Staff Summer Reading Lists 2022

Find your next summer read with suggestions from library staff! Every summer, we make a list of the best books we’ve read this year, along with a few all-time favorites.

Favorite genres: Fantasy and Sci-Fi

Ready player one / Ernest Cline
If we were villains / M. L. Rio
Calder brand / Janet Dailey
Pachinko / Min Jin Lee
The mysterious affair at Styles / Agatha Christie
The art of memoir / Mary Karr
Troubled blood / Robert Galbraith
Ariadne / Jennifer Saint
Thérèse Raquin / Émile Zola [The library doesn’t have this book, but you can request the movie]
Conversations with friends : a novel / Sally Rooney

Reads across genres

The lazy genius way / Kendra Adachi
The Lazy Genius kitchen / Kendra Adachi
The ruthless elimination of hurry / John Mark Comer
Year of yes / Shonda Rhimes
Shaq’s family style : championship recipes for feeding family and friends / Shaquille O’Neal
Where the crawdads sing / Delia Owens
The wish / Nicholas Sparks
Two can keep a secret / Karen M. McManus
You’ll be the death of me / Karen M. McManus
One of us is lying / Karen M. McManus

  Likes any kind of romance, as well as mysteries & crime stories especially if there is some romance.

Game on : tempting twenty-eight / Janet Evanovich
The maid : a novel / Nita Prose
People we meet on vacation / Emily Henry
The holiday swap / Maggie Knox
Sisters in arms : a novel of the daring Black women who served during World War II / Kaia Alderson
Not a happy family / Shari Lapena
Cat in a Sapphire Slipper / Carole Nelson Douglas
Tell me everything : the story of a private investigation / Erika Krouse
The family / Naomi Krupitsky
Everything we didn’t say / Nicole Baart

Reads mostly Science Fiction, Magical Realism & YA Fantasy

Bacchanal / Veronica G. Henry
Circe / Madeline Miller
Cloud cuckoo land / Anthony Doerr
Klara and the sun / Kazuo Ishiguro
Piranesi / Susanna Clarke
Neverwhere / Neil Gaiman
The witch’s heart / Genevieve Gornichec
The Apocalypse Seven / Gene Doucette
The gilded ones / Namina Forna
The house in the cerulean sea / TJ Klune
A master of djinn / P. Djèlí Clark

Favorite Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Non-fiction

The handmaid’s tale / Margaret Atwood [also a TV series]
The Gulag Archipelago / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Lost and found in Paris / Lian Dolan
Blackfish City / Sam J. Miller
Leviathan wakes / James S.A. Corey [also a TV series: The Expanse]
The underground railroad / Colson Whitehead
How to : absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems / Randall Munroe
The drawing of the three / Stephen King
It can’t happen here / Sinclair Lewis
Watership Down / Richard Adams

Favorite genre: magical realism

Klara and the sun / Kazuo Ishiguro
The house of the spirits / Isabel Allende
One hundred years of solitude / Gabriel García Márquez
A prayer for Owen Meany / John Irving
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell / Susanna Clarke
Me talk pretty one day / David Sedaris
Geek love / by Katherine Dunn
Winter’s tale / Mark Helprin
To kill a mockingbird / Harper Lee
1Q84 / Haruki Murakami

Genres: satire, dark humor, coming-of-age, dystopian societies, sci-fi, YA
Cat’s cradle / Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-five : or, The children’s crusade : a duty-dance with death / Kurt Vonnegut
Contact / Carl Sagan
Astrophysics for people in a hurry / Neil deGrasse Tyson
The love hypothesis / Ali Hazelwood
The hot zone / Richard Preston
The giver / Lois Lowry
A brief history of time / Stephen W. Hawking [Or try A Briefer History of Time]
Fahrenheit 451 / Ray Bradbury
Cloud atlas / David Mitchell

Favorite Genres: Horror, YA, Fantasy

Tender is the flesh / Agustina Bazterrica
The pale lady / Alexandre Dumas
A darker shade of magic / V. E. Schwab
The Witch King / H.E. Edgmon
One of us is lying / Karen M. McManus
Sorcery of thorns / Margaret Rogerson
The chosen and the beautiful / Nghi Vo
The cruel prince / Holly Black
The invisible life of Addie LaRue / V.E. Schwab
Trixie and Katya’s Guide to Modern Womanhood / Trixie Mattel & Katya Zamolodchikova