Friends of GTG: What are you reading this summer? (Vol. 7)

Guest Andy Ward shares his summer reading list.

Andy Ward is, officially, "executive vice president, publisher" at Random House. In that role he has edited writers like George Saunders, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Liana Finck, Paul Kalanithi, Imbolo Mbue, Daniel Mason... and ME! He is the funniest, wisest, most meticulous crafter of words- you should see the post-it of NO words he made for me (it included "therefore" and "akimbo.") He is also a dog dad, dad dad, weekday vegetarian, dumpling fiend and VFH (very fun hang.) Contrary to popular belief, he has never worn a bow-tie.

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt. This book crushed me, in the best way. A mother and daughter story, not a word out of place, not a word I didn’t believe with all my heart. Devastating, beautiful, and full of lines I would have read out loud to my wife, who was sitting right next to me on the couch, if she hadn’t been the one who demanded I read it in the first place. If you love Elizabeth Strout, you will love this. A novel built of the most human interactions.

Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts. This will sound homework-y, but I promise you it is not: this is the story of two men, in the late eighteenth century, in a race to do something truly insane -- to identify and categorize life on earth. All of life on Earth. One we all know today (a driven, pious Swede named Carl Linneaus) and one has been largely lost to history (an aristocratic, polymath named George Louis de Buffon). Linnaeus believed that life – including (ugh) humans -- could be organized into rigid, static boxes (this is the system we all learned in school); de Buffon was more of an artist at heart, and saw life as an endless swirl of complexity – ever-evolving (pre-Darwin, by the way) and maybe, in the end, uncategorizable. History. – brimming with ideas and adventure -- that says so much about who we are, and where we are today.

Universality by Natasha Brown. A short, vicious little parable from a brilliant young British novelist “about” a crime on an estate in the English countryside, which then becomes the subject of a viral magazine story with deeply questionable origins and motivations. But this is actually an exploration of the way words can be wielded to wound, manipulate, and distort. A story for our times, told via dizzying, shifting perspectives, and one that takes on the thorniest questions of identity, class, and race without (sigh of relief) ever announcing that it is doing so.

The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut. I read this book two years ago and still think about it constantly. It’s a novel, but one that blends nonfiction and fiction in a way that is never, for a second, distracting or annoying. (You may have heard of Labatut’s previous book, When We Cease to Understand the World, which deployed the same technique. Also great. Absurdly great. That one was translated from Spanish. The Maniac is the first book he has written in English – his second language, which is even more mind-blowing.) What is it about? It’s sort of about the Hungarian scientist/philosopher John Van Neumann, but it’s really about the terrifying reverberations of his innovations – from nuclear technology to computers to AI. Only when I finished this book did I realize it is a kind of horror story. Exquisitely constructed, and a masterclass in how you build momentum.