Summer Reads for When You Are Feeling the Heat
How hot is it?
It’s so hot if you read in the sunlight your book will catch fire.
But, seriously. It’s hot. I know we’ve had a cold front this week that has brought the chill into the 90’s but it’s still hot. If you’re too hot to move it’s probably time to grab a book and enjoy that air conditioning. In an effort to commiserate, conserve your energy and pick a book from our Summer Hot List. Here are eight books that like the heat as much as we do.
Come on, you like the heat, right? It’s why we live in Texas!
 Hello, Sunshine: A Novel, by 
Sunshine Mackenzie is living the dream she’s a culinary star with millions of fans, a line of #1 bestselling cookbooks, and a devoted husband happy to support her every endeavor.
And then she gets hacked.
When Sunshine’s secrets are revealed, her fall from grace is catastrophic. She loses the husband, her show, the fans, and her apartment. She’s forced to return to the childhood home and the estranged sister she’s tried hard to forget…
The Fireman: A Novel, by Joe Hill
The fireman is coming. Stay cool.
No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it?s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies?before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.
According to a Source: A Novel, by Abby Stern
That’s Hot
When Ella’s new Devil Wears Prada-type boss starts a not-so-friendly competition among the reporters to find an exclusive story or be fired, the stakes are higher than ever. But is being in Hollywood’s elite inner circle worth jeopardizing her friendship with budding actress Holiday Hall and her relationships with her boyfriend and her family?
Ella Warren loves her job working for celebrity news magazine, The Life, as an undercover reporter. Her evenings are spent using her alias to discreetly attend red carpet events, nightclubs, and Hollywood hotspots like the fabulous Chateau Marmont, where her eyes are always peeled for the next big celebrity story.
American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land, by Monica Hesse
For People Who Like to Make the World a Little Hotter
The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn’t stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion…. The culprit, and the path that led to these crimes, is a story of twenty-first century America. Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse first drove down to the reeling county to cover a hearing for Charlie Smith, a struggling mechanic who upon his capture had promptly pleaded guilty to sixty-seven counts of arson. But as Charlie’s confession unspooled, it got deeper and weirder. He wasn’t lighting fires alone; his crimes were galvanized by a surprising love story…
The Forever Summer, by Jamie Brenner
Beach Book – even has Summer in the Title
The Hot One: A Memoir of Friendship, Sex, and Murder, by Carolyn Murnick
It’s a Homynym
A gripping memoir of friendship with a tragic twist – two childhood best friends diverge as young adults, one woman is brutally murdered and the other is determined to uncover the truth about her wild and seductive friend.
As girls growing up in rural New Jersey in the late 1980s, Ashley and Carolyn had everything in common: two outsiders who loved spending afternoons exploring the woods. Only when the girls attended different high schools did they begin to grow apart. While Carolyn struggled to fit in, Ashley quickly became a hot girl: popular, extroverted, and sexually precocious.
After high school, Carolyn entered college in New York City and Ashley ended up in Los Angeles, where she quit school to work as a stripper and an escort, dating actors and older men, and experimenting with drugs. The last time Ashley visited New York, Carolyn was shocked by how the two friends had grown apart. One year later, Ashley was stabbed to death at age twenty-two in her Hollywood home.
The man who may have murdered Ashley, an alleged serial killer, now faces trial in Los Angeles. Carolyn Murnick traveled across the country to cover the case and learn more about her magnetic and tragic friend. Part coming-of-age story, part true-crime mystery, The Hot One is a behind-the-scenes look at the drama of a trial and the poignancy of searching for the truth about a friend’s truly horrifying murder.
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, by Nina Riggs
Hot Can Be Bright
An exquisite memoir about how to live and love every day with death in the room, ….Nina Riggs was just thirty-seven years old when initially diagnosed with breast cancer?one small spot. Within a year, the mother of two sons, ages seven and nine, and married sixteen years to her best friend, received the devastating news that her cancer was terminal.
How does one live each day, unattached to outcome? How does one approach the moments, big and small, with both love and honesty?
Exploring motherhood, marriage, friendship, and memory, even as she wrestles with the legacy of her great-great-great grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nina Riggs?s breathtaking memoir continues the urgent conversation that Paul Kalanithi began in his gorgeous When Breath Becomes Air. She asks, what makes a meaningful life when one has limited time?…
The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, by Mary Beard
It’s so hot this one is about a volcano!
Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year. Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history, from the sixth century BCE to the present day.
Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. But the eruptions are only part of the story. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it was?more like Calcutta or the Costa del Sol??and what it can tell us about ?ordinary? life there. From sex to politics, food to religion, slavery to literacy, Beard offers us the big picture even as she takes us close enough to the past to smell the bad breath and see the intestinal tapeworms of the inhabitants of the lost city. She resurrects the Temple of Isis as a testament to ancient multiculturalism. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica.
Recently, Pompeii has been a focus of pleasure and loss: from Pink Floyd?s memorable rock concert to Primo Levi?s elegy on the victims. But Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem. This book shows us how much more and less there is to Pompeii than a city frozen in time as it went about its business on 24 August 79.
Happy reading, and if you figure out how to cool off – let me know!
