Goodreads asked Joanne Leedom-Ackerman:

What books are on your summer reading list this year?

Joanne Leedom-Ackerman I am a bit of an eclectic reader and don’t plan out what I will read too far in advance, but I still order books so I will have them when I’m ready. Here are some from my shelf and some ordered in advance of publication, including Orhan Pamuck’s upcoming Nights of Plague and Elliot Ackerman’s upcoming The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan. Waiting on my shelf are Amor Towles’ The Lincoln’s Highway; Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger; Paulette Jiles’ News of the World; Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me; Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lies of Church Ladies (started by not yet finished); Avni Doshi’s burnt sugar; Laura Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept; Richard Yates’ Young Hearts Crying; James Lee Burke’s The New Iberia Blues; Peter Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (read but haven’t finished); Phil Klay’s Missionaries. I recommend Azar Nafisi’s new book Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times.

I doubt I will get all these books read in the summer but perhaps over the year. And to this I add a longer list: Burhan Sonmez’s Istanbul Istanbul; Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were; Homero Aridjis’ Selected Poems: Eyes to See Otherwise; Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage; Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye; Three African-American Classics (Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folks, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, two of which I have read); Peter Stearns’ A Brief History of the World; William Boyd’s Any Human Heart; Assia Djebar’s Children of the New World; Anne Patchett’s The Dutch House. Honor Moore & Alix Kate Shulman’s Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings That Inspired a Revolution and Still Can (an anthology so I read essays in separate takes)

All the books above are contemporary. There are classics which I return to and reread, and I expect I will also discover new classics this year.

I read on all three platforms—I often listen to a book while eating lunch or driving, read digital book, especially when the light is poor, and also read the book itself, often marking where I am on all three platforms. I am usually reading more than one book at a time, though not at the same time though sometimes on the same day.

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