Your no-bullshit guide to summer books

Summer is the season of ambitious reading lists and just like our intellectual queen Kris Jenner, we’re obsessed with books right now. Everyone’s publishing their summer reads. So, do they actually read those books, or are they just showing off what they’ve been #gifted? Most of the time, the books just end up gathering dust and drink stains, so we asked around Plaster HQ to find out what everyone’s pretending to read and what they’re actually reading this summer. Sometimes we just want to look hot and mysterious on the tube – no judgement here. These picks are sure to impress someone, even if that someone is just ourselves.

Milo Astaire

Pretending to read:

A selection from Book Soup, Los Angeles

I was recently in Los Angeles and stopped by my favorite bookshop, Book Soup. I walked past this selection of enticing art books only to remember I need to stop wasting money on books I won’t actually read.

Actually reading:

Richard Moore, Slaying the Badger (2011)

I have recently been devouring anything related to cycling, having just purchased a new road bike – lycra and all. Slaying the Badger tells the story of Bernard Hinault and Greg Lemond’s Herculean battle at the Tour de France.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Father Time (2024)

My wife and I are expecting our first child, and with this in mind, my mother-in-law kindly bought me this book about the transformative effects of being a new father.

Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea (2024)

I’m a sucker for anything to do with sea exploration. This is a new book about Captain Cooks’s final voyage. I will probably finish it before even going on holiday.

Roy Adkins, Nelson’s Trafalgar (2004)

It’s official, I’m getting old… I am genuinely excited to learn more about Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar, having recently listened to a three-part podcast on Nelson’s great victory.

Finn Constantine

Pretending to read:

Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo (2023)

Actually reading:

I bought this book because of the cover….always a dangerous game. It’s 600 pages and weighs more than my laptop. No chance I’ll get through it.

Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind (2020)

Piracy and a manhunt… what’s not to love? Also a great cover AND not 600 pages.

David Spence

Pretending to read:

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1967)

I’ve been pretending to read this for years.

Actually reading:

Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (1990)

A friend gave me this before I went to LA, where it’s set. I read 17 pages while there so I have to finish it. It starts with a man on the phone to a news station, asking them to bring their camera crew as he’s scheduling a robbery. Both parties are complicit in a dystopian media landscape. Can’t wait to see where it goes.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

Not sure what I can say about this – apart from that I haven’t read it. The story came to be on a stormy night in Geneva. It started that evening between friends, including Byron. The game was: who could write the best short horror story before dinner.

Harriet Lloyd-Smith

Pretending to read:

Douglas Coupland, Shopping in Jail: Ideas, Essays and Stories for an Increasingly Real Twenty-First Century (2013)

On paper, which it is, I should be all over this book, yet it’s been on my shelf since my boyfriend donated it to me last year. Given Coupland is a cultural prophet, Shopping in Jail can surely package all the horrors of contemporary life. Maybe I’m worried it’s all a bit dated or I won’t get it. In any case, I should start reading instead of telling everyone I am.

Actually reading:

Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica (2022)

Ate this in one heady binge after Philippa Snow cited it in Trophy Lives. An exhausting, disturbing, addictive tale of aesthetic ‘perfection’ through its influencer protagonist as she awaits an experimental procedure to return her hyper-surgeried body to its natural state. Also, cool cover – it’s giving latter-day Cindy Sherman.

Jacob Wilson

Pretending to read:

Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)

A classic of ‘New Journalism’. One of my favourite reads, and one I always find myself turning to. Didion’s sharp, unsparing prose cuts apart the political and cultural myths of 1970s California.

Actually reading:

Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)

I’m sick of the pretence, I’ve never read The White Album. I have read some of the essays individually – ‘Many Mansions’ (1977), ‘Georgia O’Keeffe’ (1976), and ‘In Bogotá’ (1974) – but never the book front to back. This summer, I’m going to pick up a cheap second-hand copy and finally face my white whale.

Izzy Bilkus

Pretending to read:

Rachel Cusk, Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018)

The second and third books from the Outline trilogy – a series of monologues from a Cusk-like narrator as she teaches writing classes, refurbishes her flat and goes on a book tour. I loved Outline (2014) but lost momentum after the first few chapters of Transit. Determined to finish by the end of the summer.

Actually reading:

Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992)

A classic but I’ve never actually read it. I found it recently in a charity shop for £1.50!

Emma Ralph

Pretending to read:

Bescherelle’s Complete Guide To Conjugating 12,000 French Verbs

I’m learning French.

Actually reading:

Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (1961)

I found this play script on the street next to a “PLEASE TAKE” sign. Happy chance! Another heavenly day!

Esther David-Deleplanque

Pretending to read:

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

I have read and re-read the first couple of chapters of this book more times than I care to count, each summer promising myself that this, this is the summer I will make it past the finish line. And yet I cannot for the life of me tell you what this book is about.

Actually reading:

Donna Tart’s The Goldfinch – I just finished The Secret History (Izzy, you’re in for a treat) and am currently on a mega Donna Tartt binge. The mandatory summer romances; If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin and In Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. Your beach read page-turning thriller; The Firm by John Grisham. And the silly-sunny-sunday-sitting-in-the-garden-giggle read; my favourite, dog-eared, Calvin and Hobbes cartoon by Bill Watterson.

Laurie Barron

Pretending to read:

Anything outside the ‘arts’, ‘fashion’, and ‘lifestyle’ sections of my New York Times and FT subscriptions.

Actually reading:

Look Again: Death: Paintings and Portraits by Sean Burns; Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna; Mean Boys by Geoffrey Mak; Do Everything in the Dark by Gary Indiana; and Wives Like Us by Plum Sykes. From ‘our new age of cruelty’, to scandal in the Cotswolds and a book that Eileen Myles described as a “bit like the book version of a Richard Curtis film, but with more grit, more bathroom sex and a literal beached whale,” I can’t wait to get stuck into these recent novellas on the beach x

Billy Parker

Pretending to read:

Carl Jung, The Red Book (2009)

I think it’s time I reconnected to my ‘spirit of the depths’. When reality sucks (and we are without tropical beach access) we must go internal baby. A dark empty room on a rainy July afternoon with a big fat red folio sounds like summer to me.

Actually reading:

Luka Magnotta’s prison psych-evaluation documents

A friend of mine is writing a screenplay about Luka Magnotta (Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, Netflix) and has lent me his ring-bound folder containing extensive research documents (fun!). Can relate to the desperate plea for fame. Cannot relate to the murder of kittens and humans. Maybe I’m just into any form of bound folio.

Actually actually reading:

Gemma Collins, Basically…: My Life as a Real Essex Girl (2013)

Need I say more…

Oscar Found

Pretending to read:

Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking (1985)

My teeth are turning yellow.

Actually reading:

George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

I read Animal Farm and that interested me…

Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck (2016)

Because I give too many.