This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Last summer, I spent a shocking amount of time at my local D.C. pool reading about the Ebola virus. As my friends tanned on nearby chairs and tweens did cannonballs, I sat happily in the water, arms and e-reader barely staying dry, learning the details of an outbreak of a terrifying disease just two dozen miles from where I was wading. That’s how I tore through Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, a nonfiction story about the origins of filoviruses such as Ebola, the scientists who study them, and a potential disaster on U.S. soil.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- The lost idealism of heartland rock
- The books that take revenge, centuries later
- Two poems by Luis Muñoz
This mismatch between dangerous tales and leisurely environs makes up a significant part of my reading life—flipping through Adam Higginbotham’s book about Chernobyl at the beach, for example, or picking up Maurice Herzog’s classic account of the first ascent of the Himalayan mountain Annapurna during a romantic vacation. I agree fully with what Eva Holland wrote inThe Atlantic this week: “Life-and-death stakes? Dangerous mysteries? Motley crews pitting themselves against impossible odds? Sign me up—but only vicariously, please. I like my adventures paired with a cup of tea and my softest blanket.”
Holland collected a list of great adventure narratives that will send you somewhere incredible from the comfort of your couch (or, in my case, the shallow end of the pool). She mentions a few on my to-be-read list, as well as one that is famous in my household. My wife has adopted my nonfiction-thriller habit, which led her to David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, one of the books Holland recommends, just as I dug into Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl. As we read side by side, I’d often share with her some awful blunder on the part of a Soviet nuclear scientist, and in exchange, she’d read me a particularly gruesome passage about the disappearance of the adventurer Percy Fawcett in the Amazon. Sometimes she would relay horrifying-slash-hilarious debates over the finer points of skull-measuring pseudoscience. Mostly, she recounted men beset by tropical diseases, piranhas, and insects—lots and lots of insects.
Great nonfiction writers have a “magic trick,” Holland writes. The best ones can place in your mind’s eye an indelible image of an inaccessible summit, a raging waterfall, or a lonely desert. The promise of such wonders can be enticement enough for browsers to pick up these books, but my favorite parts are usually smaller in scope. I love getting inside the heads of the voyagers and learning about their ambitions and doubts; I adore when a writer, with the perspective of hindsight, lays out just how long the odds of success were. And I’m especially hooked by descriptions of the mistakes the characters inevitably make. “Surely they’re going to turn around,” I said to my wife after she summarized the bleak outlook for the Fawcett party. She only grimaced, and we both read on.
Seven Death-Defying Books for the Adventurous Reader
By Eva Holland
These titles will spirit you to some of the planet’s wildest landscapes, without making you leave your armchair.
What to Read
Boys Weekend, by Mattie Lubchansky
It’s going to be a great getaway, Sammie’s friends promise: Adam’s bachelor party will take place in El Campo, a futuristic bastion of hedonism floating in international waters, where there will be no wives or girlfriends, just good old-fashioned dude time. What could go wrong? Well, for starters, Sammie, the best man, isn’t a man at all—they are newly out as trans, uncomfortably trying to navigate the bro-ish culture of their college friend group. The guys swear they’re all cool with it, but they’re having a really hard time using the right pronouns. Also, El Campo seems kind of … weird? A creepy finance cult is hanging around, everyone is acting a bit off, and Sammie is pretty sure there are monsters in the ocean and doppelgängers slowly replacing their friends. Lubchansky’s graphic novel is vivid and delightful, full of noodly limbs, swirling tentacles, and cartoon blood and guts. El Campo, stocked with ghoulish, hyper-capitalistic entertainment (you can 3D-print and hunt your own clone), straddles the line between hysterical and hair-raising. Sammie’s trip there goes poorly, but it’s a lot of fun to read about. — Emma Sarappo
From our list: The 2025 Summer Reading Guide
Out Next Week
John of John, by Douglas Stuart
My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past, by Tracy Clark-Flory
Your Weekend Read
Is It the Shoes?
By Alex Hutchinson
A relatively unheralded 31-year-old Kenyan named Sabastian Sawe won the London Marathon with a time of 1:59:30. That is, for reference, 26.2 miles run at an average of 4:34 a mile—or, put another way, a pace that most recreational runners would struggle to sustain for more than a few seconds, if they could hit it at all. Perhaps even more arresting was the fact that the man who took second place, Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, also ran under two hours, finishing just 11 seconds behind Sawe.
The feat was the culmination of a shift—or, perhaps more aptly, a total disruption—in marathoning over the past few years, in which the eventual breaking of the mythical two-hour mark went from an impossibility to a guarantee.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.
Explore all of our newsletters.
The post An Unexpected Type of Beach Read appeared first on The Atlantic.
