The Washington Post's "What to read this summer": Summer is here, and with it hopefully a bit more time to read. Today we get book recommendations from The Post's in-house experts. Monday, May 26, 2025

About halfway through the podcast: 

Maggie Penman: “What I’m always looking for in a summer read is a really good book that I will be completely absorbed by where nothing too disturbing happens. I think this is surprisingly difficult to find. If you look at a lot of the books among the Best Books according to critics and prizes, a lot of them are upsetting. I would love a book that will really draw me in but also not disturb me.”

John Williams: I think not being disturbed is an underrated desire, and that people have every right to not be disturbed when reading. There are always in the summer on the one hand things that are romancey and super light, but it sounds like Maggie is maybe looking for something that has a bit more heft to it, some quality, but isn’t that depressing.

Jacob Brogan: I’ve got one for you, Maggie. It’s not a book coming out this summer. It came out earlier this year. That’s Ada Calhoun’s novel Crush… In this novel, she falls in love with an old friend through this incredible intellectual courtship. They are writing these dreamy, swoony, brilliant letters to one another full of quotations. And unless you consider people finding new forms of happiness stressful, I don’t think it’s a really stressful novel. I had a lot of fun reading it. And I genuinely think it would be a great summer read no matter when it had come out in the year. So I’d pick that one up.

John Williams: That’s a good one. Calhoun’s a great writer. And that’s a book about opening up a marriage, which honestly is incredibly trendy these days in memoirs and in novels. If you want in on that trend, that’s probably a good place to start.