Referential's 2026 Summer Reading List
Find the next summer read for your personality type.
When my sisters and I would go to our public library as kids, we’d climb down the stairs and find the small room at the back of the children’s floor where, all summer, there would be on the walls their grand, summer reading challenge. One year, they covered the wall with a gradient of colorful butcher paper. You got a deep sea diver, and each book you logged allowed you to descend deeper toward the ocean floor (if you reached it, you got to collect a prize from the librarian). Another year, you were assigned an astronaut and made your way through space.
While this certainly ignited achievement-oriented tendencies for all three of us, we also speak so fondly the joys of the analog summer reading challenge. I perk up anytime I see a library or bookstore rolling out their own bingo card to encourage people to read beyond their comfort zone.
Looking at some old and new standouts from my bookshelf, I compiled a summer reading list for different types of readers. Here’s Referential’s summer reading guide, featuring publishing industry satire, formal play, and Icelandic hot girl murder.
Referential’s Summer Reading List
For the horror reader deep in Nextdoor: The Night Guest, Hildur Knútsdótti—I can fly through audiobooks in the summer, and this Icelandic horror novella made a great companion for long walks on July evenings. Iðunn drifts through her days, unsettled by the realization that, by night, she’s sleepwalking. Iðunn also loves to scroll through her neighborhood Facebook page and visit with her neighborhood’s outdoor cats. This was recommended to me by a friend who a.) loves animals and b.) loves neighborhood gossip, and I think it fills a perfect niche.
For the NYRB reader who thinks it’s so over: Late Fame, Arthur Schnitzler—Publishing is broken, and this is a horn that people have been wailing on since the nineteenth century in Austria. A group of enthusiastic poets rediscovers the work of a poet decades later. The book asks deep questions on how we value art, and the twist is perfectly earned. A movie came out this year, and it did not do well, but I’m, nonetheless, intrigued.
For a brilliant, fresh family story: Goodbye, Vitamin, Rachel Khong—Poignant, understated, Goodbye, Vitamin offers such rich and original reflections on family, love, memory, and illness. I loved the daily entries and found that the white space between vignettes adds great drama to the storytelling.
For a grief-induced break from reality: Dead in Long Beach California, Venita Blackburn—Venita Blackburn’s debut novel tells the story of Coral, a writer who finds her brother Jay dead in his apartment. Coral takes Jay’s cell phone and, over the course of the following week, sends text messages to various people in his life, impersonating him online and even creating social media accounts using his identity. In wildly original form—employing various narrators, a novel within a novel, and found text like Buzzfeed articles and fan fiction—this polyphonic book looks at the horrors that arise when grief renders life illegible to oneself.
For the lover of gay canon: Mysterious Skin, Scott Heim—After hearing Scott Heim and Kyle Dillon Hertz discuss the novel at an event celebrating its 30th anniversary reissue, I read this book with rapt attention. The prose is refreshingly crisp, the details are so originally observed, and the story is completely gutting. The Gregg Araki film is also getting a 4K restoration in short order.
For the Sapphic period piece and graphic nonfiction lovers: Charity and Sylvia, Tillie Walden—When the incredibly talented author and artist Tillie Walden digs into the history of one of the earliest documented lesbian couples in the U.S., you listen. The sepia drawings bring readers inside a vision of Vermont at the turn of the 19th century, and the book is stitched through with letters between the two women.
For the party poets: Party Line, Kyle Carrero Lopez—Full of parties both social and political, this debut collection amazed me in how it can move so deftly from a party in Fire Island to the shores of memory in Cuba.
For an immersive masterpiece: The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison—I can still viscerally remember the feeling of reading Toni Morrison’s debut (!) novel. This book is completely brilliant and haunting, and I’m always amazed by its formal inventiveness. I always feel better for reading her work. I’m preparing for my own vacation next week and am debating whether to bring Jazz, which provides an epigraph for Party Line, or Song of Solomon with me.
Reference Section
August announcements: For the month ahead, I’m going to be taking a bit of a summer break. Paid subscribers will get Monthly MASH on Tuesday, and I’ll still have stories to share every week. You’ll be hearing from a couple of guest writers on texts they love, and I’ll be excavating some stories you might have missed from the archives. I’m excited to be sharing the space with other writers I admire, and I look forward to the conversations that I have scheduled for September and beyond. I also have some very exciting news I can’t wait to share.
Read of the week: Summer Wrobel’s new essay in Sonora Review, “Ars Poetica.” Through telling the story of the writer’s childhood experience with epilepsy, the essay becomes a profound and poignant meditation on absence, addiction, and the relationship between the narrator and her mother. The imagery is arresting, and I had tears in my eyes at the end. Here’s a sample:
It is strange to have an experience that can only be witnessed by someone else. As a child, I was diagnosed with epilepsy, a neurological disorder that arrived as mysteriously as it would one day leave. From the ages of four to eleven, my body seized. My absence seizures were small and brief, staring spells that led to lapses in my memory. I would raise my hand in class, and by the time I was called on, forget what it was I had to say. Those seizures weren’t like the tonic-clonic seizures, where my body woke up sore. The absence seizures felt more like their namesake—tiny absences, sometimes hundreds of them, stealing brief seconds from the day.
Read the full essay here.
For some more summer reading, writers and editors at the Portland Press Herald recommended some favorite beach reads. Check out our list here.
Note: I earn a small commission when you shop for books through my Bookshop links, which helps support Referential’s free subscriptions.
Added to all my list bb