How to Build a Summer Reading List

A curious combination of chance and serendipity

And while you are here, why not enter the Goodreads Summer Giveaway to win a copy of my latest novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND?

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Preparations began just after Christmas, when I stopped into BMV, my local second-hand/ overstock bookshop, to peruse the shelves for Sue Miller, which has been a habit of mine since I picked up her 13th book, Monogamy (published in 2020) and fell in love with her work, long after the Sue Miller heyday—Miller’s first book, The Good Mother, was published in 1986, and I distinctly remember the movie tie-in edition lying around my house back when I was just old enough to know it was vaguely salacious.

There are benefits to being late to a party, a certain one being that second-hand titles are usually readily available, and indeed used copies of Miller’s While I Was Gone and The World Below proved ubiquitous, plus there had been pretty new editions of her backlist reissued alongside Monogamy, some of which I collected, and for a while—even as my Sue Miller collection grew—it seemed like the string of books-still-left-to-read before me might stretch forever. The same way it had seemed with Margaret Drabble and Penelope Lively about 20 years ago, whole shelves of their paperbacks with orange Penguin spines, or Laurie Colwin’s, albeit Harper Perennial, ever displayed on tables at the university book sales I scoured for sweet deals back when all these authors were new to me.

For a while… it seemed like the string of books-still-left-to-read before me might stretch forever.

Maybe it’s truly a sign of being at mid-life, however, that such bounties are dwindling. I’m still a bit stunned at my unprecedented Oxfam bookshop haul from my trip to England in the spring, a haul of precisely zero. Nothing. There are still authors whose works I’m on the hunt for—Penelope Mortimer, whose short story collection I’m longing to get my hands on; Elizabeth Taylor, the other one; some Muriel Sparks—but these are rarer finds, their orange spines hard to come by, and no longer is the Oxfam Bookshop or any second-hand place an automatic trove of treasures, and so when I strike gold now, the find is extra special.