Is Summer Actually the Season for Reading Big, Thick Books?

There’s something in the air this summer: everyone seems to be reading huge books. The New Yorker did a round-up of their staff’s summer “Mega-Reads”: “sizable, sprawling novels, biographies, and works of history that will keep you absorbed and entertained until the end of the season.” The artist and writer Austin Kleon has long made a habit of reading big books for summer, “what [his] son would call ‘thicc bois’.” Everyone’s reading Lonesome Dove all of a sudden. Layla Halabian wrote in Language Arts about being “addicted to the Lord of the Rings audiobooks.” And, anecdotally, everyone I know is either reading a 650-page novel in the park or hauling a comprehensive history book along on vacation.

What’s the deal? Why all the big books, and why this summer? I love project reading—I’m an unabashed Caro-head, am always recommending insanely long Gene Wolfe cycles to people, and have nearly finished reading everything Ursula K. Le Guin wrote—but my taste for summer reading is shorter, slimmer volumes. As a guy who doesn’t thrive in summer (hates shorts, sunburns way too easily, sweaty), this doesn’t feel like the natural season to take on a big read. Project books feel like an indoor activity to me, something you do when the sun sets earlier and you can hunker down. And the logistics of reading thicc bois is counterintuitive to me. Summer is about being out and about, and I’m not sure I want to be lugging around some thousand pager that’s making my tote bag strap cut a divot in my clavicle.

But everyone else is going big this summer, and I’m feeling the pressure to join in. I consulted some experts on the phenomenon: Heather Akumiah and Leah Abrams, writers and the hosts of the very cool Limousine podcast and reading series. They’re hosting an Anna Karenina book club for what they’re calling “Big Thick Book Summer.” The first episode of their book club chat just came out.

Abrams told me that they initially picked Anna Karenina after discovering “just how soapy and delightful Tolstoy really is (sorry, no shade to Dostoevsky),” but they also picked up on something going on in their community. “The more we mentioned Anna Karenina to friends, the more we realized we were tapping into something broader in the culture at large,” Abrams said. “People are looking to heal their attention spans, to be absorbed in something long term again. We thought this would be a fun opportunity to do it all together.”

Healing attention spans and reading together is evergreen, but the idea of carving out time to really get into a big book does feel connected to summer as the season of relaxation. Summer’s lazier and more chill. We’re seeing friends, staying out later, drinking al fresco. Americans are grilling and shooting off fireworks, and Europeans are all on vacation. Summer is about leisure, and as Akumiah told me, “reading is the ultimate leisure activity.”

So it makes sense, especially for book nerds, to kick back with a book. Plus, summer’s forever associated with a school break. Akumiah, like me, still connects “summer reading with childhood summers, when you’d have these endless, boring days that were your responsibility to fill up.” Without any homework, summer was a chance to read for pleasure.

But why the turn to a big project book? Are we all such nerds that we’re creating our own summer reading challenges as a throwback to when we were kids?

It could be that summer feels less crunched. Akumiah points out that “in the summer we get the illusion of more free time—through longer days, long-needed vacations, summer Fridays (ew sorry), and the general sense that it’s time to treat ourselves.” I think this is right. Summer is when we’re allowed to take our eye off work a little, which is another way of saying we have more off-the-clock time to set our own goals. As Akumiah said, “no better way to reject the grindset than to pick up a big, impractical book that you can carry with you from park to rooftop to airport gate all summer.”

I think for some though, the grindset is not so much rejected as it’s redirected: summer’s freedom is the chance to grind on your own terms. A big book, especially a classic, is a self-improvement project. We have the time to read something we’ve been telling ourselves we have to read and have been intending to get to. Abrams said that she’s “spent years being intimidated by the thick Russian classics or simply assuming they weren’t for me.” What better time to face that fear and really sit with dense lines of Tolstoy or Joyce than a long summer day?

There’s a baked-in self-improvement and self-actualization angle to a summer project too. June through August is when you’ll get cool before school starts again, when you’ll meet someone and fall in love, when you’ll go to another country and return with New And Fresh Perspectives. Summer is when we figure our shit out.

Thick classics are often approached like they have all the answers. These are books full of big ideas and with lots to teach us, or so we think. Writing about Lonesome Dove, Michael Sebastian says that “McMurtry is all about the Big Themes.” Thick classics are tackling existential issues, and aren’t skimping on ambition: they’re taking on war and peace, crime and punishment, and setting great expectations. Summer offers the free time to meet the lofty goals we assign to these books. We can finally make the long trek to the mountaintop, consult the sage wisdom of the classic texts, and ponder their Big Themes, which all takes time. And the summer is when we’re all allowed to prioritize pleasure a bit more, which makes reading the bigger, more decadent books less like homework.

I wonder if it is simply fun and flirty to go outside on a hot summer day with a huge book. It signals carefree relaxation and a rich inner life. It’s an interesting choice. Bringing Bolaño’s 2666 or Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety to the beach is saying that you have nowhere to be for a while, and nothing to do but read and think.

The where of summer is exciting, too: the beach, the pool, and the new city are all great places to set up with a long read. I asked Abrams and Akumiah where they hoped to be reading this summer, and Abrams told me, “I wish to be reading in my local park with the sweet, sweet knowledge of a Mamdani victory in the Democratic primary wafting through the air on the summer breeze. And wait… wish fulfilled!”

That’s the height of summer leisure: taking time for yourself is also an acknowledgement of hope about the future. Taking on a big book is making the time to relax, but also to think in the longer term and commit to something bigger. So many people picking up bigger books and reading them with others is a sign that we want to look forward, to think deeper, and to seek community and connection. Sounds like a hot summer to me.