Alternative Summer Reading List 2023

Read these and enrich your life, or at least your mood. Feat. Los Angeles, magic mirrors and perverts.

This summer in the UK is fucking miserable, weather-wise, which is the only relevant metric because it sets the mood for everything that happens here. I went to Greece to escape it and took more books than I thought I could read. Usually this strategy only serves as a stick to beat myself with and I return home one down and all my other books scrappy and smeared with suncream. But this time I read a lot. 

Here’s what I’ve read recently that I would, for some reason or other, recommend. You’ll have to pre-order a couple of them (Melissa Broder and Anna Biller) but if you’re a girl’s girl, those two are worth it.

Penance – Eliza Clark

This novel is The Craft meets every budget British true crime documentary you’ve seen on late night TV. The second comparison is a compliment – in Clark’s novel you have this failing British journalist investigating a murder supposedly committed by a gang of teen girls in a bid to revive his career. You sift through different accounts of what actually happened via this journo, the girls, their parents and family members and podcasters who are also crudely covering the case. I started to forget it isn’t non-fiction and related in varying ways to the different girls, all of whom are grim and ashamed and boastful and isolated in the way teen girls are. If you’re interested, I interviewed her for The Creative Independent recently about her love of unreliable narrators like these.

Death Valley – Melissa Broder (pre-order, sorry) 

This is Melissa Broder’s third novel. I fucking love Melissa Broder. I recently re-read her essay collection So Sad Today, which began as a VICE column when I worked there, and it took me back to a fun, chaotic, conversational time of ~internet writing that I miss. She’s one of the few modern writers I’ve found whose weird brain ticks along in a familiar way and her humour and observations feel like relief. Death Valley is basically about anticipatory grief. As per the synopsis, the protagonist “has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow – for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path, thanks to a receptionist who recommends a nearby hike.”