from a Small Island Make Believe Prisoner of Trebekistan The Song of the Lark A Month in the Country Banal Nightmare Gullah Geechee Home Cooking Norwegian Wood The Hound of the Baskervilles Music: A Subversive History Persepolis Romola All the Beauty in the World Netherland An Anthology of Our Extraordinary Earth It was a glorious summer of reading, and easily the most reading-centric summer I've had as an adult. Misc. thoughts: The nudges to read across genres and time periods helped a lot. It's easy to set a goal to read broadly, but a lot harder to do. One reason I fail at this is that it's pretty easy to read widely on some dimensions but not others, and to thereby feel that one's coverage is better than it really is. Simply reading more had…