Summertime calls for deep satisfying stories lying in the grass, flies buzzing, airplanes roaring, sun blazing, wind whooshing. This season calls for reading that teaches, reflects, and nourishes alongside the vitamin D coming down and lingering throughout the seasons to come. 

How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell

Odell’s case against the attention economy is a definite must-read for me: a piece of activism disguised as self-help working against tech capitalism and forever endless productivity. As an artist, Odell makes space to reject the apps and tools intended to catch our attention and profit off of it with imaginative vision.

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Alicia Elliott

Writing with beautiful clarity and generous spirit, Elliott’s book filled me feelings, knowledge, and fight. Deftly weaving the personal with the political, Elliott writes towards a vision and hope where Indigenous peoples are given the full expansive humanity that white settlers are offered.

Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being, Amy Fung

I was so excited for this radical collection of essays from critic, organizer, and curator Amy Fung who has worked in the arts across Canada for the past decade. In her debut book, she looks critically at Canada’s art world and how it continually implicates itself in the systems of oppression that it seeks to critique.

Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown

Colorlines perfectly synthesizes this book as “demonstrat[ing] how we can tap into our emotional and erotic desires to organize against oppression.” Yes! I’m inspired by her positive action through positive sentiments through positive reflections towards positive results.

Overstory, Richard Powers

This sweeping story brings together a collection of characters whose lives circle around and have been affected by trees: different trees across different lands and different rooted histories. The varying characters begin to find each other in the second half of the book through environmental activism, which Powers is astute in exploring the limits of.

Optic Nerve, Maria Gainza

An exciting English debut from Argentine author Maria Gainza recounting a woman’s obsession with art. Odd moments of art history are merged with the narrator’s  workaday Buenos Aires life. It is part Ways of Seeing, part How Should a Person Be?, and part fantastical Calvino. What’s not to love?

The Years, Annie Ernaux

Acting as my introduction to Annie Ernaux work, The Years has hooked me into the author’s writing, leaving me eager to dive deeper into her catalogue. Ernaux traces France post-WWII by way of a collective anonymous voice. It acts as a communal memoir, recounting the story of a country post WWII through the intimate memories, stories, and photographs of herself and others.

This Place: 150 Years Retold, forward by Alicia Elliott

An extraordinary comic collection from a broad range of Indigenous voices, recounting Indigenous stories of resistance, resilience, violence, and belief. With a beautiful forward by Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, these accounts reject Canada’s national story, generously shining a light on experiences long obscured.

Meat and Bone, Kat Verhoeven

I appreciated this book about being a young open-minded progressive living in a major metropolis who nevertheless can’t break out of toxic body thoughts and judgments. The main character Anne covets thinness, a body of protruding bones and zero fat. She meets a seductive neighbour who feeds into insecurities while her friends try to save her from self destruction.

Clyde Fans, Seth

This 20-years-in-the-making body of work by legendary Canadian cartoonist Seth has finally found its ultimate material form: a beautiful box set containing the 500 pages of the Clyde Fans series, originally developed through his Palookaville comics. Seth's graphic novel takes us in a wide emotional journey of nostalgia, solitude, isolation, success and failure, work, one's attitude towards one's life and one's responsibilities.

But that's not all! Here are some Summer titles coming out in the coming months that I'm very excited about digging into.