Welcome! It was the week when the woods charted a return to Broadway. It was the week when Seth Green lost an ape (it's complicated). And it was the week we said a painfully early but admiring farewell to Ray Liotta. Let's get to it.
Opening Argument: Beach reads are a state of mind
Novelist Jennifer Weiner wrote a piece for USA Today recently about the idea of the "beach read," a term often applied to her own books that she acknowledges having originally disliked for its tone of light dismissal. But, she says, she's come to embrace it, and even set out to write a trilogy of "beach reads." She says this: "By the end of the project, I realized that, to me, 'beach read' had come to just mean a book I enjoy."
She's right. As she points out, the literal beach is not a great place to read for a lot of us: sunburn, sand, water, sometimes a lot of noisy crowds. But maybe the beach is just the idea of escape, the idea of choosing, temporarily, to be somewhere else. You could call them mountain-cabin reads, or you could call them grandparents'-house reads, or maybe just vacation reads. But "summer reads" sounds too much like school to me, so "beach reads" it is.
With that said, here are a few beach reads I can recommend to you this summer, some of which I have mentioned in this newsletter before, but you cannot have too many good books.
Clare Pooley's Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting is a really lovely and good-hearted story about the power of letting yourself meet strangers, which is a particularly welcome thing to read about at a time when a lot of us have had much less time out in the world than we used to. (Full disclosure: This book comes out of Penguin Random House, as do my own books.)
Grant Ginder's Let's Not Do That Again is a caper and a family story and a political comedy (with some crime thrown in), about a family that will keep surprising you. I just loved it and think it would be exactly right for your vacation.
No beach read list would be complete without a selection of romance and love story writers who are reliably, crowd-pleasingly delightful to read: try Jasmine Guillory, Alisha Rai, Kristan Higgins, Casey McQuiston, or Emily Henry.
I know I have mentioned both Birds of California by Katie Cotugno and Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman (also a PRH book), but they are my favorite love stories of the year so far.
Also absolutely great? Susan Rigetti's Cover Story, which is spun out from a riff on Anna Delvey, but which is so full of suspense and action that I read it in one giant gulp.
I'm jumping the gun here, but did you know that there's a new Tom Perrotta book about Tracy Flick this summer? It's out June 7, called Tracy Flick Can't Win, and it's a treat.
So whether you are at the beach or not, find something that pleases you, and give yourself a moment to read. It might do you good.
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We Recommend
I was deeply moved by this beautiful piece over at RogerEbert.com about Bob's Burgers and the way something you really love can save you.
For reasons related to an upcoming project (soon!), I watched Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation from 1974, starring Gene Hackman as a paranoid surveillance expert. This will be a shocker, but: that's a darn good movie that hasn't lost a step.
All the This Is Us people among you will want to check out the take on the finale from NPR's own Eric Deggans, including a conversation with creator Dan Fogelman.
What We Did This Week
Apple TV+, Searchlight, Hulu, Marvel, Universal
We shared my conversation with Karen Grigsby Bates about some of the 2021 books she loved about identity and culture, from NPR's Books We Love project.
Glen and Aisha and Mallory Yu talked about the new film Men.
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