A Summer Reading Recap

The highlights of my reading from June-August

Excitement about “summer reading” abounds on the internet, and with good reason. My own reading pace tends to slow down in the summertime, mostly because of the extra time and attention my children require when they aren’t in school. Summer is just not my favorite season, and my reading often reflects that.

This year was a little different! I managed to keep my reading pace during June and July, in part because of some vacation time and in part because my kids are growing more independent. (It’s possible! It happens! Parents of little ones—hang on, it’s coming!). Then, once my kids went back to school on August 1, I slowed down a bit. I took some naps. I sat on the porch playing the NYT games. I sent Marco Polo messages to friends. I watched an almost unbelievable amount of Olympic coverage. I also fell into a major reading slump after finishing Parable of the Sower (more on that below).

But overall, since Memorial Day, I read 25 books. I love that nice even number, so it seems like an excellent time for a summer reading recap. I’m not going to cover everything I read—but there were some definite trends and some stand-out books I can’t stop thinking about.

Here’s what I’ve been reading this summer! (I’ve added all the books mentioned below to my Recommended Reads from 2024 list on Bookshop. If you purchase a book through this link, I earn a small commission. Thanks for supporting my writing in this way!)

Books about Disability:

Disability theology is a topic I’m increasingly curious about, and I wanted to specifically highlight a few books on the topic I dove into this summer.

Demystifying Disability: This is a straightforward, helpful, quick primer on disability issues. It is really helpful in sorting through language and interpersonal interactions, and I recommend it!

The Disabled God: This is more academic theological text, which I highly recommend to anyone who is particularly interested in disability theology and won’t mind the academic tone.

The Reason I Jump: This has been on my TBR for years. It is a memoir-in-translation, written in a Q&A style, by a 13 year-old autistic boy who is mostly non-speaking. Some of the language struck me as outdated, but it was written more than a decade ago. Such a worthwhile read for anyone who wants to better love and understand the the autistic people in their lives (which is, hopefully, all of us).

A solid four or five stars for each of these helpful, illuminating books.

A Vanderbeeker Summer

Summer 2024 was very much the Summer of the Vanderbeekers for our family! We read the first four books in this series, swapping back and forth between both print and audio. These books are an absolute delight. Each of the 5 Vanderbeeker kids is so well developed, but none feels like a caricature. I love reading almost any book about neighbors and intergenerational relationships; throw in a New York City setting and I’m sold. This series only strengthens my conviction that when the world is a mess and life is chaotic, good middle grade novels are a balm for heart and soul. Five stars all around from all five members of our family. (The audio is excellent for car rides!)

Speaking of neighbors and intergenerational relationships…

I finally forced myself to read The Winners, the final installment in Fredrik Backman’s Beartown trilogy. I put it off for so long because I just didn’t want to leave these characters behind, but it was time. These are hard stories, full of heartbreak and warranting content warnings (physical violence including child abuse, sexual assault, suicide, drug and alcohol addition, homophobia…), but Fredrik Backman is trustworthy. He loves his characters, he wants the reader to love them too, and so he carries the reader’s heart carefully.

One of my biggest “ah-ha” moments in The Winners is the way characters I dislike make choices I hate and would never make in my own life—and yet, in the course of the story, I am relieved by those choices because they make reconciliation possible for the characters I love.

When I started this trilogy, I thought, “I don’t really care about hockey. I don’t really care about these teenage boys.” Now, a few years later, I hold Amat and Bobo and Benji and Maya and Ana and Alicia and Ramona and Teemu so close to my heart. I almost want to tattoo the number 16 on my body. (IYKYK.)

Read these books. I don’t think you’ll regret it. Five stars from me.

And finally, shifting gears fairly dramatically, I want to talk about Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Where to even begin?

If The Winners needs content warnings, Parable of the Sower needs caution tape and flashing lights. This book is very dark, full of violence and disturbing images, and even if you are not a sensitive reader, you’d be wise to pick up this book with a full awareness of what you are getting into. My father-in-law had abandoned it halfway through and gave me ample warning—and I was able to push through only because I knew what to expect and had decided it would be worth it.

Parable of the Sower is dystopian, speculative fiction about a girl named Laura who abandons her home after her neighborhood is attacked by roving drug addicts. She has discovered (her words) or invented (others’ words) a new religion, called Earthseed, and she believes it’s essential for surviving the violent, unstable world in which she lives. She sets off in search of a new and safe community where she can build a life and share Earthseed with others.

The story is told through Laura’s journals and Earthseed writing, and it begins on July 20, 2024. That’s why I decided now was the time to read it (and I did so in conjunction with a read-along on The Stacks podcast, and as a buddy read with my friend, Andrea). I can’t adequately express just how eerie my reading experience was. Laura’s world is different than ours—very different—and yet it felt so close, so possible, so oddly familiar. And ultimately, that’s what makes the book so disturbing to read. A reader might be able to distance themself from the horror of the plot if if happened in the year 3000, or even in the year 2100. But it doesn’t. It’s unfolding right now, today, and it was incredibly unsettling.

I don’t know how Octavia Butler did it. Parable of the Sower was published in 1993, and Butler unfortunately passed away too young, in 2006. What would she have made of 2016, of 2020, of 2024? Though the world is different and the situation more dire than our own, she seems to have predicted Trump and Trumpism; corporations like Amazon and Meta and Nestle; water shortages and climate collapse; and the American immigration crisis. (Of course, some were already sounding the alarm on these topics in the 90s, and perhaps Butler was just paying closer attention than most.) The world building she did in Parable of the Sower is quite something, and while I did feel unsettled—extraordinarily so—the book also felt validating in a way that is hard to explain. There are factions of society who want to brush off the concerns of Millennials and Gen-Z as alarmist panic, as unreasonable sensitivity. We saw in the way so many brushed off Black Americans’ warnings about Trump; we saw it again as white men rolled their eyes at the outrage women felt about Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. I feel it every day as eco-anxiety rises and half our nation’s politicians insist climate change is a fantasy. Sometimes, I hear people talk about politics (and life) and wonder, “Are we living in the same reality?”

And so there was something about reading Parable of the Sower that felt like validation. It was though Octavia Butler was speaking across time to say, “You are not crazy. Do not grow complacent. It all matters.”

It was a book I absolutely needed to read in 2024, both to know I am not alone in my concerns about the future and to feel encouraged and reaffirmed to continue living counter-culturally, to insist on better and different from our government and communities, and as Lauren wrote on Butler’s imagined March 2, 2025, “Belief/Initiates and guides action—/Or it does nothing.”

I don’t ever want to read this book again, but I can’t give it anything but five stars.

So, there you have it. If you’re interested in seeing what else I read this summer, it’s all tracked on my Storygraph. As always, I’d love to know more about what you have been reading this summer, so please tell me in the comments!

Here’s to more great reading in autumn!