Last month, researchers published a study finding that the practice of “leisure reading” is in precipitous decline. In 2004, 28% of survey respondents reported reading for pleasure; by 2023, just 16% did. The survey defined such reading broadly: novels, audiobooks, magazines—any consumption of words not required by work or school. In an interview with The New York Times, one of the reading study’s co-authors described what she saw to be the broad negative implications of its findings, noting that reading involves forming connections with characters on the page. “The empathy that we feel for them is actually real,” she said, “and these connections with characters can be ways that we can feel less alone, that we can feel socially and emotionally validated.” So whether looking for leisure or connection, read on, pleasure seekers. We have a book for you.—Keziah Weir, Senior Staff Writer
‘All Passion Spent’ by Vita Sackville-West
Published in 1931, All Passion Spent tells the story of Lady Slane, who takes ownership of her life after years in the shadow of her wealthy and influential husband. Upon becoming a widow, Lady Slane defies everyone’s expectations and untangles herself from her capricious children by moving out of her Chelsea house to rent a small cottage in bucolic Hampstead. At 88, she takes the London underground for the first time, “going up to Hampstead alone, she did not feel old; she felt younger than she had felt for years.” In her newfound freedom and soothed by the tranquility of her leafy surroundings, she reminisces about her youth and reflects on her memories. But her plans for quiet contemplation are interrupted when a long-forgotten friend comes knocking on her door.
Despite being nearly a century old, this novel remains an amusing and surprisingly contemporary read. Sackville-West, who herself was an aristocrat married to a statesman, paints a delightful picture of eccentric characters, with witty observations that one can imagine being drawn from her own experience of London’s high society in the early 20th century. (1931)—Giulia Franceschini, Senior Global Planning Manager
‘It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin’ by Marisa Meltzer
At one juncture in Marisa Meltzer’s vivacious new biography of Jane Birkin, our heroine’s career is at a crossroads. She’s already appeared in a couple of West End productions, had small parts in two iconic films—Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Jacques Deray’s La Piscine with Alain Delon and Romy Schneider—and her disastrous marriage to John Barry, with whom she had a daughter, Kate, has just ended. She hears about an audition for a romantic comedy called Slogan, by the French director Pierre Grimblat; she gets the part and plays opposite Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she falls madly in love. Shortly thereafter, he is writing hit records for her, and together they are the talk of le tout-Paris. We are on page sixty, and Birkin has just turned twenty-one.
As both style icon and a symbol of a newly liberated youth, someone who seemed to emerge fully formed out of Swinging London and Mai ’68, Birkin was an Englishwoman who became the embodiment of Parisian chic. She scrambled the very grammar of sex appeal. Where Brigitte Bardot (who had just ended an affair with Gainsbourg) embodied a voluptuous, sultry past, Birkin heralded a new future—spare, androgynous, and insistently modern. As the ample passages from her journals make clear, her private life was bound up with men who both adored and unsettled her. Yet she carried those entanglements lightly, shaping from them not dependence but the contours of her own legend. (2025, Atria)—Eric Miles, Visuals Editor
‘No One Belongs Here More Than You’ by Miranda July
Before she wrote the sexy mid-life-crisis-perimenopausal novel no one knew they needed, Miranda July sharpened her deadpan voice through short fiction in her debut collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You. Through 16 stories—a few that read more like vignettes, and others more fully-fledged—July catapults us into the lives of some singular weirdos, who are odd mainly because of the intensity of their loneliness and the extreme lengths they pursue for human connection. People are in love with people they shouldn’t be. Or at the very least, it’s complicated. In short, situationships abound, and not just of the romantic variety. In one story, a woman gives elderly ladies swim lessons by placing their faces in bowls of water. In another, a teenager moves in with her childhood best friend and performs in a peep show to try to win her affections. Come for the jokes and unmistakable narrative voice; stay for the heartache. (2007, Scribner)—Natasha O’Neill, Digital Line Editor
‘Cantoras’ by Caro De Robertis
Is anywhere safe in an autocracy? Caro De Robertis’ novel reminds us that it’s possible to find a home within each other even when everywhere else feels unsafe. When fascism overtakes Uruguay in 1977, there are few places to hide from militant soldiers who sweep the streets and enforce oppressive curfew laws. Any gatherings are smothered, festivities are prohibited, and nearly all human interaction is monitored. Because homosexuality is deemed a dangerous transgression, young queer women like Flaca are especially at risk. Feeling suffocated by harsh censorship, she devises a plan—invite four others like her to a remote coastal shack for a week-long vacation. Over the course of decades, these fellow “cantoras”—a term that translates directly to “singers,” but is also Uruguayan slang for sapphic women—make repeated pilgrimages to this remote cabin in search of refuge. But even in this safe haven, Flaca’s lovers and friends struggle to find a true escape from what haunts them: memories of trauma, discrimination, self-hatred, and alienation. Cantoras is the story of a fight: a battle to insist on one’s own existence even when conforming might be the only way to survive. (2019, Knopf)—Kenneal Patterson, Associate Web Producer
‘Will There Ever Be Another You’ by Patricia Lockwood
“I started to laugh and then she started to laugh; many things in the human being are contagious,” Patricia Lockwood writes in her autobiographical new novel, whose main focus of contagion is the coronavirus pandemic. Of the book, Lockwood told the New Yorker, “I wrote it insane, and edited it sane.” Drawn in part from notebooks she kept while sick (“The first line of the mad notebook read ‘I wish, when I was a teenage Christian, that I had been more experimental with my evangelizing. God laid a big egg in my heart to tell you this”), it charts her hallucinatory journey from a feverish early infection in 2020 through the long haul of long COVID, and would probably be unreadable were it written by anyone but Lockwood. Instead, the poet-novelist-critic manages, via her on-page avatar, to wrestle her disease’s most vocationally disruptive symptom—its brain-scrambling warp of her ability to communicate—into a narrative through-line as she attempts to wrest back control of her brain. To be in that brain, amid that battle, is one of the more immersive reading experiences I’ve had in some time. (2025, Riverhead)—KW
‘Ladivine’ by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump
“If I think about good and evil, it’s definitely without the capital letters,” Marie NDiaye told Madeleine Schwartz in The Paris Review’s recent, excellent “The Art of Fiction No. 268.” Having never read NDiaye’s work and feeling instantly lacking, I picked up Ladivine, a novel about four generations of women and their complex mother-daughter relationships. Ladivine Sylla, a Black immigrant to France, is a source of both shame and duty for her beautiful daughter Malinka, who renames herself Clarisse, begins passing as white, and starts to live a double life before shocking violence descends. Decades later, Clarisse’s own daughter—named, poignantly, Ladivine, though Clarisse takes pains to keep her mother from meeting her namesake—travels with her young family to an island nation that may or may not be her ancestral homeland, where a surreal series of misidentifications unfolds. It’s a haunting novel of doublings and family secrets, surface appearances and psychological depths, rendered with electric clarity. “Might they not be tired and put off by such relentless generosity,” NDiaye writes of Clarisse and her family, “the patient, unforthcoming man and the increasingly mysterious and obliging child, neither of whom, perhaps, wanted so much goodness and wished she would let them know her in some other way, too?” (2016, Knopf)—KW
‘The Unpassing’ by Chia-Chia Lin
In another story about family secrets, we follow fifth grader Gavin, one of four children in a family of Taiwanese immigrants living in a community 30 miles outside Anchorage, Alaska. The novel begins in 1986, in the days before the Challenger launch, which Gavin and his family have been eagerly anticipating. Already one is prepared for disaster, but within pages a separate tragedy strikes: the day before the launch, Gavin, struck with meningitis, falls into a weeks-long coma. When he awakens, he learns from his teenage sister, Pei-Pei, that their youngest sister, four-year-old Ruby, has died. The three remaining siblings (rounded out by the fierce and dreamy Natty, age five) weather their parents’ increasingly volatile relationship as details emerge around the circumstances of Ruby’s death. Reading, I felt myself borne through the book on the strength of Chia-Chia Lin’s descriptions, both earthly—a beluga whale beached on the mudflats, flying squirrels in the attic—and interpersonal. “You are welcome here,” a woman tells Gavin’s mother at a solstice party. “My mother nodded soberly. ‘You are welcome, too.’” I didn’t want it to end. (2019, FSG)—KW
‘Meet Me at the Museum’ by Anne Youngson
Frankenstein notwithstanding, I’m not crazy about epistolary novels. But when my mom, whose literary taste I trust completely, graduates from gently suggesting I might like a book to sending me a copy, I tend to bump it to the top of the to-read pile. Such was the case with Meet Me at the Museum, the debut novel Anne Youngson published at 70 years old. The book unfolds via letters sent between Tina Hopgood, an English farmer’s wife, and Anders Larsen, a Danish scholar who specializes in the Iron Age. Their initial topic of conversation is the Tollund Man, whose body was found in a peat bog and resides (in the novel and in reality) at the Silkeborg museum, where Anders is a curator, and where Tina would like to visit. What begins as a factual exchange blooms into an increasingly personal correspondence: they describe difficulties in the lives of their children, the personalities of their current and former spouses, dreams and regrets—until a revelation in Tina’s life forces a confrontation that threatens the deep bond they’ve built. Poignant, pensive, and just sweet enough, like an almond cake dusted in powdered sugar. (2018, Flatiron)—KW
‘Heart the Lover’ by Lily King
Sophocles walked so that Lily King could rend our hearts with her novels about love triangles. In Heart the Lover, an unnamed narrator meets two young men during the last gasp of her college tenure. Sam and Yash, she recognizes, are “scholars” to her self-identified “student.” Sam and Yash nickname her Jordan (as in Baker) and sweep her into their heady academic life. But when her powerful attraction to Sam yields a subpar relationship, and her friendship with Yash turns into something more, the trio splinters irrevocably, and “Jordan” feels the reverberations far into the future. Decades later, now an accomplished novelist, her past catches up with her at the home she shares with her young family in Portland, Maine. It’s a quick novel, maybe a Gatsby-and-a-half long, but there’s so much packed into each interaction, be it a conversation between a mother and a sick child, or a confusing college hookup. And on top of all that great sexual tension and the beautifully rendered heartache of passing time, King’s fans will be rewarded with, to my mind, the most pleasurable kind of literary Easter egg of them all: the recognition of old friends peering out from pages past. (2025, Grove Press)—KW
