So far, Summer 2021 thankfully looks different from this time last year. One similarity, though, is the prevalence of summer books lists. Continuing my tradition from last year and previous years, I’ve curated 21 of this year’s best summer books lists:
Behavioral Scientist: Behavioral Scientist’s Summer Book List 2021
Business Insider: 26 spectacular books that made it onto college summer reading lists this year at universities around the country
CBS News: 12 Perfect Summer Beach Reads for 2021
Financial Times: Summer Books of 2021: Business
Goodreads: 2021 Summer Reads
Harper’s BAZAAR: The Best Summer Books to Read in 2021
Kirkus: Hottest Summer Reads of 2021
Literary Hub: The Ultimate Summer 2021 Reading List; by Emily Temple
Los Angeles magazine: Better Than Beach Reads: A Guide to This Summers Buzziest Books
New York Times: Summer Is Coming. Bring a Book.
Oprah Daily: 20 of the Best New Summer Books to Pick Up This Month
Popsugar: Hit the Beach — or the Couch — With the 47 Best Summer Reads of 2021
Publishers Weekly: Summer Reads 2021
Science: Summer Reading 2021
Shondaland: Your Summer 2021 Reading List
TIME: 36 New Books You Need to Read This Summer
Travel + Leisure: The 20 Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2021
UC Berkeley: Summer reading list for new students Lift Our Gazes
USA TODAY: 10 Summer Reads You Won’t Want to Miss
Vogue: The Best Books to Read This Summer
The Washington Post: 20 Books to Read This Summer
At Literary Hub, managing editor Emily Temple continues her heroic and admirable tradition of collating information from multiple summer lists. “This year,” Temple writes, “I read 38 lists, which recommended a grand total of 522 individual books.” She ranks the books that have appeared on the most lists. This year’s top placements went to Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl (mentioned on 21 lists), Ashley C. Ford’s, Somebody’s Daughter (20), and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Malibu Rising (15).
The design of many of these lists is eye-catching: colorful and with large cover images of the featured books, many with their own superb cover designs. The Publishers Weekly list is particularly extensive. It’s divided into genres (fiction, nonfiction, mystery/thriller, comics, and so on); and there are links to previous summer books lists, back to 2012. The Washington Post lists includes links to reviews of the books, and also an interview with Alison Bechdel, author of the nonfiction title The Secret to Superhuman Strength.
For nonfiction fans, the Behavioral Scientist list is a goldmine of information, heralding important new titles like Adam Grant’s Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know; Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals; Katy Milkman’s How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be; Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler’s Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain; and Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein’s Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. Sunstein is also on the list for Nudge: The Final Edition, which he co-authored with Richard H. Thaler.
And if you are concerned about your goals for the summer or the rest of the year, here is what Milkman, the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says in her Q&A on the Behavioral Scientist books page: “I think there’s an overemphasis on big goals. It’s not that goals aren’t useful. There’s tons of research showing that having a certain kind of goal—a clear, concrete, achievable goal, or a stretch goal—really is valuable. But it’s not solving a problem … You still have to deal with the challenges of procrastination, temptation, forgetting, self-efficacy, and whether or not your peers are supporting you.”