Best summer books... according to The Gate and rd.com

Summer is here... "finally" most people say! Well, I'm not famous for liking the summer, as I'm an eternal lover of the Fall and the rain. Although, all seasons have their joys. Summer for example is a great time to read more for some people, as they lay on the beach for hours and what better than to read a good book?! Some of you are on vacation during summertime, which is another chance to read books. So, in today's article, I will introduce you to books, actually great books that include 'summer' in their title but also a nice list from rd.com, with a few 'best summer reads of all times'.

I will begin with few suggestions from rd.com and continue with our list of summer books! I hope you'll find what suits you best for some quality reading summertime ;) Enjoy :D

From rd.com

1) All-American Muslim girl - Nadine Jolie Courtney

If you’re in the mood for a poignant, moving coming-of-age novel, pick up All-American Muslim Girl by Nadine Jolie Courtney. High schooler Allie is dating a popular white boy with ultra-conservative parents who don’t know she’s Muslim American. Themes explore the diversity and nuance of religious identity while presenting a brave, independent teenager who grapples with faith and finds her voice despite a world filled with Islamophobia.

Nadine Jolie Courtney (born August 23, 1980) is a Circassian-American novelist, a lifestyle writer, and a former reality TV personality. She is the author of critically acclaimed YA novel All-American Muslim Girl, Romancing the Throne, Beauty Confidential: The No Preaching, No Lies, Advice-You'll-Actually-Use-Guide to Looking Your Best, and Confessions of a Beauty Addict. Her blog Jolie in NYC received international press in 2005 after Courtney, a former beauty editor, was outed and dooced for anonymously blogging about the beauty industry. The New York Post subsequently dubbed her "the poster girl for the blogger generation".

In 2015, she appeared on season 2 of Bravo's reality documentary television series Newlyweds: The First Year alongside her husband, filmmaker Erik Courtney.

2) Yellow Bird - Sierra Crane Murdoch

Sierra Crane Murdoch’s riveting true-crime tale follows Lissa Yellow Bird, a member of the “Three Affiliated Tribes” and Arikara Nation, who obsesses over the disappearance of an oil worker on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Yellow Bird’s own life becomes a subject of fascination as Murdoch’s chronicles her resilient spirit and intrepid search for justice. Yellow Bird is a feat of literary journalism that keeps the pace of a mystery novel as it exposes the dark ways the oil industry affects the lives of Native people.

Sierra Crane Murdoch is a journalist based in the American West. She has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker online, Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion, and High Country News. She has held fellowships from Middlebury College and from the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley.

3) The Water Dancer - Ta-Nehisi Coates

The acclaimed journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates deftly blends the fantastic with the historical in his debut novel set in the antebellum South. The Water Dancer follows Hiram who is born into the system of enslavement on a plantation, but who also possesses enormous power. Coates infuses the story with magical realism to explore the power of memory and the history of the Underground Railroad. Coates depicts the unbearable history of the enslaved through rich explorations of familial bonds and imaginative language that reinvents ways to represent this American history and the people within it.

Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates (born September 30, 1975) is an American author and journalist. Coates gained a wide readership during his time as national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he wrote about cultural, social, and political issues, particularly regarding African Americans and white supremacy. Coates has worked for The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, and TIME. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, O, and other publications.

He has published three non-fiction books: The Beautiful Struggle, Between the World and Me, and We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. Between the World and Me won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He has also written a Black Panther series and a Captain America series for Marvel Comics. In 2015 he received a "Genius Grant" from the MacArthur Foundation. His first novel, The Water Dancer, was published in 2019.

4) Magic for Liars - Sarah Gailey

If you love twisty mysteries with a fantasy edge, check out Sarah Gailey’s quirky crime tale set in an academy for mages. Magical happenings intermix with a hardboiled investigation into a murder. The detective on the case, Ivy, doesn’t do magic, while her twin sister teaches a course in it. Gailey infuses sibling rivalry with suspense that’s both whimsical and relatable. Their writing mixes enchanting poetry with relatable intrigue that keeps you rapt until the very end.

Sarah Gailey is an American author. Their alternate history novella River of Teeth was a finalist for the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novella, the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novella, and the 2018 Locus Award for Best Novella. In 2018, they also won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer.

5) The Black Tides of Heaven - JY Neon Yang

JY Neon Yang is known for her spellbinding prose and mesmerizing world-building. The fantasy novella The Black Tides of Heaven is Book 1 in the acclaimed Tensorate Series. The story follows non-binary twins who come of age in a techno-magic world where gender is chosen once the time feels right. It’s an intriguing story about individuals who rebel within a larger political system set for revolution.

Neon Yang, formerly J. Y. Yang, is a Singaporean writer of English-language speculative fiction. Yang is non-binary and queer, and uses they/them pronouns.

Yang has written a series of "silkpunk" novellas, and has published short fiction since 2012. Their novella The Black Tides of Heaven was nominated for the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novella, the 2018 Kitschies Golden Tentacle and the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novella.

Yang's work revolves around "the human body as a vessel for storytelling", and is based on their background as a molecular biologist, journalist and science communicator.

6) The Star Side of Bird Hill - Naomi Jackson

In this beautifully written coming-of-age novel, two young sisters move from Brooklyn to Barbados to live with their maternal Grandmother, a midwife who practices Obeah and helps them rediscover their roots. Naomi Jackson brilliantly captures the experience of Phaedra, ten, and Dionne, 16, who are transported from the city to island life in the summer of 1989. When their father shows up to take them home each grapples with what it means to go home and the bonds between family and culture.

Naomi Jackson is author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, published by Penguin Press in June 2015. The Star Side of Bird Hill was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. Star Side was named an Honor Book for Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also selected for the American Booksellers Association’s Indies Introduce and Indies Next List programs. The book has been reviewed by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, NPR.org and Entertainment Weekly, which called Star Side “a gem of a book.” Publishers Weekly named Jackson a Writer to Watch.

7) Stay Woke - Justin Michael Williams

Justin Michael Williams’s guide to meditation creates an inclusive practice that takes into account the experiences and identities of those who are often left out of conversations on mindfulness. Williams offers readers a way to get the practical benefits of meditation, especially if that practice acknowledges social struggle. Williams demystifies the mystical by telling readers “if you can worry, you can meditate.” He transforms a wellness buzzword into a tool for all, including Black people, the LGBTQIA+ community, and anyone else who goes through injustice and trauma. If you think meditation is boring and doesn’t work, delve into this kit for customizing the practice to match the heartbeat of your messy, modern, worthwhile life.

From growing up with gunshot holes outside of his bedroom window, to sharing the stage with Deepak Chopra, JUSTIN MICHAEL WILLIAMS knows the power of healing to overcome. He is an author, top 20 recording artist, and transformational speaker who is using music and meditation to wake up the world.

I think 7 books is enough.. is a good number... to continue with our own list of summer books! Well... let's see...

1) A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy written by William Shakespeare c. 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One subplot involves a conflict between four Athenian lovers. Another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they are to perform before the wedding. Both groups find themselves in a forest inhabited by fairies who manipulate the humans and are engaged in their own domestic intrigue. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular and is widely performed.

William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays,[c]154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted.

2) Suddenly Last Summer - Tennessee Williams

Kerr, in the NY Herald-Tribune, describes: "This, says Mr. Williams through the most sympathetic voice among his characters, 'is a true story about the time and the world we live in.' He has made it seem true-or at least curiously and suspensefully possible-by the extraordinary skill with which he has wrung detail after detail out of a young woman who has lived with horror. Anne Meacham, as a girl who has been the sole witness to her cousin's unbelievably shocking death, is brought into a 'planned jungle' of a New Orleans garden to confront a family that is intensely interested in having her deny the lurid tale she has told. The post-dilettante's mother is, indeed, so ruthlessly eager to suppress the facts that she had the girl incarcerated in a mental institution and she is perfectly willing, once she finishes her ritualistic five o'clock frozen daiquiri, to order the performance of a frontal lobotomy. A nun stands in rigid attendance; a doctor prepares a hypodermic to force the truth; greedy relatives beg her to recant in return for solid cash. Under the assorted, and thoroughly fascinating, pressures that are brought to bear, and under the intolerable, stammering strain of reliving her own memories, Miss Meacham slowly, painfully, hypnotically paints a concrete and blistering portrait of loneliness.of the sudden snapping of that spider's web that is one man's life, of ultimate panic and futile flight. The very reluctance with which the grim, hopeless narrative is unfolded binds us to it; Mr. Williams threads it out with a spare, sure, sharply vivid control of language.and the spell is cast."

Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.

At age 33, after years of obscurity, Williams suddenly became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, Williams attempted a new style that did not appeal as widely to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

3) My First Summer in the Sierra - John Muir

In the summer of 1869, John Muir, a young Scottish immigrant, joined a crew of shepherds in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains. The diary he kept while tending sheep formed the heart of this book and eventually lured thousands of Americans to visit Yosemite country.

First published in 1911, My First Summer in the Sierra incorporates the lyrical accounts and sketches he produced during his four-month stay in the Yosemite River Valley and the High Sierra. His record tracks that memorable experience, describing in picturesque terms the majestic vistas, flora and fauna, and other breathtaking natural wonders of the area.

Today, Muir is recognized as one of the most important and influential naturalists and nature writers in America. This book, the most popular of the author's works, will delight environmentalists and nature lovers with its exuberant observations.

John Muir (April 21, 1838 – December 24, 1914) also known as "John of the Mountains" and "Father of the National Parks", was an influential Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, botanist, zoologist, glaciologist, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States of America.

His letters, essays, and books describing his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada, have been read by millions. His activism helped to preserve the Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Park, and his example has served as an inspiration for the preservation of many other wilderness areas. The Sierra Club, which he co-founded, is a prominent American conservation organization. In his later life, Muir devoted most of his time to the preservation of the Western forests. As part of the campaign to make Yosemite a national park, Muir published two landmark articles on wilderness preservation in The Century Magazine, "The Treasures of the Yosemite" and "Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park"; this helped support the push for U.S. Congress to pass a bill in 1890 establishing Yosemite National Park. The spiritual quality and enthusiasm toward nature expressed in his writings has inspired readers, including presidents and congressmen, to take action to help preserve large nature areas.

4) Love and Summer - William Trevor

In his characteristically masterly way, Trevor evokes the passions and frustrations of the people of a small Irish town during one long summer.

It’s summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn’t go unnoticed when a dark-haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs. Connulty’s funeral. Florian Kilderry couldn’t know that the Connultys are said to own half the town: he has only come to Rathmoye to photograph the scorched remains of its burnt-out cinema.

A few miles out in the country, Dillahan, a farmer and a decent man, has married again: Ellie is the young convent girl who came to work for him when he was widowed. Ellie leads a quiet, routine life, often alone while Dillahan runs the farm.

Florian is planning to leave Ireland and start over. Ellie is settled in her new role as Dillahan’s wife. But Florian’s visit to Rathmoye introduces him to Ellie, and a dangerously reckless attachment begins.

William Trevor (24 May 1928 – 20 November 2016) was an Irish novelist, playwright and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he was widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.

He won the Whitbread Prize three times and was nominated five times for the Booker Prize, the last for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2011. His name was also mentioned in relation to the Nobel Prize in Literature. He won the 2008 International Nonino Prize in Italy. In 2014, Trevor was bestowed Saoi by the Aosdána.

Trevor resided in England from 1954 until his death at the age of 88.

5) Summer Island - Kristin Hannah

Years ago, Nora Bridge walked out on her marriage and left her daughters behind. Now she is a famous talk show host. Her daughter Ruby is a struggling comedienne. The two haven’t spoken in more than a decade. Then a scandal from Nora’s past is exposed, and Ruby is offered a fortune to write a tell-all about her mother. Reluctantly, she returns to the family house on Summer Island, a home filled with frayed memories of joy and heartache. Confronting a past that includes a never-forgotten love, a sick best friend, and a mother who has harbored terrible family secrets, Ruby finally begins to understand the complex ties that bind a mother and daughter—and the healing that comes with forgiveness.

Kristin Hannah was born in California. After graduating with a degree in communication from the University of Washington, she worked at an advertising agency in Seattle. She graduated from the University of Puget Sound law school and practiced law in Seattle before becoming a full-time writer. Hannah wrote her first novel with her mother, who was dying of cancer at the time; the book was never published.

Hannah's best-selling work is The Nightingale, which has sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide and has been published in 45 languages.

Hannah lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, with her husband and their son.

6) The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc - Loraine Despres

It's a steamy June afternoon in Louisiana, circa 1956, and Sissy LeBlanc is sitting on her front porch, wondering -- half seriously -- if she could kill herself with aspirins and Coca-Cola. She's been living in stifling old Gentry since the day she was born and trapped in a sham of a marriage to PeeWee LeBlanc since she was only seventeen. In short, she's fed up, restless, and ready for an adventure. Sissy just never imagined temptation would come into her life that breathless summer day as she sat smoking on her porch swing. For although she may have been fixated on the taut muscles of the lineman shimmying down the telephone pole across the street, she hadn't allowed herself to imagine that he'd be none other than her high school sweetheart, Parker Davidson, who left town fourteen years before without so much as a wave good-bye. But suddenly, here he is, leaning in for a kiss that will stir up more excitement than Sissy could ever have imagined...

Loraine Despres is a best-selling novelist and screenwriter. Her first novel, the rollicking Southern love story, The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, a Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club featured selection. It became a national best-seller and is now in its 25th printing. It begins: “When you get to be a certain age, you realize that the only thing you have time for is doing exactly what you want.”

It engendered The Southern Belle’s Handbook, Sissy Leblanc’s Rules to Live By, which includes all Sissy’s rules such as, “It’s okay for a woman to know her place, she just shouldn’t stay there.”

Her next novel, The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell, about intolerance and love, is set in 1920, when prohibition was in full swing, women were clamoring for the vote, and the Ku Klux Klan was sweeping the country as a money-making pyramid scheme. It begins: “Belle Cantrell felt guilty about killing her husband, and she hated that. Feeling guilty, that is.” It was the main book selection for all the chapters of the Pulpwood Queens, the largest book club in America with over 280 chapters.

During her screenwriting days, Loraine wrote many screenplays, pilots, and MOWS. Her produced episodes include those for The Highlander, The Equalizer, Crime Story, Chips, Family, Knots Landing, Dynasty, The Walton’s, and Love Boat, but she is best remembered for writing that cultural icon the “Who Shot J.R.?” episode of Dallas.

She taught screenwriting at UCLA for seven years and worked as an International Screenwriting Consultant in Germany, Sweden, Spain, and Canada. Loraine served on the Boards of Directors of PEN USA and Women In Film.

7) Farewell Summer - Ray Bradbury

In a summer that refuses to end, in the deceiving warmth of earliest October, civil war has come to Green Town, Illinois. It is the age-old conflict: the young against the elderly, for control of the clock that ticks their lives ever forward. The first cap-pistol shot heard 'round the town is dead accurate, felling an old man in his tracks, compelling town elder and school board despot Mr. Calvin C. Quartermain to marshal his graying forces and declare total war on the assassin, thirteen-year-old Douglas Spaudling, and his downy-checked cohorts. Doug and his cronies, however, are most worthy adversaries who should not be underestimated, as they plan and execute daring campaigns-matching old Quartermain's experience and cunning with their youthful enthusiasm and devil-may-care determination to hold on forever to childhood's summer. Yet time must ultimately be the victor, with valuable revelations for those on both sides of the conflicts. And life waits in ambush to assail Doug Spaulding with its powerful mysteries-the irresistible ascent of manhood, the sweet surrender to a first kiss.

Ray Douglas Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947.

Married since 1947, Mr. Bradbury and his wife Maggie lived in Los Angeles with their numerous cats. Together, they raised four daughters and had eight grandchildren. Sadly, Maggie passed away in November of 2003.

On the occasion of his 80th birthday in August 2000, Bradbury said, "The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me. The feeling I have every day is very much the same as it was when I was twelve. In any event, here I am, eighty years old, feeling no different, full of a great sense of joy, and glad for the long life that has been allowed me. I have good plans for the next ten or twenty years, and I hope you'll come along."

I will end The Gate's list with Ray Bradbury about "summer" books.. as our list is more 'classical' and Ray is a must-read author! I hope you enjoyed today's article and maybe contact us for more suggestions with book about summer and books having 'summer' in their title.

Have a great reading week and a beautiful summer ahead!