{"id":7294,"date":"2025-08-18T14:43:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T14:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/7294\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T14:43:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T14:43:08","slug":"griffin-dunnes-the-friday-afternoon-club-kaveh-akbars-martyr-and-more-summer-book-recommendations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/7294\/","title":{"rendered":"Griffin Dunne\u2019s The Friday Afternoon Club, Kaveh Akbar\u2019s Martyr! and more summer book recommendations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whether you like it or not<\/a>, summer\u2019s not quite over yet. There are still many days of sunshine and miserably hot temps<\/a> ahead. To round out the rest of your summer reading list, our staffers share their favorite books they read this summer, for you to enjoy on a sandy beach, at a neighborhood cafe, or maybe just anywhere with AC<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As an inveterate gossip, I really enjoyed Griffin Dunne\u2019s memoir, <\/a>The Friday Afternoon Club<\/a><\/strong>. Dunne\u2019s dad Dominick is a summer novel staple (maybe you too want to lay on a beach and read about how society ladies were mean to each other), but it turns out his rakish actor son has lived a life of fun fodder. From his childhood attending parties alongside Sean Connery to his best-friendship with Carrie Fisher, the book is full of glamour, family feuds, mistakes, and at least one visit to an orgy.
It also provides a front-row seat to one of the most devastating domestic violence murders in the American public consciousness, as Griffin navigates life after his sister Dominique\u2019s murder. While he leans a little heavily on his father\u2019s past writing for those sections, an anecdote from the set of Johnny Dangerously<\/a> \u2014 the now-mostly forgotten Michael Keaton movie Dunne filmed at night while attending the trial during the day \u2014 brought surprise tears to my eyes.<\/p>\n

\u2014Meredith Haggerty<\/strong>, senior editor, culture<\/p>\n

My great friend Tyler invited me to join his book club. He works at our local high school, which means I now get to be part of literary discussions with the English teacher who I had during my freshman year! I\u2019m excited to learn from everyone in the group, and also from the other teachers I didn\u2019t get the chance to have back then. This past month, we read The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong<\/strong><\/a>. I\u2019ve really enjoyed his poetry collections and other novels, but this has become my favorite book of his by far. It\u2019s about a teen who\u2019s struggling deeply while living in a declining town in Connecticut. He\u2019s literally pulled back from the edge by an elderly widow and he ends up becoming her live-in caretaker. The bond they form is beautiful, and the story also dives into his experiences working at a fast-casual restaurant, which is deeply relatable to anyone who\u2019s worked in a similar environment. His writing is immensely poetic and continues to leave me thinking about dignity, memory, class, and survival.<\/p>\n

\u2014Gabby Fernandez<\/strong>, associate director, audience<\/p>\n

Life and Fate<\/a><\/strong> by Vasily Grossman<\/strong><\/a>, which I recently completed, was one of the best books I\u2019ve ever read, it\u2019s essentially War and Peace for the Eastern Front of World War II. The book follows various Russian characters, including one central family, dealing with the chaos and horrors of the Nazi attacks, while also grappling with the ongoing traumas of Stalin\u2019s purges and continuing repression, and the moral compromises that life under authoritarianism entails. It\u2019s harrowing, moving, and fascinating.<\/p>\n

\u2014Andrew Prokop<\/strong>, senior correspondent<\/p>\n

The Upcycled Self<\/a><\/strong> by Tariq Trotter, better known as <\/strong><\/a>Black Thought<\/a><\/strong>, for layered storytelling that reads like a song, is quintessentially Philly, and pairs well with a warm summer evening on the porch.<\/p>\n

\u2014Devi Lockwood<\/strong>, editor, policy, politics, and ideas<\/p>\n

The River Has Roots<\/a><\/strong> by Amal El-Mohtar<\/strong><\/a>! It\u2019s an enchanting little fable about language and song and sisters, and every sentence was made to be read aloud \u2014 I really recommend doing so.<\/p>\n

\u2014Kim Slotterback<\/strong>, copy editor<\/p>\n

I just finished the new novel from writer Gary Shteyngart, whose last name I definitely spelled right on the first attempt. Called Vera, or Faith<\/a><\/strong>, it\u2019s another Shteyngart near-future semi-dystopia comic tour de force, a genre for which I believe he is the one and only writer. Set far enough in the future that there are self-driving cars with grouchy personalities and chess-playing AIs capable of emotional conversations, but close enough to now that upper-middle-class Manhattan parents are still obsessed with getting their kids into the right colleges, Vera tracks a kind of familial awakening for a 9-year-old girl named Vera grappling with a family that\u2019s falling apart and a country that\u2019s outright collapsing over Trumpian nativism gone wild. It\u2019s Shteyngart, so of course it\u2019s funny \u2014 he may be the one novelist who is actually amusing on X \u2014 but what makes it break through is Vera, who will take her place among the great precocious protagonists of literature. Move over, Holden Caulfield.<\/p>\n

\u2014Bryan Walsh<\/strong>, senior editorial director, Future Perfect<\/p>\n

Kaveh Akbar\u2019s <\/a><\/strong>Martyr!<\/strong><\/a> was the kind of read that left me altered. The ending hit with such force that I immediately flipped back and read it again. And again. Wait \u2014 did that just happen?? It\u2019s a novel filled with ghosts, grief, conversations between Cyrus, the novel\u2019s narrator, and imagined versions of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Beethoven Shams (a brother who doesn\u2019t even exist) and a fateful plane crash that killed his mother. Akbar\u2019s poetic voice handles sticky subjects like American and Arab politics and Muslim religion with both empathy and force. This book is beautiful. I\u2019m still thinking about it. I might always be.<\/p>\n

\u2014Paige Vega<\/strong>, climate editor<\/p>\n

After seeing it rec\u2019d repeatedly, I recently picked up Elizabeth Moon\u2019s <\/a>Remnant Population<\/a><\/strong>, a sweetly feminist sci-fi novel originally published in 1996. It follows an elderly but still spry woman, Ofelia, who\u2019s spent decades living with her family and others in a small, experimental human colony on a faraway planet. When the project gets axed and all of the colonists are ordered to return home, Ofelia decides to stay behind, so that she can finally be alone, for once. Solitude all too often gets framed as an awful thing, but here it\u2019s full of joy and replenishment. Ofelia comes into her own once she no longer has to concern herself with the societal strictures placed around women, or with the way other people constantly underestimate her because of her age.<\/p>\n

Except then, of course, everything changes \u2014 when the cute neighboring aliens show up.<\/p>\n

One of the best things about Elatsoe<\/a><\/strong>, Darcie Little Badger\u2019s 2020 young adult fantasy slash murder mystery, comes when the protagonist tells her family that her dead cousin has just ordered her to solve his murder. Instead of the skepticism you might expect, Ellie, aka Elatsoe, named after her powerful great-six, or sixth-great-grandmother, gets nothing but support and assistance from her family and friends, as they all band together to help Ellie and her ghost dog Kirby solve the mystery.<\/p>\n

As Lipan Apache, Ellie and her family move through a world full of magical realism, where mythological, European, and Indigenous folkloric creatures all coexist with modern society; fairy rings, for example, are massive teleportation centers that get treated like airports. Ellie herself draws on her own magical powers, and the stories of the past, to help fight the all-too-human monsters threatening to uproot them all. This is a book full of surprises, delights, and profound humanity. Little Badger won the Locus award for best first novel, and it\u2019s easy to see why.<\/p>\n

\u2014Aja Romano<\/strong>, senior culture writer<\/p>\n

This summer I enjoyed reading Vincenzo Latronico\u2019s <\/a>Perfection<\/a><\/strong>, a short satirical novel about a millennial expat couple in Berlin who become increasingly dissatisfied with their lives. They\u2019ve carefully curated their apartment and careers and social circle to reflect their aesthetic taste. But try as they might \u2014 from popping pills at art parties, to taking up refugee activism, to becoming digital nomads in Lisbon and Sicily \u2014 they can\u2019t shake the feeling that life is passing them by. The book also reminded me of Ay\u015feg\u00fcl Sava\u015f\u2019s <\/a>The Anthropologists<\/a> in documenting the pursuit of happiness in an age of aimlessness.<\/p>\n

\u2014Avishay Artsy<\/strong>, senior producer, Today, Explained<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Whether you like it or not, summer\u2019s not quite over yet. There are still many days of sunshine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[359,1067,18,117,19,17,7471],"class_list":{"0":"post-7294","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-culture","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-vox-book-club"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}