Summer has a reputation for being a relaxing time, perfect for catching up on the books one has mentally shelved during the school year. But what happens when summer is quite busy?

Despite my best efforts to prioritize reading — including deleting TikTok — I cannot realistically endeavor to read the 78 books I added to my Goodreads “Want to Read” shelf over the past nine months.

Surely, I’m not the only one balancing a summer job or two with family and friend time, physical activity, screen time and schoolwork, making spots on a summer to-read list coveted. Books must do more than intrigue readers if they want to be read between the busy months of June and September.

Below are four books that did just that for me. 

• “The Emperor of Gladness” by Ocean Vuong

Last winter, I read Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” The work was so thought-provoking and eloquent; I knew it wouldn’t be the last of Vuong’s works I read. So, when I learned about the release of “The Emperor of Gladness” via an interview with Oprah Winfrey, I was excited. 

An Oprah’s Book Club Pick, “The Emperor of Gladness” is about a small town teenager named Hai who forms an unexpected, deep relationship with an elderly woman experiencing dementia after she convinces him not to take his own life.

“The book is a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate value systems, to create a different hierarchy of values,” Vuong said to Winfrey.

Vuong discussed the importance of landscape and its history in this novel, arguing the inextricable tie between the two. Despite the novel being marketed as literary fiction, Vuong considers it historical fiction, and I believe I will enjoy it, given the promise of his past work and the unexpected connections between the tangible and intangible.

• “Writers & Lovers” by Lily King

To pursue a creative career, or to live securely? That is the question this novel asks, as its synopsis makes these two things mutually exclusive. 

In “Writers & Lovers,” it’s the summer of 1997, and 31-year-old Casey Peabody struggles to support herself as a waitress and aspiring author. Balancing the demands of art and life, Casey refuses to relinquish her creative ambitions as her friends have done. There is also a love triangle.

A novel set in summer with romance and a relatable protagonist? Count me in, please.

• “Small Boat” by Vincent Delecroix

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize this year, “Small Boat” is a fictional work based on a true story about the drowning of 27 migrants in the English Channel in November 2021. Migrants had phoned French authorities numerous times for help, but they had refused to send a rescue team, telling them they had to call the British authorities and resulting in the deaths of all but two on board.

What struck me about this story is that it’s narrated by the telephone operator who works for the French authorities: the one who refuses to send the rescue team. Positioning readers to see through the lens of the operator may make it easier or harder to demonize them; I don’t yet know, but I do know that this choice of perspective will provide a story incredibly different from the one that would’ve been told had Delecroix chosen to write from the potentially more obvious perspective of one of the migrants.

Although Delecroix said the purpose of the novel was not to establish a moral judgement of the operator’s lack of compassion, “Small Boat” entertains the subject.

“In a world where heinous actions often have no consequence, where humanity’s moral code appears fragile … ‘Small Boat’ explores the power of the individual and asks us to consider the havoc we may cause others, the extent to which our complacency makes us complicit and whether we could all do better,” the 2025 International Booker Prize judges said. 

Of all the considerations the shortlist entertained, those of “Small Boat” haunted me the most.

• “My Salinger Year” by Joanna Rakoff

There’s nothing like a book recommendation from a mentor whose taste in books you trust more than your own.

When I told a professor of my aspiration to work in the publishing industry, she suggested I read “My Salinger Year.” Shortly after, I read the synopsis about 23-year-old Rakoff in late 1990s New York, finding her authorial voice as an assistant, responding to author J. D. Salinger’s fan mail. 

A change of pace from my fiction-heavy list and an opportunity to familiarize myself with the history of literary New York, “My Salinger Year” may be the recommendation I didn’t know I needed.

In a summer that never seems to have enough time to read all the books one desires, these four books will be read by me. What’s at the top of your summer will-read list?

Honorable mentions:

• “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin
• “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “Swimming in the Dark” by Tomasz Jedrowski
• “Walk Like a Girl: A Memoir” by Prabal Gurung
• “Evenings and Weekends” by Oisín McKenna
• “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante