Some Summer Reads That Inspire
I’m always drawn to books that transport us to evocative places, shift perspective, and catalyze growth — this season there are many to choose from. Three novels on my summer list are authored by cohosts of Friends & Fiction, which regularly introduces me to new voices. Two nonfiction works on my list encourage us to soar to new heights.
I’m excited to read the forthcoming novel by my fiction teacher and Friends & Fiction cohost Kristin Harmel. The Paris Daughter, out June 6, centers on two mothers in Paris who must make impossible choices under Nazi occupation. Harmel has written stirringly about different facets of World War II for more than 10 years. Whether her stories are about winemakers in France joining the resistance, document forgers saving children, or Jewish refugees surviving in the forests of Eastern Europe, Harmel always teaches me something new about this wretched, studied period in world history. She has spoken about the impact that reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl has had on her life and writing. Once a chick lit writer, Harmel saw her first World War II novel, The Sweetness of Forgetting, published in August 2012, shortly before I took her class.
I’m also anticipating fellow cohost Kristy Woodson Harvey’s new novel, The Summer of Songbirds, out July 11. It revolves around four women who join forces to save the summer camp that transformed their lives. From reading two of her previous novels, The Wedding Veil, and Christmas in Peachtree Bluff, I know Harvey expertly captures the intricacies of family relationships in the South and vividly depicts home interiors and seasons. (In real life, she also runs an interior design blog with her mother.) In her newest, Harvey explores the power and complexity of female friendship drenched in the love of summertime.
I’m looking forward to Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas. This one is out of my preferred genre, but Cañas came across my screen in May 2022 through the Book of the Month Club with her Gothic horror debut, The Hacienda. Her first novel taps into my fascination with Latin American history. The story centers on a newly married woman trapped in a haunted house in Mexico in 1823 two years after the Mexican War of Independence. A Ph.D., Cañas thoroughly researched and wove in the socioeconomics and concerns of the period — particularly what it felt like to be marginalized during colonization. It’s all wrapped in a spooky mood mixed with elements of religion and spirituality.
In Cañas’s latest, a supernatural western, vampires and vaqueros battle on the Texas-Mexico border during the 1840s. I read a preview online and was gripped from the first sentence: “It was often said that a strange kind of magic ran in the water of Rancho Los Ojuelos, the kind that made the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca go mad, the kind that made mustangs swift and the land rich.” Are you intrigued, too? Vampires of El Norte debuts August 29.
I just finished Patti Callahan Henry’s latest, The Secret Book of Flora Lea, published May 2. Another cohost of Friends & Fiction, Callahan Henry is new to me — she has a lyrical, atmospheric writing style. This time, she delves into mystery, building her novel around a woman, Hazel, who discovers a rare book tied to her past secrets about her missing sister, Flora Lea, and their childhood in the English countryside during the United Kingdom’s Operation Pied Piper in World War II. Driven by deep love and bottled up with guilt, Hazel stops at nothing to find out what happened to her lost sister. The novel readily moves back and forth between Hazel’s teen years in 1939-1940 and her adulthood in 1960. This ode to the power of story and storytelling entreats when the lines between fact and fiction often seem blurred today. Truth emerges regardless and that certainly holds in Callahan Henry’s latest.
On the nonfiction side, two business/personal development books have made an indelible impression. The first, Ozan Varol’s Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary, I’ve written about here. With rich examples, Varol describes how it’s vital to be deliberate in your media consumption, follow your curiosity, look where no one else is looking, trust yourself, and learn to be a creator. He shows how we are all capable of adopting these behaviors.
I’m starting my second pick, Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most, out May 16. I appreciate the frame NYU Marketing Professor Adam Alter sets forth. Alter describes two opposite behaviors necessary for a breakthrough: exploration and exploitation. Exploring requires experimenting and some risk since you don’t know that you’ll find what you need right away. This means saying yes to uncertainty and trying new things. Exploiting involves working deeply in an area, refining and refining as you go along. This phase requires saying no more often to guard your time. Alter writes, “The explore-exploit combo the researchers identified in 2021 is powerful because it provides a recipe for turning periods of stasis into periods of change.” Post-pandemic, this is what the world needs now.
To learn more about having a breakthrough, you can sign up for a webinar with Adam Alter on May 16 at 1 p.m. EDT.