It’s finally starting to feel like summer on the East Coast. To wit: the forearms are out, and so are the reading lists. To find out which books everyone is reading and recommending this season (as is my wont), I read 35 summer reading lists from 31 publications, counted up all the books, and tallied them together for you here.
This year, those 35 lists (which are themselves listed at the bottom of this post), recommended a total of 540 individual books. 85 of those appeared on at least 3 lists; those 85 are now presented to you in descending order of popularity. Well, it really speaks for itself, starting with the winner-by-a-mile:
19 lists:
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere
15 lists:
S.A. Cosby, King of Ashes
14 lists:
Melissa Febos, The Dry Season
R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
13 lists:
Susan Choi, Flashlight
V.E. Schwab, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
10 lists:
Rob Franklin, Great Black Hope
9 lists:
Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea
Caroline Fraser, Murderland
Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother
Catherine Lacey, The Möbius Book
Jess Walter, So Far Gone
8 lists:
Megan Giddings, Meet Me at the Crossroads
Aisling Rawle, The Compound
Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith
7 lists:
Claire Lynch, A Family Matter
Jason Mott, People Like Us
Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big
Riley Sager, With a Vengeance
Katie Yee, Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
6 lists:
Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story
Hal Ebbott, Among Friends
Michelle Huneven, Bug Hollow
Lisa Jewell, Don’t Let Him In
Xenobe Purvis, The Hounding
Lucas Schaefer, The Slip
Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners
5 lists:
Megan Abbott, El Dorado Drive
Kashana Cauley, The Payback
Michael Clune, Pan
Yrsa Daley-Ward, The Catch
Jonas Hassen Khemiri, The Sisters
Maris Kreizman, I Want to Burn This Place Down
Sarah MacLean, These Summer Storms
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Bewitching
Adriana Trigiani, The View from Lake Como
Jeff Weiss, Waiting for Britney Spears
4 lists:
Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory
Bill Clinton and James Patterson, The First Gentleman
Marlen Haushofer, Killing Stella
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Misbehaving at the Crossroads
Laura Lippman, Murder Takes a Vacation
Mattie Lubchansky, Simplicity
Benedict Nguyen, Hot Girls With Balls
Chris Pavone, The Doorman
Ivy Pochoda, Ecstasy
Loretta Rothschild, Finding Grace
Louis Sachar, The Magician of Tiger Castle
Miriam Toews, A Truce That Is Not Peace
Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness
Ruth Ware, The Woman in Suite 11
3 lists:
Fredrik Backman, My Friends
Regina Black, August Lane
Amy Bloom, I’ll Be Right Here
Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise
Peter Ames Carlin, Tonight in Jungleland
Ron Chernow, Mark Twain
Nicola Dinan, Disappoint Me
Matthew Gvin Frank, Submersed
Grace Flahive, Palm Meridian
James Frey, Next to Heaven
Carley Fortune, One Golden Summer
Jayson Greene, UnWorld
Jonathan Gould, Burning Down the House
Emily Henry, Great Big Beautiful Life
Holly Jackson, Not Quite Dead Yet
Stephen King, Never Flinch
Rax King, Sloppy
Michael Koresky, Sick and Dirty
Thomas Mallon, The Very Heart of It
Sangu Mandanna, A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping
Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything
Annabel Monaghan, It’s a Love Story
Aisha Muharrar, Loved One
Joyce Carol Oates, Fox
Helen Oyeyemi, A New New Me
Daniel Saldaña Paris, tr. Christina MacSweeney, The Dance and the Fire
Todd S. Purdum, Desi Arnaz
Karin Slaughter, We Are All Guilty Here
Brendan Slocumb, The Dark Maestro
Mia Sosa, When Javi Dumped Mari
Edward St. Aubyn, Parallel Lines
Katie Sturino, Sunny Side Up
Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley
Kevin Wilson, Run for the Hills
*
List of lists surveyed:
USA Today’s 15 books you should read this summer • Goodreads Readers’ 80 Most Anticipated New Summer Books • Kirkus Reviews’ 21 Hottest Books of Summer 2025 • Publishers Weekly’s Summer Reads 2025 • The Los Angeles Times’ 30 must-read books for summer • Vulture’s 28 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Summer • Harper’s Bazaar’s The 21 Best Beach Reads to Keep You Occupied All Summer Long • The New York Times’ 31 Novels Coming This Summer and 21 Nonfiction Books Coming This Summer and The Summer’s Best Beach Reads • TIME’s The 16 Most Anticipated Books of the Summer • The Washington Post’s 30 books to read this summer • The Wall Street Journal’s Summer Books: The Best Reading for the Season • Our Culture’s Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2025 • Town & Country’s The 46 Must-Read Books of Summer 2025 • The A.V. Club’s most anticipated books of summer 2025 • The Boston Globe’s 75 new books to add to your summer reading list • The Atlantic’s Summer Reading Guide • NPR’s 17 new books our critics can’t wait to read this summer • The New York Post’s The 30 best beach reads for summer 2025 • Page Six’s editors share their best beach reads for summer 2025 • Oprah Daily’s The 26 Best Summer Reads of 2025 • Iowa Public Radio’s 2025 summer book guide for grown-ups • PEOPLE’s Best Nonfiction Books of Summer 2025 and Most-Anticipated Summer Books 2025 • Southern Living’s 25 New Beach Reads For 2025 • Tertulia’s Best New Fiction Books Coming Summer 2025 and Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of the Summer • Esquire’s The Best Books of Summer 2025 • Bustle’s The Most Anticipated Books Of Summer 2025 • BookBub’s The Best Books of Summer • AARP’s 35 Summer Books to Add to Your 2025 Reading List • St. Louis Public Radio’s The best summer books of 2025, according to St Louis librarians • Garden & Gun’s The Great Big Summer Reading List • and of course, Lit Hub’s 22 Novels You Need to Read This Summer.
