The Official Summer Reading List
Bookish
THE OFFICIAL SUMMER READING LIST
As discerning literary women ourselves, we at So Textual believe your summer reading stack can be as intellectually enriching as it is indulgent—dismissing the notion that the “beach read” must be light, throwaway, or emotionally shallow.
The Official So Textual Summer Reading List blends the literary with the leisurely—think Mediterranean villas, blue skies, glittering water, and long afternoons spent with a book in hand.
These are the books that smart, sophisticated, well-read women are slipping into their carry-ons for this year’s summer vacation. Some are sun-soaked and romantic; others are contemplative and quietly devastating. All have been chosen for the thinking woman’s summer.
Call Me By Your Name (2017)
1. Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman
If you’ve seen the film, Call Me by Your Name (2017), you’ll know the visuals, the plotline, the love story, and the scene with the peach—but the novel offers a rare beauty, intimacy, and lyricism of its own. Published in 2007, but set in 1980s Northern Italy, this coming-of-age novel unfolds over a single summer but spans decades in memory.
It’s a slow, romantic burn filled with sensual detail and literary longing, and if you know what it's like to kindle a love affair through literature, you know how text and metaphor make desire and attraction blaze all the brighter; connection somehow feels different when your lover appreciates the same writers and stories as you—which is another reason we're literary!
Few books capture the heat of both place and emotion quite like Call Me By Your Name. Aciman’s prose evokes late afternoons in sun-drenched villas, with conversations about literature, and the kind of brief, transformative relationships that linger for a lifetime.
For anyone who enjoys their romance with philosophical weight and their summer reading steeped in intersubjectivity and an innocence-lost atmosphere, this is the only choice.
2. The Endless Summer by Madame Nielsen
A hedonistic love story that drifts between Denmark and Portugal, between youth and age, between summer and winter.
This slim 2018 novel is one of the most stylistically distinct on the Official So Textual Summer Reading List—a poetic, dreamlike narrative, confronting ideas of time, sexuality, and tragedy.
A Danish woman falls in love with a much younger Portuguese artist; around them, lovers and friends circle and collide. The premise alone tells you everything: the indulgence, the age gap, the sense of place and mood.
This is a summer book for those who appreciate literary risk-taking and elliptical storytelling. The Endless Summer is a brief, heady blur of a read that leaves you feeling, like the characters, slightly dazed, overstimulated, and suspended in the weightless aftermath of a season where nothing quite happened—and yet everything quietly shifted.
3. The Beautiful Summer by Cesar Pavese
A coming-of-age novella set in 1930s Northern Italy—tender and atmospheric, while exploring the disillusionment of adolescence through the collapse of idealized beauty—both romantic and artistic. This disillusionment is rendered in spare prose, with Pavese’s characteristic emotional restraint. He's one of those authors who conveys just as much with what he doesn't say, and it's authors like this who make us better readers.
Told through the eyes of a young girl on the cusp of adulthood, The Beautiful Summer unfolds in painterly scenes: humid nights, fashionable parties, the thrill of being noticed. But beneath the surface glamour is a story about longing, naivety, and what it means to step into one’s own desire.
Pavese’s prose is ideal for readers who want a dose of Italian melancholy with their morning espresso on the balcony.
4. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
A French Riviera summer. A teenage girl. A moral scandal. This novel is a cult classic—both for what it says and the attitude it wears. It’s the kind of book that says something when you’re seen reading it on a sun lounger.
Published in 1954, when Sagan was just 18, Bonjour Tristesse is effortlessly cool, emotionally ambivalent, and deceptively sharp.
The story follows 17-year-old Cécile spending the summer with her charming father and his much-younger mistress. What unfolds is a devastating reflection on love, cruelty, and control.
With a new film adaptation directed by Durga Chew-Bose and starring Chloë Sevigny just released, this summer is the perfect time to revisit (or finally read) this stylish slice of mid-century ennui.
5. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Jansson’s meditative novel published in 1972 is about a girl and her grandmother spending the summer on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland. This is a summer novel in the purest sense—gentle, unhurried, and observant.
There's little in the way of plot; instead, we drift through a series of vignettes of island life, the childlike wonder of discovery, and the unspoken bonds of family and grief. However, what the book quietly accomplishes is a profound meditation on impermanence—how attention, not action, becomes the way we mark time, cope with loss, and make a life.
If you’ve ever wanted to read a book that feels like sitting in the shade after a swim, The Summer Book is it. It’s also beautifully short—perfect for slow reading over long, light-filled afternoons on vacation.
6. The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt
A poet retreats to her childhood hometown after her husband announces a "pause" in their marriage. What follows is sharp, cerebral, and quietly destabilizing.
A finalist for the Femina Prize and lauded for its formal precision, The Summer Without Men blends fiction, essay, and interior monologue to probe the boundaries between madness and lucidity, aging and reinvention. Hustvedt draws on philosophy, psychoanalysis, and poetry to construct a narrative that’s both rigorously intellectual and emotionally acute.
Don’t let the provocative title fool you—Hustvedt’s 2011 novel is a layered, feminist portrait of middle age, identity, and intellectual survival. It's about art, literature, and the inner lives of women—it's hot girl summer, after all.
If you're drawn to writers like Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, you'll appreciate Hustvedt. This is a summer read for those who enjoy heady literature with exploration of complex emotions and psychological depth.
7. Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki
Originally published in 1946 and later revived by the New York Review of Books (NYRB), Three Summers is a dreamy, richly atmospheric novel that follows Maria, Infanta, and Katerina—three sisters in the Greek countryside navigating love, identity, and the strange poetry of adolescence.
Set just before World War II, it captures the kind of summers that stretch out endlessly, days blurring together, feeling both wildly free and deeply formative. Liberaki renders summertime adolescence as that transition-period we all know and would love to experience again: a consciousness all its own, full of contradiction, sensuality, and half-understood longing.
If you love books that unfold slowly in the heat, where memory and desire feel inseparable, this one belongs in your summer tote bag. It’s the ideal blend of dreamy sun-dappled escapism and introspective charm.
8. Sunstroke and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley has a gift for revealing the emotional undercurrents of ordinary lives—the silences, tensions, and longings that simmer just beneath the surface.
In Hadley’s 2007 collection, Sunstroke and Other Stories, the tales are often set during summer, when things loosen: marriages falter, passions flare, and the world takes on a faint surrealism.
We love her attention to interior shifts, like how a gesture, a glance, or a passing impulse can quietly unravel a life—all the gossip you want in late-July. This book contains worlds to dip into between summer swims, and stories to linger over with a late afternoon drink in the cool shade of your villa’s patio.
9. A Shower of Summer Days by May Sarton
This is a special gem that made its way onto the Official So Textual Summer Reading List not for its drama, but for its mood. A Shower of Summer Days is about homecoming, memory, and transformation—set in a crumbling Irish estate over the course of one summer.
When Violet Gordon returns with her husband to her childhood home, long-buried tensions rise to the surface—old love, new desire, and the echo of a house that holds them all.
Sarton, known for her introspective journals, brings a poet’s sensitivity to prose. This 1952 novel is gentle, melancholic, and deeply interior. The plot is subtle; the beauty is in the atmosphere. For those drawn to books that feel like a summer retreat in themselves.
10. Summer by Edith Wharton
A bold and quietly controversial novel of desire, class, and awakening—from one of our literary patron saints. Less known than The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth, Summer is one of Wharton’s most sensual and emotionally raw works, published in 1917.
Set in a rural New England town, it follows Charity Royall, a young woman whose world begins to unravel when she meets a man from outside her small social sphere. Wharton strips away the drawing-room decorum of her more famous novels and instead gives us heat, dust, and the danger of a summer fling.
The language is rich and colorful—typical of Wharton, but with a striking directness that was daring for its time. There’s something about the feverishness of summer that brings Wharton’s usual themes of repression and social pressure to a boil.
11. Everything Inside by Edwige Dandicat
A short story collection full of devastation, resilience, and love—set in and around the Haitian diaspora. There’s summer here—in the heat, in the Caribbean air.
Danticat’s stories are emotional without sentimentality; clear-eyed and deeply human. The eight stories in Everything Inside traverse marriages, friendships, family ties, and political histories, all grounded in a deep sense of place and cultural memory.
What distinguishes Danticat is her precision—every story feels distilled, essential, yet layered with history and interiority. She renders displacement and belonging not as opposites, but as conditions that live inside each other.
This is summer not as escape, but as exposure: to memory, to inheritance, and to the ache of being in two places at once.
12. The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard
Shirley Hazzard is a longtime So Textual favorite, and this early (1970) novel shows exactly why.
The narrator, a British woman working in postwar Naples, finds herself entangled with a glamorous couple and a mysterious writer, and what unfolds is more about emotional excavation than plot.
The Bay of Noon is less about what happens and more about how it’s remembered. It’s a study in atmosphere, in the subtle shifts of intimacy and perception that occur when you’re a stranger to others—and to yourself. Hazzard’s language is exacting, but the emotional undercurrent is elusive. It's the perfect, understated summer read for those who love introspection and shadowy glamour.
13. A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
Art, memory, and the healing power of time—set in a small, idyllic English village during the summer of 1920.
This tender, meditative 1980 novel offers a profound look at the ways in which art and time can mend a broken soul. Tom Birkin, a World War I veteran, is employed to restore a faded medieval mural in a church, and the process becomes a meditation on meaning, selfhood, and the power of art.
Carr’s writing is understated—the book's gentle pace and its exploration of rural English life during the summer create a perfect balance of introspection and escape. If you’re craving something reflective but grounded for your summer read—or you're just stuck in your Brooklyn apartment this summer—A Month in the Country is your literary getaway.
14. Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin
This is a novel for readers who want something a bit more cerebral. Summer in Baden-Baden weaves together two timelines: Dostoevsky’s stay in the eponymous German town in 1867 and Tsypkin’s own reflections, blurring the lines between fiction and biography.
Set against a backdrop of heated summer days and intellectual contemplation, this 1982 novel is about the relationship between the artist and their work, the complexities of human desire and artistic obsession.
It’s an intellectual indulgence for those who want more than just the feeling of summer—who want to stoke the pathos of obsession, ambition, and artistic delusion that emerge when days blur, structure dissolves, and no one is watching.
15. We the Animals by Justin Torres
A raw, poetic debut about the messiness of family, boyhood, and growing up—brimming with summer’s wild energy.
This is the summer novel for anyone who wants intensity—the sort of heat that comes with feeling everything all at once. We the Animals follows three brothers as they navigate their fractured family and their turbulent, often violent childhood in 1980s upstate New York.
The brothers run wild, shirtless, barefoot and untamed, in a poetic narrative that feels like an explosion of feeling, capturing the visceral experience of youth, desire, and pain with the kind of raw emotion that can only be felt in summer.
As you can see, summer reading doesn’t have to mean mindless escapism—we believe it’s the perfect time to indulge in literature that’s both luxurious and intellectually stimulating, with stories that transport you to faraway places or peel back the layers of human experience.
Whether you're lounging by the beaches of Marseille or relaxing in a quiet corner of the garden, these books offer everything from the sun-drenched glow of romance to the nuanced complexities of memory and identity, and all the tender, messy parts of being alive.
As we head into the season of long days and late nights, these books are companions for the thinking woman—they enrich our lives and contribute to what it means to live well.
If you're looking to discover more literary treasures and immerse yourself in conversations that are as edifying as the books themselves, consider joining our Book Club—a space for discerning readers to share ideas, explore new voices, and connect over books that leave a mark.
Happy reading, and may your summer be as rich and fascinating as the pages you turn.
Continue Reading
As discerning literary women ourselves, we at So Textual believe your summer reading stack can be as intellectually enriching as it is indulgent—dismissing the notion that the “beach read” must be light, throwaway, or emotionally shallow.
The Official So Textual Summer Reading List blends the literary with the leisurely—think Mediterranean villas, blue skies, glittering water, and long afternoons spent with a book in hand.
These are the books that smart, sophisticated, well-read women are slipping into their carry-ons for this year’s summer vacation. Some are sun-soaked and romantic; others are contemplative and quietly devastating. All have been chosen for the thinking woman’s summer.