Boston.com readers share the best books they read during summer 2020
We asked for your favorite books of the summer. You answered.
The long days of summer are perfect for escaping into a book — and Boston.com readers have been doing just that.
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We asked the readers to share the titles that captured their attention and kept them engrossed during the summer months of the coronavirus pandemic. Readers wrote in with more than 150 recommendations — from celebrated classics and award-winning novels to volumes that have spent weeks atop bestseller lists.
In some cases, readers didn’t pick a specific title, opting instead to recommend anything, or “everything,” — by their favorite authors, including Louise Penny, Tana French, James McBride, Helen Hoang, Evelyn Waugh, and Emma Straub.
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While more readers suggested works of fiction for passing the remaining summer days, dozens recommended works of nonfiction, from political reads to memoirs to volumes focused on science and nature. One reader praised “Spillover” by David Quammen, published in 2012, which explains and examines how new diseases originating in animals — hello, COVID-19 — get passed to humans.
“Totally on point during a pandemic,” wrote one Boston.com reader who recommended the title. “Educational and informative, yet easy to understand even for the reader without a science background. Well-done.”
More than a few books received multiple resounding endorsements from readers.
With ten readers recommending it, the novel “American Dirt” by Jeanine Cummins, which faced criticism and debate when it was published in January and sparked conversations about the lack of diversity in publishing, was the most-picked title. A handful of readers also had high praise for the recently-released debut novels “Before You Go” by Tommy Butler and “The Vanishing Half” by Brit Bennett.
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Below, explore the books your fellow Boston.com readers recommend you pick up before summer’s end.
Fiction
- “28 Summers” by Elin Hilderbrand (2020)
- “1984” by George Orwell (1949)
- “2666” by Roberto Bolaño (2004)
- “The Accidental Tourist” by Anne Tyler (1985)
- “The Alice Network” by Kate Quinn (2017) *Picked by two readers
- “All American Boys” by Jason Reynolds & Brendan Kiely (2015)
- “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr (2014)
- “American Dirt” by Jeanine Cummins (2020) *Picked by 10 readers
- “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown (2000)
- “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand (1957)
- “The Authenticity Project” by Clare Pooley (2020)
- “Before You Go” by Tommy Butler (2020) *Picked by four readers
- “The Book of Longings” by Sue Monk Kidd (2020)
- “Bonfire” by Krysten Ritter (2017)
- “Broken Irish” by Edward Delaney (2011)
- “Cape Cod” by William Martin (1991)
- “Cat’s Eye” by Margaret Atwood (1988)
- “The Chronicles of Saint Mary’s” by Jodi Taylor
- “Circe” by Madeline Miller (2018) *Picked by three readers
- “City of Girls” by Elizabeth Gilbert (2019) *Picked by two readers
- “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell (2004)
- “Conjure Women” by Afia Atakora (2020)
- “The Crow Girl” by Erik Axl Sund (2016)
- “A Discovery of Witches” by Deborah Harkness (2011)
- “Dune” by Frank Herbert (1965) *Picked by 2 readers
- “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand (1943)
- “The Giver of Stars” by Jojo Moyes (2019) *Picked by two readers
- “The Glass Hotel” by Emily St. John Mandel (2020)
- “The Great Believers” by Rebecca Makkai (2018)
- “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
- “The Guest List” by Lucy Foley (2020) *Picked by two readers
- “Harry Potter” by J.K. Rowling *Picked by three readers
- “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas (2017) *Picked by two readers
- “Hippie” by Paulo Coelho (2018)
- “Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi (2016)
- “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins (2008) *Picked by two readers
- “Jaws” by Peter Benchley (1974)
- “Kindred” by Octavia E. Butler (1979)
- “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (1862)
- “Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng (2017) *Picked by two readers
- “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott (1868) *Picked by two readers
- “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann (1924)
- “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2020)
- “Midnight Sun” by Stephanie Meyer (2020)
- “Mr. Loverman” by Bernardine Evaristo (2013)
- “Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville (1851)
- “Next Year in Havana” by Chanel Cleeton (2018)
- “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead (2019)
- “The Night Circus” by Erin Morgenstern (2011)
- “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah (2015) *Picked by four readers
- “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong (2019)
- “Ordinary Grace” by William Kent Krueger (2013)
- “The Overstory” by Richard Powers (2018)
- “Paradise” by Toni Morrison (1997)
- “The Paris Wife” by Paula McLain (2011)
- “Peace Talks” by Jim Butcher (2020)
- “The Plague” by Albert Camus (1947)
- “The President is Missing” by James Patterson and Bill Clinton (2018)
- “Rodham” by Curtis Sittenfeld (2020) *Picked by two readers
- “The Saxon Stories” by Bernard Cornwell
- “Sea Wife” by Amity Gaige (2020)
- “Sensation Machines” by Adam Wilson (2020)
- “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes (2011)
- “The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2001) *Picked by two readers
- “The Silent Patient” by Alex Michaelides (2019) *Picked by three readers
- “The Silmarillion” by J.R.R. Tolkien (1977)
- “The Starless Sea” by Erin Morgenstern (2019)
- “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)
- “The Stranger” by Harlan Coben (2015)
- “Such a Fun Age” by Kiley Reid (2019) *Picked by two readers
- “Summer of ‘69” by Elin Hilderbrand (2019)
- “Telephone” by Percival Everett (2020)
- “This Is How It Always Is” by Laurie Frankel (2017) *Picked by two readers
- “The Time of the Hero” by Mario Vargas Llosa (1963)
- “The Vanishing Half” by Brit Bennett (2020) *Picked by four readers
- “We Were the Lucky Ones” by Georgia Hunter (2017)
- “We Were Witches” by Ariel Gore (2017)
- “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens (2018) *Picked by three readers
- “A Woman is No Man” by Etaf Rum (2019)
- “The Woman in the Window” by A.J. Finn (2018)
Nonfiction
- “Action Park” by Andy Mulvihill and Jake Rossen (2020)
- “Becoming” by Michelle Obama (2018)
- “Being Mortal” by Atul Gawande (2014)
- “Beyond Words” by Carl Safina (2015)
- “Born to Run” by Christopher McDougall (2009)
- “Breathe: A Letter to My Sons” by Imani Perry (2019)
- “Bringing Nature Home” by Douglas W. Tallamy (2009)
- “Bunker Hill” by Nathaniel Philbrick (2013)
- “The Butchering Art” by Lindsey Fitzharris (2017)
- “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson (2020)
- “A Chance in the World” by Steve Pemberton (2012)
- “Common Ground” by J. Anthony Lucas (1985)
- “Dear America” by Jose Antonio Vargas (2018)
- “The Detective in the Dooryard” by Timothy Cotton (2020) *Picked by two readers
- “Dove” by Robin L. Graham (1972)
- “Dreyer’s English” by Benjamin Dreyer (2019)
- “Educated” by Tara Westover (2018)
- “The Elephant and the Flea” by Charles Handy (2001)
- “An Elephant in My Kitchen” by Françoise Malby-Anthony (2018)
- “Eleven Seconds” by Travis Roy (1998)
- “Evicted” by Matthew Desmond (2016)
- “Fantasyland” by Kurt Andersen (2017)
- “Fiber Fueled” by Will Bulsiewicz (2020)
- “Filthy Beasts” by Kirkland Hamill (2020)
- “Flash Boys” by Michael Lewis (2014)
- “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too” by Christopher Emdin (2016)
- “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls (2005)
- “Hidden Valley Road” by Robert Kolker (2020)
- “Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance (2016)
- “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi (2019)
- “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie (1936)
- “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” by Michelle McNamara (2018) *Picked by two readers
- “Infinite Powers” by Steven Strogatz (2019)
- “The Inner Tradition of Yoga” by Michael Stone (2008)
- “It’s So Easy: And Other Lies” by Duff McKagan (2011)
- “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson (2014)
- “Just Wiggle Your Toes” by Kevin Brooks (2020)
- “Let Your Mind Run” by Deena Kastor and Michelle Hamilton (2018)
- “Me” by Elton John (2019)
- “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius
- “A Most Beautiful Thing” by Arshay Cooper (2020)
- “Notes on a Silencing” by Lacy Crawford (2020)
- “One by One by One” by Aaron Berkowitz (2020)
- “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn (1980)
- “The Radium Girls” by Kate Moore (2017)
- “Range” by David Epstein (2019)
- “Running with Sherman” by Christopher McDougall (2019)
- “A Sand County Almanac” by Aldo Leopold (1949)
- “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (2011) *Picked by two readers
- “Say Nothing” by Patrick Radden Keefe (2019)
- “Self-Portrait in Black and White” by Thomas Chatterton Williams (2019)
- “Shoe Dog” by Phil Knight (2016)
- “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson (2003)
- “The Soul of an Octopus” by Sy Montgomery (2015)
- “Spillover” by David Quammen (2012)
- “The Splendid and the Vile” by Erik Larson (2020) *Picked by three readers
- “Stranger in the Forest” by Eric Hansen (1988)
- “This Life” by Martin Hägglund (2020)
- “Too Much and Never Enough” by Mary L. Trump (2020) *Picked by three readers
- “Triggered” by Donald Trump Jr. (2019)
- “Twilight of Democracy” by Anne Applebaum (2020)
- “Untamed” by Glennon Doyle (2020) *Picked by two readers
- “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield (2002)
- “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson (2010)
- “The World” by Richard Haas (2020)
- “You Are a Badass” by Jen Sincero (2013)
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