A few months ago, we invited you to join us in a low-stakes summer reading challenge: a bucket list of literary criteria meant to help us all read widely and deeply, check things off our to-read lists and take full advantage of this season of leisure — which, in our corner of the world, means a season of books.
The goal was to try to check off at least five items on the list by summer’s end. As the season comes to a close, we here at the Book Review are sharing our own tallies (and some thoughts on the books that got us there). If you played along, please share your own lists with us in the comments! We’d love to hear from you.
Leah Greenblatt, editor
a book published in the last year
“Buckeye,” by Patrick Ryan. Is it faint praise to compare a book to a body pillow? Ryan’s big, generous novel about the interconnected lives of two young couples in midcentury Ohio felt as plush and comforting as one. Our reviewer Jess Walter called it “omniscient, sweeping, almost defiantly sentimental.”
a book in translation
Hu Anyan’s “I Deliver Parcels in Beijing,” translated by Jack Hargreaves, offers an unvarnished dispatch from the front lines of the gig economy, written by a guy who’s held nearly every low-wage, low-reward job on the market (delivery driver, security guard, convenience store clerk, bicycle salesman). The Cinderella bit of it is that now he can add a new title: internationally best-selling author.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post The Books We Loved This Summer appeared first on New York Times.
