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21 Curated Summer Book Lists for 2021

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.”

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