It's summer, and here with it are all the pleasures of reading outside. Consuming a good book out in the world binds you closer to it: I can still remember the exact feel, smell and location of the grassy hill where I finished "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" during summer more than a decade ago. Here are five newly released paperbacks.
"Wake: The Secret History of Women-Led Slave Revolts"
by Rebecca Hall, illustrated by Hugo Martínez (Simon & Schuster, $19.99).
"Wake" is a graphic novel that revises our reading of history and at the same time, tells of its author-historian's struggle to bring that history to light. It tells of scholar Rebecca Hall's effort to uncover the truth about women whose roles in slave revolts have been erased from history. NPR reviewer Etelka Lehoczky said that "Wake" "sets a new standard for illustrating history" and named it a best book of the year.
"Once There Were Wolves: A Novel"
by Charlotte McConaghy (Flatiron Books, $17.99).
Charlotte McConaghy's second novel was highly anticipated last year after her first drew comparisons to Moby Dick. "Once There Were Wolves," like that Melvillian first novel, brings the reader into a world where humans have beaten the world into submission and out of balance, and mixes literary eco-fiction with elements of mystery and thriller novels. In the book, an Australian wolf biologist named Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland to reintroduce fourteen gray wolves into the remote Highlands. But the locals are less than open to the idea, and when someone meets their end in the woods, a traumatic event in Flynn's past also bubbles to the surface.
"The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees"
by Ben Mezrich (Grand Central Publishing, $17.99).
A book for those who, like me, read news coverage (and lots of tweets) about one of the strangest financial stories in years — the GameStop short squeeze, where hobby traders online brought Wall Street to a standstill — in bewilderment last year. In "The Antisocial Network," Ben Mezrich (perhaps best known for writing the book Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher turned into "The Social Network") tells the story beat by beat in easy prose. While it's slick, Mezrich did produce it speedily, selling the movie rights to a book proposal a week after the short squeeze happened, and has been accused in the past of playing fast with facts. Many characters are composites and Mezrich as usual fills in gaps in facts with his imagination, but the book can still help you understand the mechanics of what happened in an entertaining way.
"Beautiful World, Where Are You: A Novel"
by Sally Rooney (Picador, $18.00).
Sally Rooney's name and work seems like it's everywhere these days, from international bestseller lists to headlines to Hulu. Her third novel after "Conversations with Friends" and "Normal People" continues on the path of re-imagining romance in realism for the Millennial generation, telling the story of four people in and around Dublin — two women and two men they consider whether to fall in love with. New York Times reviewer Brandon Taylor said this is her best novel yet, with "the arid, intense melancholy of a Hopper painting," yet "funny and smart, full of sex and love and people doing their best to connect."
"The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War"
by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown and Company, $18.99).
Malcolm Gladwell has long been intrigued by a stray German bomb, dropped during World War II in his grandparents' back garden outside of London, which didn't go off. In his new book, he follows an obsession born of that intrigue: Bombers. He tells the World War II story of a small band of idealistic strategists, the "Bomber Mafia," who asked: What if precision bombing could weaken the enemy and make war far less lethal? Nearly a century later, Gladwell examines their legacy, calling the book "a case study in how dreams go awry. And how, when some new, shiny idea drops down from the heavens, it does not land, softly, in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters."
