Summer looks different for everyone. Some people are already gone, backpack half-planned, chasing something unfamiliar in a country they’ve never seen. Others wait until the crowds thin out in September. There’s the beach chair that doesn’t move for two weeks, and there’s the trip built entirely around old churches, local markets, and a language nobody in the group actually speaks. Some people need six weeks to switch off. Others manage it in a single long weekend.
A good book drops you into a life that isn’t yours. A city you’ve never walked through. A choice you’d never have made. A pair of eyes that sees the world nothing like your own. Sometimes it’s the opposite, words for something you’d already noticed but never quite pinned down. Sometimes it’s just a very good story, and that’s enough.
Here’s what we’ve read, the ones that stuck with us enough to pass on.
The Secret of Secrets
Dan Brown
Robert Langdon returns, this time chasing a discovery that could permanently change how we understand human consciousness. The story opens in Prague, a city Brown uses the way he always does, as a puzzle box of history, symbolism, and things hidden in plain sight. Katherine Solomon’s research on consciousness sits at the center of it, and the chase that follows moves through London and New York before it’s done. It’s long, and it knows it’s long, but the pace picks up exactly when it needs to.
A History of France in 21 Women
Katherine Pangonis
From Eleanor of Aquitaine to Coco Chanel: twenty-one women who shaped French history but rarely got the chapter they deserved. Pangonis moves from the fifth century to the present day, and the range is part of the point, a medieval queen, an Impressionist painter fighting her way into an all-male circle, a writer who took on Paris’s literary establishment a century before anyone was ready for her. It reads less like a history book and more like twenty-one short, sharp stories that happen to add up to one.
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A love story, but also a sharp look at identity, migration, and what it means to be seen as “other.”
The novel follows Ifemelu from Nigeria to the United States and back, and Adichie doesn’t soften the parts that are uncomfortable to read about race, about belonging, about the small daily negotiations of being somewhere you don’t quite fit. It’s also, underneath all of that, wry.
Tout le bleu du ciel
Mélissa da Costa
It’s about a young man with early-onset Alzheimer’s who sets off on one last journey to the mountains with a stranger.
A moving story that lets you experience the beauty of life. About unconditional connection and learning to enjoy the present, when the future is uncertain and your past is slipping away, step by step.
Synchronicity
Joseph Jaworski
This book brings a touch of magic into your life. Joseph Jaworski takes you through his personal story and teaches you to see the world differently by looking at it differently. In doing so, he taps into a well of wisdom and inner knowing.
What stays with you isn’t a framework or a model; it’s the way he describes moments of alignment that can’t quite be planned for, only recognized when they happen.
The Tao of Coaching
Max Landsberg
No frameworks, no five-step models: just one manager, Alex, and the situations that force him to stop giving answers and start drawing out what his people already know. Short chapters, no jargon, and a way of thinking about leadership that’s easy to carry with you, even somewhere far from the office.
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy dissects love, social pressure, and personal freedom with a sharpness that makes you forget the book is over a century and a half old. Anna’s story runs alongside Levin’s; a landowner working out what a good life actually looks like, largely removed from the drama consuming her and it’s that second, quieter storyline that tends to stay with readers longest.
It asks for your time, and it’s worth spending.
