A Socialist Summer Reading List for the Dog Days of Summer
Just in time for your (hopeful) escape from the heat and the grind, here are the summer reading recommendations of Jacobin’s editors and staff writers.
We asked a handful of Jacobin writers and editors to suggest some beach reads for this season. (Jesus Merida / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
Here at Jacobin, our summer reading lists may not be something you could accurately describe as “light.” But maybe that’s not what you’re looking for. From last year’s recommendation of Enver Hoxha’s memoirs to 2021’s plug for Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (which remains a leftist literary classic), we must plead guilty to encouraging you to drag a heavy tome along with you on your beach vacation. But we believe you’ll be rewarded by doing so, with this year’s literary delights spanning from a winding Napoleonic narrative to the first book in a masterpiece trilogy on the civil rights movement — with an incursion on commodity fetishism thrown in for good measure.
The Hole
Hiroko Oyamada
For the first third of Hiroko Oyamada’s novella The Hole, it seems like nothing will ever happen. After her husband is transferred to an office near his hometown, the narrator, Asa, drifts away from her unfulfilling career in Tokyo and into the equally depressing role of a housewife in rural Japan. Both settings — the unspecified office, and the hot, stagnant countryside, where spring fades into summer, cicadas buzz incessantly, and she is known only as “the bride” — feel like a darkened stage on which a performance will soon begin.
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