Today, Explained - The summer I turned into a bookworm

Episode Date: July 20, 2025

Summer. Time for pools, BBQs, and the beach read. But why do we read "summer books"? This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Matthew Billy, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images.  Further Reading: Bad Witches by H.B. Akumiah and Constance Grady's newsletter from Vox. Further listening:  ⁠Limousine⁠ podcast. If you have a question, give us a call on 1-800-618-8545 or send us a note here. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I've recently gotten super into reading this summer. To me, summer reads are meant to be fun and fast. I'm pretty big into sci-fi and general mysteries like that. I'm Jonklyn Hill. This is Explained It To Me, and I think one of the best parts of summer is Love Island. I love to call myself a sensitive gangster, so here I am crying again. But that's over now. So it's time for the second best part. Grabbing a book and sitting outside by someone's pool.

Usually I go for the It book of the summer. Think you're Britt Bennett or Emma Klein. Or a medium to spicy romance novel. Something along the lines of Jasmine Guillory or Talia Hibbert. It's fun. It's an escape from the doom scroll and it just feels right. But how did summer reading become such a thing? Before we dive into that, we wanted to hear from some readers about why and what they read in the summer. So we sent our producer, Avashai Artsy on a quest to find readers. Okay, Avashai, set the

scene for us. What did you find? Hey, JQ. Yeah, so I went to a meeting of a group called the Silver Lake Reading Club. Welcome, everyone. This is our 85th reading club. It's not in the scene. 85.

So this group meets every Tuesday evening at a cafe or restaurant here in Los Angeles and they read together. So like silently but next to each other, they're just they're reading together? Right. Yeah. Yeah, there's some breaks for socializing, but otherwise they read for two 45 minute stretches and then at the end they might have an author come and do a reading and sign books.

But yeah, you could just imagine like a couple dozen people sitting at tables or in armchairs, sometimes in a group or just by themselves. And they're just engrossed in their books. They're soft music playing. It's very serene, very calm. And the reading club was founded by Helen Bowie. And she says she's really blown away by how successful it's been. In total, we've had 2000 people000 people come to Reading Club since we started,

and they've read a total of 5,000 books at our evenings together, which is pretty amazing if you think people in LA don't read. The events sell out every week, and now Helen is forming a nonprofit and is going to even start a kids' reading club as well. All of this sounds really awesome, but why go to a silent book club instead of, you know, just taking your book and reading it on your own? Yeah, I wonder that too, especially because it does cost $20 to attend, and that money does go towards the space.

They usually rent out the cafe or the restaurant just for these events, but still that's, you know, real money to show up somewhere and just read your book. So I asked some of the attendees, why do you come here? And we stepped outside of the reading club, so you'll hear traffic noise just because I didn't want to disrupt people while they were reading quietly. That's very polite of you. I grew up loving reading as an avid reader and fell out of the habit. And so just having a dedicated time to read and focus on just that has been really nice.

I would just self-describe myself as an introverted person. And so for me, I love this socialization. This sounds so crazy, but sometimes I almost feel like I'm doing myself a disservice by reading. Like I should be like out doing something else with other people or being more social or whatever. And this bridges that gap and that ridiculous anxiety in a nice way.

You know, I really love this idea of reading as a social activity. You know, we're both in book clubs and I really just love reading a book and being able to dissect it afterwards with my friends. What did these readers have to say about what makes for a good summer read? Yeah, I asked them about that. And I should note that I'm in Los Angeles, which doesn't have as defined seasons as other parts of the United States, but we do still have summer and we do like to read in the summer. So some of the attendees shared their thoughts about what they look for in a good summer book. I approach summer reading like Love Island.

I need to read the hottest books of the summer. I just finished Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and it was so incredible and amazing binge read. In the fall, I gravitate toward things like fantasy and mystery and that cozy stuff. Whereas in the summer, I would say I'm a mix of a literary fiction reader and some romance thrown in there. I definitely think about maybe like locational reading,

like beach reading or vacation reading, which then I'll go for something easier or funny or like rom-com-y as opposed to like something a little bit more intense. And I guess that's the summer vibe is like easy, breezy, lesbian vampires, that's the vibe. Ooh, breezy lesbian vampires. That's amazing.

And as to why we might like to read in the summer, here's what folks had to say. I think because it's ingrained in our childhood, we always had summer reading lists, whether you were in sixth grade or a freshman in college And I think it's always that time Where you feel like you can kind of arrest a little bit more if you're lucky and just pick up a few more books So I think it's just something that's been ingrained in us since since we were kids very much like a summer vacation

You see what happening with Love Island where everybody's watching it every night I feel like that's the same bond you get with reading, especially if you're reading off the summer lists. You have other people that you know that you can talk to immediately about something crazy that happened in the book. I feel like reading more in the summer. I think my body's a little more conditioned to it, and I'm more prone to stay out later in the daylight with a book. And I think the last piece of summer reading is I think people are finding time to escape

and literature is that outlet. And I think if you combine that actually right now with what's going on in just our atmosphere, then you'll find that people are looking to escape even more. And literature has always been there for us. And it is more important than ever now. Okay, Avashai, thank you so much for taking us to the Silver Lake Reading Club.

I loved hearing their theories on why we do summer reading. There is a little more to it though and we've talked to the woman who wrote the book on how summer reading became a thing. That's after the break. This is a true story. It happened right here in my town. One night, 17 kids woke up, got out of bed, walked into the dark, and they never came back. I'm the director of Barbarian. A lot of people died in a lot of weird ways. You're not gonna find it in the news because the police covered everything all up. On August 8th...

This is where the story really starts. Weapons. Hey, this is Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, a show about media and tech and what happens when they collide. And this may be hard to remember, but not very long ago, magazines were a really big deal. And the most important magazines were owned by Conde Nast, the glitzy publishing empire that's the focus of a new book by New York Times reporter Michael Grinbaum. The way Conde Nast elevated its editors,

the way they paid for their mortgages so they could live in beautiful homes, there was a logic to it, which was that Conde Nast itself became seen as this kind of enchanted land. You can hear the rest of our chat on channels, wherever you listen to your favorite media podcast. We're talking summer reads, so it's only right to talk to the woman who wrote the book

about them. I'm Donna Harrington-Luker, and I'm the author of a book on summer reading called Books for Idol Hours. How did this idea of summer reading even start? Were we always like, oh my gosh, it's hot out. Guess I got to like grab a book. No, not really. My research focused on the 19th century. And I started kind of way back

looking at newspaper articles, advertisements from book publishers and the like. And I kind of divided into two periods before the Civil War and after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, it's definitely constructed as a masculine practice. The idea was that men would get away from the heat and the pressures of their lives, and they should read something cool. So the essays of Charles Lamb, of all things, for summer reading. Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M was obliging enough to read and explain to me for the first 70,000 ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal,

just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. From Charles Lamb's A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig. Poetry was mentioned often as well. It all changes after the Civil War. After the Civil War, there's an increase in travel and tourism. The performance of summer leisure becomes an aspiration for a growing middle class.

So you have many, many more people engaging in this tradition or in this practice. And you have an increase in railroads as well, and hotels begin to spring up. And as a result of that, publishers start really promoting summer reading. And it takes a very, very specific form, and increasingly, it becomes something that women do. It becomes a rather gendered space. So it kind of has its beginnings in the 19th century and in a middle-class desire for learning

how to perform summer leisure the way an elite class, a moneyed class, already did. Yeah. Can you talk about that performance a little bit? I think that's really interesting. Yeah. Publishers would advertise a variety of things as summer reading. But one of the kind of central things was what I was calling the summer novel. It would be a novel that would be set in Saratoga Springs or Newport or Cape May. It would be set at a summer resort. Regardless of how wealthy or not people were, they always seemed to stay there for an entire

summer as opposed to a week or a weekend. And it would involve kind of a courtship novel. And over the course of the novel, over the narrative arc, two young people would meet, they would resolve their differences, they would visit various places and at the end they would be married. I think one of the most popular novels of the period definitely kind of showcased this. It was called One Summer by an author by the name of Blanche Willis Howard, who was very prominent in the day in the 19th century. And it involves at the very, very start the young woman, the heroine of this novel.

She doesn't have a summer novel to read, and so she goes out on a rainy night. She goes to the drug store to buy a novel for entertainment. She accidentally bumps into a young man and nearly blinds him with her umbrella. She moved towards him with an expression of sincerest regret upon her lips. Her remark was however unspoken for the stranger at the same moment advanced

and in a gentlemanly voice said, my good woman. Good woman indeed, she thought indignantly and with a sudden revulsion of feeling, her sympathies giving way to wounded pride of station. Does he take me for a bookmate?" And so from that start, needless to say, they have to get over a certain animosity. It's kind of Beatrice and Benedict from Shakespeare time. He is trying to woo her, she is resisting.

And over the course of the novel, they finally indeed do admit their love for each other. The other part of the arc was that it took you through the various things you could do at the different resorts. There'd be a plot development at the Toboggan ride at Saratoga, or there would be the ending when the couple comes together would be celebrated by fireworks set off at Bar

Harbor, Maine. So by reading these, you'd get an idea of what these resorts were about, and you'd get an idea of how you performed leisure. There's also a good bit of fashion for the young woman. You'd get an idea of how you're supposed to dress. So they're really serving two functions here. That's so interesting. So it sounds like it's serving the purpose kind of a mixture of like Hallmark movie with your romance, but like the drama and intrigue of like white lotus. That's what it seems like. Definitely the Hallmark characteristic of it. Absolutely, definitely on that.

I think over the course of the reading, I only uncovered two novels, summer novels, that were kind of aimed at men and they moved very, very differently than for the young women. And one of them takes place in California at a resort there in kind of the winter time rather than the summertime. And every chapter is based on a different animal or bird that needs to be shot at and eaten. So very, very different perspective and different gendered perspective here. Very. Were these books purely escapists or did they get at larger themes too. Yes, they are escapists in the sense of allowing you to experience another lifestyle.

But they were very, very much kind of a liminal space, a space of betwixt and between. And for young women especially, it's doing the cultural work of what does it look like to have more freedoms as a young woman? Because there was markedly more freedom, or at least as these books constructed it, during the summer and at summer resorts, so that you have women hiking and women going out on boats on their own and being unchaperoned.

And so opening up vistas of freedom. Now admittedly, at the end of all these, order is reasserted. People go back to their normal lives. Marriage as the ultimate institution of tradition gets reasserted. But for the space of the novel, there are more freedoms. And the novels weren't spaces that were necessarily completely out of touch. There's questions about American imperialism. There's questions about American imperialism. There's questions

about treatment of Native Americans. And so when you take the book as a whole, it's nation-building in a way as well. What was the reaction to the rise of summer reading at the time? The publishing industry had a very serious marketing challenge on its hands. Early, say post-Civil War especially, you have rising literacy rates, especially among young women, but you have a very solid and profound discourse that says novel reading is evil, that it is dangerous, especially for young women. The fear was that it would be sexually arousing, that the morals would be questionable.

One of the people that I talk about is the Reverend T. DeWitt Talmage. He was a major voice against summer reading, basically saying that summer reading is literary poison in August. Would it not be an awful thing for you to be struck with lightning someday when you had in your hand one of these paper-covered romances, the hero, a Parisian rouet, the heroine, an unprincipled flirt, chapters in the book that you would not read to your children

at the rate of $100 a line. I really believe there is more pastiferous trash read amongst the intelligent classes in July and August than in all the other ten months of the year. So that kind of clerical concern about what novel reading does to young women, that had to be overcome. And so they've got to kind of shift the focus that it has to become a light reading has to become a pleasure reading. It has to become an escape from the dangers of or the pressures of modern life, and even for young women, and they're very successful. Do we still have a lot of these summer reading conventions in book publishing now?

I mean the idea of summer reading as marketing, it's still with us today. It may have lost its idea of schooling a middle class in the performance of summer leisure, but as a marketing strategy, it is still here today. This week each host is giving her a summer reading lists in a series we like to call Ladies Get Lit. Are you on the hunt for a good summer read? Well, look no further. Summer reading season is almost upon us, which means it's time for a visit.

Book talk is going to be an important influence here as well. So it persists as a marketing effort, absolutely. The lists that I've seen all kind of include novels, but then also important fiction. We're living in difficult times, and I think that the recommendations for nonfiction, the ones that I've seen have been fairly substantial, and I think they kind of reflect that. It's just a different marketing world now. And in the 19th century, you had probably four or five taste making publications, and they were the places that you went to get your recommendations for what to read next, and to get your judgments. And that kind of centralization doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

All right. Thanks so much for explaining this to us. Okay, thank Thanks so much for explaining this to us. Okay. Thank you so much. That's Donna Harrington-Luker. She's the author of Books for Idol Hours, 19th century publishing, and The Rise of Summer Reading. Coming up, the case for getting serious about summer reading. ["Summer Reading"] Every so often you say a combination of words you never expected to say,

such as, Tesla opened a diner in Los Angeles. This week on the Vergecast, we talked to a writer who went there, ate the food, and saw a lot of Cybertrucks. Also, Apple is making a big design change to its operating systems. It's called Liquid Glass, and the public can finally try it. Our reviewers have been testing it for weeks, and they have some strong opinions about how it looks.

Finally, it's summer blockbuster season. We talk about the new media circuit that movie stars have to endure to promote their projects. A lot of it involves being chicken. That's this week on Vergecast. We're back with Explain It To Me. And when you hear summer book, you might be thinking of something light. And I guess that's the summer vibe is like easy breezy lesbian vampires that's the vibe. But what about a big old classic? That's what one listener who called in is doing. My name is Heather I'm a writer living in New

York and I host the live reading series and podcast, both of which are called Limousine, with my friend and co-host and fellow writer, whose name is Leah. And for our podcast, we usually interview writers about their career and stuff like that. But this summer, we actually decided to do an Anna Karenina book club. I called them up to hear why. I think it weirdly does suit itself to the summer because the summer feels like a time Where things are a little bit slower and we have more free time Even if we don't actually have more free time

there's like often like the illusion of free time because You'll go on vacation like a vacation that you've been planning all year So you have time off work or like the days are longer or like maybe you actually do do the kind of work that like slows down over the summer, stuff like that. And ironically, it feels like spending time with like a massive classic that takes all of your attention is almost more indulgent than, you know, reading something that's short and frothy and quick that you actually probably could read when you're busier. It feels almost like more leisurely and more indulgent to take time on this really huge impractical thing to be reading. Yeah.

Okay. With that in mind, you told us in your voicemail that you decided to do something different with your podcast this summer. What are y'all doing this summer? This summer, we're basically breaking down Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and we're doing, every two weeks, we're reading a different part. So if you're familiar, it's a massive book. It's an eight-part book.

And yeah, just every other week, we're dissecting a part. We're talking about it with everybody in our Discord. We're posting memes about all of the sections. And yeah, just like building a little community around reading Anna Karenina. What made you all pick Anna Karenina? I think we both had this feeling that one, I mean, it's one of those books that like,

you have to read before you die. Like we both had felt like, oh, we want to read this. And it might be fun to do like a book club version since it's a doorstop. It's quite literally massive. And it's easier if you break it down and have some like friends and accountability. And then as soon as we said it, we just started noticing people in the wild were reading it. And I do think like, that's not, you know, necessarily a coincidence. Like people are looking for something longer,

something classic right now to challenge themselves to spend time away from their phones. And it also is just such a fabulous, like juicy book. It's the perfect read. So there was something in the culture outside of us and we just wanted to be in conversation with it. Yeah, how's the response been to Big Book Summer from y'all's community of listeners?

It's been amazing. It's been so much fun. Like, when you read something like Anna Karenina, you realize this was incredibly popular for a reason. Like, this was, it's just a fun, juicy, it's a romance. And I think having other people go on that journey with you, having other people read it alongside you really helps you enjoy it a lot more. Someone in our Discord took a picture of a line that's like, Levin put on his big boots and put that in the Discord and they're like, slay boots.

And so I think like having a group of people to like, exactly like. I was about to say, slay the boots house down. Oh my God. Yes. Boots the house down, slay the Boots House down. Oh my God. Yes. Boots the house down, Tolstoy. Slay mama. To have people who are kind of engaging with it on every level, not only does it make it more accessible,

but I think it just genuinely enriches the conversation of the book. It allows you to bring Love Island into the picture. Oh, so you're women of culture is what you're telling me. Exactly. Oh, well, yes. We're high low and we can talk. You know, when I think of these big books, these classic books, I also think of required summer reading from high school or from college.

And it's very easy for that to not scream summer fun. I find reading to be such a joy and returning to it has just been absolutely amazing. But also on the flip side, I recognize there are times where it can be so much work. How do you get over the feeling that reading classic literature feels like homework? I think for sure, speaking about it with other people and making connections with contemporary life, I think that's really helped to make it a lot more fun. But I also think just because something is a little bit difficult doesn't mean

that it's not enjoyable. You know, like that kind of friction can also be enjoyable and really, really rewarding. But yeah, I truly, open Anna Karenina, doesn't feel like homework. It feels like, I don't know, it feels like watching like Desperate Housewives or something. It's like very- It's a soap opera.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. And yeah, I do think what Heather said is so true, like there's something satisfying or like rewarding about a task, like completing something that's like that momentous and that long. And I also think like they did summer reading pizza parties for a reason. Like it worked on me at least. Oh my gosh, like so many personal pan pizzas. Yeah. Oh, personal pan pizzas I was throwing back. Exactly. Like it worked on me and I think it worked on a lot of people. And so

even if it does feel like homework, it was the type of homework that like, yeah, of course I want to win the contest. Like, of course I want my name on the list of people who finished their summer reading goals. So maybe there's something satisfying in returning to that, too. Yeah, I honestly I was going to say, wait, what's wrong with summer reading? Yeah, I mean, I liked it. That's how I mean, but I was going to say, wait, what's wrong with summer reading? What's wrong with summer reading homework? No, I mean, I liked it. That's how I mean. But I was a very specific

type of child where I was like, you, I mean, you want me to read holes for assignment? Sure. Yeah. I was going to do that. Yeah. No, exactly. Do y'all think reading for pleasure is having a resurgence? Like, are we so back when it comes to reading? We are so back. We are so back. We are so back, yeah. I think so.

1000%. The vibe shifted. Totally. And shout out to the Romanticie Girlies for getting that going. I can't lie. Man! They started that.

Wow. They've done a lot of work. Yeah. Carrying literacy on their backs, really. Carrying Barnes and Noble on their backs, honestly. Oh, holy. Before I let you go, if someone's like, it's summer, I want to get into reading something,

what are some suggestions you have? I just finished reading Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, which is like this book that I'm sure maybe listeners have heard of. But definitely, when I finished Anna Karenina, I was like, how about something short? And it feels summery somehow, I think, in part, because it's like, I don't know, it's about young people who are living abroad.

And it definitely has more serious themes, but I think that's a good one. And that's definitely if you just spent a bunch of time on a classic and you're like, I want to see what it's like to finish a book quickly. You should try. You should read that for sure. Well, my number one book that I would recommend is Bad Witches by H.P. Akumya. I think that should be on everybody's summer reading list. But on top of that, I think if you want more of the classics,

I have never read Mrs. Dalloway. I'll be brave and admit that. And I think that's probably next on my list. It's like, oh, I want to sit down with Mrs. Dalloway and hear what she's up to. Leah, Heather, thank you so much for explaining this to us. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us.

This was so fun. That was Heather Akumia and Leah Abrams. You can find a link to their podcast, Limousine, in our show notes, along with a link to Heather's book, Bad Witches. If you're looking for recommendations, my colleague Constance Grady has a great newsletter full of them. You can find a link to that in show notes too. Before you go, we want your help with next week's show.

Tipped wages are making a lot of noise right now. People who get tips make a different minimum wage from those of us who don't. What are your questions about tipping and the minimum wage? Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545. This episode was produced by Avashai Artsi, who's reading, You Didn't Hear This From Me. Amina Alsati, who just started the Ministry of Time, edited the show. Fact Checking by Melissa Hirsch, who's reading the aptly titled,

Problematic Summer Romance. And Engineering by Matthew Billy, who's reading Two Wheels Good, The History and Mystery of the Bicycle. Special thanks to Alex, Aaron, Allison, Bernie, Helen, and Alexis, and the rest of the Silver Lake Reading Club. I'm your host, Jojonegwyn Hill,

and I just finished The God of the Woods. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Thanks for watching!