Summer is here, and with it summer reading. Every week, the New Yorker’s editors and critics select the best new books we’ve read in 2025 so far. This year, we’ve also asked the magazine’s writers to suggest favorite mega-reads—sizable, sprawling novels, biographies, and works of history that will keep you absorbed and entertained until the end of the season. Their selections are below.
Casey Cep on “Moby-Dick”
“He had to go fast, like an American, or he was all torpor. Half horse half alligator.” I hadn’t heard that Southern folkism, about indestructible men, before encountering it in the poet Charles Olson’s utterly bizarre, bewitching book about Herman Melville, which my colleague Philip Gourevitch lately convinced me to read. “Call Me Ishmael” isn’t a mega-read; it’s more like a micro-read, a hundred or so pages of prose and verse and a kind of centaur of the two. But I’m quoting from it in service of a megalo-read: “Moby-Dick” and all the wondrous books written about that one wondrous book.
I can already hear you saying that you’ve read “Moby-Dick,” but have you, really? And if you have, have you read even the horse half or the alligator half of all there is to read about it? “God keep me from ever completing anything,” Melville writes in his masterpiece, and the fantastic thing about making “Moby-Dick” your summer read is that you’ll never stop reading.
Start with the novel, of course, and then choose your own adventure. Want the true story of the ship that inspired the Pequod? There’s Nathaniel Philbrick’s moving, magisterial “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.” Want a meditation on Melville, marriage, and the pandemic? That’s the recent novel in verse “Dayswork,” by the poet wife and novelist husband Jennifer Habel and Chris Bachelder. Want to spin the globe of Melville’s mind and moral universe? That’s Greg Grandin’s incredible “The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World.” Want to read a novel that’s got as much of the wilderness and the human mind trapped in its pages? That’s “Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson, which the author called “Moby-Jane” while writing it, joking that she, too, “drowned a lot of people.” But if you want the strangest thing I’ve ever read about “Moby-Dick,” almost as strange as the novel itself, that’s “Call Me Ishmael,” which includes a description of Melville so perfect it could’ve been his epitaph: “The man made a mess of things. He got all balled up in Christ.”
Jia Tolentino on “The Cazalet Chronicles”
One of the only unambiguous extended pleasures I experienced in 2020 was that of reading all five volumes of “The Cazalet Chronicles,” by Elizabeth Jane Howard, back to back. “Sunlight refurbished the room,” Howard writes, in the first paragraph, “making toffee of the linoleum, turning the chips on the white enamel washstand jug slate blue.” That calm, bright, tarnished deliciousness—the immediate re-attunement of your attention to the slow secret unfolding of a summer’s day—that’s just what it feels like to read these books, which refract the political and social upheaval of the twenty years surrounding the Second World War through the life of an upper-middle-class English family.
“The Cazalet Chronicles” is the sort of series, like “Wolf Hall” or “The Three-Body Problem” or the Patrick Melrose novels, that inspires active jealousy within me when a friend goes in for the first time. But, unlike the other occupants of this category, “The Cazalet Chronicles” remain shockingly underread and underpraised. Hilary Mantel once supposed that Howard’s work was dismissed both because of her private life (she married Kingsley Amis, and counted Arthur Koestler and Cecil Day-Lewis among her many suitors) and because of the centrality of the domestic in her work. Howard’s was the sort of fiction that’s thought, Mantel wrote, to be by women and for women; novels that “seldom try to startle or provoke the reader; on the contrary, though the narrative may unfold ingeniously, every art is employed to make the reader at ease within it.” Of course, the home—even and especially one as luscious as the Cazalet countryside estate—is the site of a thousand turns and deceptions and revelations, heightened by the comfort that both the reader and the characters feel. My best pitch for “The Cazalet Chronicles”: they’re a cross between Laurie Colwin and Elena Ferrante, with more than a bit of the Evan S. Connell masterpiece “Mrs. Bridge.” Read these books before they get the inevitable makeover and reissue that they’re due.
Julian Lucas on “The Tale of Genji”
Forget, if you can, that it’s ten centuries old and more than a thousand pages thick. “The Tale of Genji,” by a Japanese noblewoman known to posterity as Murasaki Shikibu, is as dewy as the tears staining its protagonist’s fine stationery—or the kimono sleeves of his lovers, who tremble as they yield to his immaculately calligraphed verse. Genji, the Shining Prince, is one of literature’s most irresistible fuckboys, and his escapades remain a scandalous delight. Much like Prince Harry, he’s the son of a monarch by an ill-fated beauty, and is briefly exiled to a distant coastal province. Yet Genji is no mild-mannered wife guy, and his prodigious talents make you wonder why fans of royalty ever settled for podcasts.
He excels at poetry, dancing, koto-playing, and palace intrigue; demoted, at birth, to “commoner” status, he rises, by midlife, to the role of imperial regent. In between, he bros out with fellow-noblemen, resists the vengeful schemes of his late mother’s archenemy—the Kokiden Consort—and seduces nearly everyone, from the younger brother of a woman who breaks off their affair to his own stepmother, the empress. The Heian period’s dizzyingly complex rituals, hierarchies, and even floor plans endow Genji’s womanizing with the thrill of battlefield strategy: Could a “directional taboo” be an excuse to drop in on a man with a beautiful daughter? Does a secluded lady’s stiff handwriting and clichéd allusions mean that she’s mid?
Genji’s liaisons, each marked by an exchange of poems, succeed one another so divertingly that their sorrows accumulate by stealth. Love, and lovers, go up in smoke, while the consequences of their entanglements play out indefinitely. It’s no wonder that Genji and his lovers, several of whom become priestesses or nuns, flirt with renouncing the world. Karma wins in the end, but so does fiction—and there, waiting for the right moment to make a pass from your nightstand, the Shining Prince is truly deathless.
Margaret Talbot on “Possession”
The subject of the British biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s latest book might sound too narrow for its substantial girth. “The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham” is, in the first instance, a biography of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham, the gorgeous favorite and bedmate of King James I of England and Scotland. But “The Scapegoat” is also a wise and poignant examination of same-sex love and gender fluidity in seventeenth-century England. And, because the absorbing narrative is, in part, constructed of short, thematic chapters on topics such as magic, horses, plague, dancing, and other touchstones of the times, it offers a glittery immersion in the whole early modern epoch. The philosopher Francis Bacon and the painters Rubens and van Dyck shimmer in and out, along with a host of strong-willed, ambitious women, including Buckingham’s clever stage mother, a member of the minor gentry who contrived to place her dazzling son in the path of a king whose preferences were widely known.
In general, I’d rather read beautifully rendered histories like Hughes-Hallet’s, or novels actually written in the eras that they depict, than contemporary historical fiction. One exception is the wonderfully heady A. S. Byatt 1990 novel “Possession,” which offers the pleasures of two artfully conjured time frames: the then contemporary world of two young academics in the late eighties and that of the Victorian poets whose previously hidden romance they sleuth out. It’s a sexy novel about research—what’s not to like? I’m also a fan of Byatt’s 2009 “The Children’s Book,” another prodigious historical novel. Some critics have found it overstuffed, and it does digress, but I was captivated by Byatt’s intricately detailed conjuring of Edwardian-era bohemians—an E. Nesbit-like children’s author, Fabian socialists, feminists, acolytes of the Arts and Crafts movement—trying to build new ways of living and making art in the summery interval before the devastation of the First World War. Not all of Byatt’s books were this long, but she was prolific, and, by her own account, always wrote her fiction by hand, with a pen—or as she once put it, “with the blood that goes to the ends of my fingers.”
Joshua Rothman on “The Morning Star”
I was a mega-fan of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autofictional opus, “My Struggle.” I read the whole sequence twice, and some of the volumes several times; I loved the books partly because I saw so many of my own struggles reflected in them. So I wasn’t sure what to expect from Knausgaard’s new sequence of novels, which began appearing in Norwegian in 2020. They’re very different, not just fictional but occult and spooky, in the manner of Stephen King. In the first novel, “The Morning Star,” a strange celestial object appears in the night sky, and ordinary Norwegians see dead people and experience demonic visitations. In the following books, “The Wolves of Eternity” and “The Third Realm,” it becomes clear that the new star is changing the relationship between life and death. A long section of the latter book takes place in what might be a kind of Viking bardo. And yet all this unfolds in the hyper-detailed, time-dilated world of Knausgaard, in which minutiae are momentous.
I had to start “The Morning Star” twice—I needed time to adjust to the new, creepy Knausgaard. But, once I did, I was transfixed. We live in a rational, scientific age. But what if it turned out to be only that—an age—and we were plunged back into the mystical, spiritual, enchanted, haunted world that existed before? The novels explore this question in an existentially grounded way. When an actual miracle occurs, and materialism is revealed to be an illusion, people who were already trying to understand their lives have to revise their views, just as we often have to change our minds about what it all means, when our world views falter. So there are all sorts of high-minded reasons to start the new series—although, for some of us, the promise of “My Struggle” married to Stephen King’s “The Stand” may be enough.
Hua Hsu on the Hickman Saga
A couple of years ago, I was at my local comic shop with my kid, when I thought it might be “fun” to see what the X-Men were up to. But comics—as with many forms of once juvenile entertainment—are no longer for the casuals. Reading “House of X” and “Powers of X,” critically acclaimed books by the writer Jonathan Hickman, I was unprepared for how much the Marvel universe—and comic storytelling—had evolved in the thirty or so years since I’d last checked in. These were dense, thrilling explorations of faith and fallibility, genocide and politics, that had little to do with the quippy heroes of my youth. Hickman’s worlds are vast and immersive, filled with heroes that come across as philosophical and troubled, uncertain of what makes life meaningful or what aspects of our world are worth preserving. His storytelling ambition has made him the type of figure who can sell a title based on his affiliation alone, and this summer he will oversee a new miniseries called “Imperial.” I’m slowly making my way through what fans informally call the Hickman saga, a series of interwoven story lines involving the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, which ran from 2009 to 2016. I can’t say it’s easy to follow—there are multiple Earths, antimatter universes, at least one well-known character who communicates from the land of the dead. But part of the pleasure comes from trying to keep pace with Hickman’s wild and elaborate visions, and figuring out where he sees faith amid these dying, interstellar empires.
Andrew Marantz on “The Lord of the Rings”
The first books to stoke my older child’s imagination all day, even when he wasn’t reading them, were the “Harry Potter” books; the first sequel he liked better than the original was “Sport,” the third book in the “Harriet the Spy” series; but “The Lord of the Rings” is the first book he has loved so fiercely that it has physically disintegrated in his hands. His copy of “The Fellowship of the Ring” has basically exploded from overuse, yet he still carries the fragments with him wherever he goes—a chunk from “Fog on the Barrow-Downs” to “The Council of Elrond” stuffed into his backpack, the last few chapters splayed on his bedside table. Recently, for his eighth birthday, I got him a book called “The Atlas of Middle-Earth”—two hundred pages of devoutly obsessive cartographic fanfic. Somehow, even this has entranced him. The other morning, a confusion regarding the index—something about the difference between Lórien and Lothlórien—almost made him miss the school bus. (So far, the spine is intact.)
Unlike Peter Thiel and Giorgia Meloni, I did not grow up with “The Lord of the Rings” in my life, and, reading it now with my son, it’s hard to pinpoint what about it he finds so entrancing. (Occasionally, when Tolkien gets going about Balin, son of Fundin, and Aragorn, son of Arathorn, I have to turn away from my kid and carefully suppress a yawn.) The entertainment value of the “Harry Potter” books, which are among the most tightly plotted confections ever sold, needs no explaining. “Harriet the Spy,” a subtly acerbic sendup of Manhattan socialites as seen through the eyes of their emotionally neglected children, holds up shockingly well. But “The Lord of the Rings,” despite all that I’d heard about dark magic and epic battles, is mostly about walking through the forest. As one popular plot synopsis on TikTok goes, “Walk, walk, hide, walk, walk, walk—steal some mushrooms!” My son watched the TikTok and laughed, conceding the point, then went back to reading. (“The Company filed slowly along the paths in the wood, led by Haldir, while the other Elf walked behind.”) I lay down next to him, taking the book from him and starting to read aloud. (“The Company marched on, until they felt the cool evening come and heard the early night-wind whispering among many leaves.”) And after a while, almost despite myself—“He laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree’s skin and of the life within it”—I felt the hypnotic lull overtake me, too.
Katy Waldman on “The Deptford Trilogy”
Freud is out, Jung is in, and, this summer, you might treat yourself to Robertson Davies, a devotee of the psychotherapist, who would have approved of Davies’s belief that the best books afford an “exploration, extension, and reflection of one’s innermost self.” “The Deptford Trilogy,” which consists of the novels “Fifth Business,” “The Manticore,” and “World of Wonders,” traces the consequences of a seemingly small act of boyish violence. On December 27, 1908, Boy Staunton (a literal boy, double-underlining Davies’s interest in archetypes) throws a snowball with a stone concealed in it at his friend Duncan. He misses, and instead strikes a pregnant woman who goes into premature labor. Afterward, the woman’s mind dissolves and an ethereal simplicity sets in; Duncan, the snowball’s intended target, believes that she may have developed miraculous powers. He has grown up to become a respected hagiologist, and is narrating the first volume of the series in testy reply to a newspaper article about his retirement that cast him as a middling figure. Now, as he surveys his own life and the fate of Boy (mysterious, grisly) and other participants in that childhood scene, he wonders about his role in their collective drama—was he hero, villain, confidante, or, perhaps, the fifth business, the slippery extra who brings the story to a close?
“The Manticore” picks up the thread with a new narrator, David Staunton, son of Boy. He’s a rationalist lawyer who sentences himself to Jungian analysis after the death of his father. In Davies’s hands, the interpretation of dreams becomes swashbucklingly grand, mystical, beautiful, and grotesque. “World of Wonders” centers on one of the earlier books’ most enigmatic personalities: Magnus Eisengrim, illusionist extraordinaire, who unfolds secrets of his own.
I read these books when I was a teen-ager and was floored by their intensity and grandeur. Rereading them now, drowning in text—and specifically in voiceless text, with no human behind it—I love their talkiness. Davies’s characters are mesmerizing speakers, who live to spar, lecture, and lie. They’re old-fashioned and pretentious and peevish, and they hold forth about everything from theatre to polyamory to the nature of the Devil. Their speeches, at their headiest, inspire hope and a kind of holy terror. (“In short, Davey, God is not dead. And I can assure you God is not mocked.”)
Jennifer Wilson on “War and Peace”
The translators of “Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece,” by the Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah, were relieved when, after a period of no contact with Rabah and his family, they finally received word last winter that he was alive. The news was bittersweet, coming via a video clip of Rabah, surrounded by the rubble of his home library in Gaza, pulling a book from the debris: “War and Peace,” by Leo Tolstoy. It’s a novel I first read in college, and have thought back on frequently in the past year and a half as images from Israel’s assault on Gaza and the ensuing humanitarian crisis have sat strangely on my social-media feed alongside reactions to celebrity gossip and debates about the state of book reviewing.
The boundaries of war and peace were collapsing in Tolstoy’s time as well. Though the novel’s primary setting was the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, in 1812, Tolstoy drew on his experiences as a soldier in the Crimean War (1853–1856), a military dispute over, officially, Russia’s desire to protect Orthodox minorities in Palestine. The Crimean War is often considered the first modern war—new inventions like the telegraph and an advanced railway system allowed reporters and photojournalists greater access to the battlefield. In “War and Peace,” when Nikolai Rostov comes home after being wounded at the Battle of Schöngrabern, he tells his friends the story of what happened “just as those who have taken part in a battle generally do describe it, that is, as they would like it to have been, as they have heard it described by others, and as sounds well, but not at all as it really was.” Tolstoy hoped those heroic fictions, designed to inspire young men to pursue senseless deaths, would be undone as war began to disturb peace. He overestimated the truth. “Nothing lures us,” writes Rabah, “more than those caring for our death like it was an apple just half ours with the other belonging to the wind.”
Michael Luo on “The Third Reich in Power”
When your kids are of a certain age, beach vacations tend to become the default. I mostly sit under the umbrella and read. More often than not, I’m propping open a big book. A few years ago, for spring break, I brought “Grant,” by Ron Chernow. Page count: eleven hundred and four. On another trip, I read “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” by T. J. Stiles, which weighs in at more than seven hundred pages. This past spring break, my companion was “The Coming of the Third Reich,” a seminal account of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power by the historian Richard J. Evans. It is a comparatively slim but still ambitious six hundred and fifty-six pages.
I’m now embarking upon “The Third Reich in Power,” the second book in a trilogy by Evans, which is nine hundred and seventy-six pages. My aspiration is to finish the summer off with his culminating work, “The Third Reich at War.” I’ve been drawn in for the obvious reasons—wanting to understand how the Weimar Republic, the fledgling democracy that emerged in Germany after the First World War, teetered and then collapsed, as the country fell under the thrall of the Nazi movement. I’ve found myself unable to avoid drawing parallels to our current moment in the United States: the widespread economic woes, the mushrooming discontent, the right-wing nationalism, the scapegoating of minority groups, the rise of a charismatic populist leader, the suppression of culture, and the ruthless consolidation of power by the ruling party.
There are fundamental differences, of course, ones that some historians contend make the comparison unhelpful, but reading about a fascist leader’s path to power and the ways he used coercion, manipulation, and fear to bring a country’s population to heel makes for absorbing—and disturbing—reading. I was recently on a panel, moderated by The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, called “The Past Is Never Dead,” with my colleagues Jelani Cobb and Geraldo Cadava, both historians by training. Cadava talked about what he sees as a greater appetite for historical knowledge nowadays, particularly among young people. He noted that enrollment in history courses at Northwestern, where he teaches, has surged. Many of us are trying to make sense of where we are today by looking back.