Melissa Harris-Perry: Back with you on The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Around this time every year, there is list after list of the buzziest books about to hit the shelves from beach reads to engrossing nonfiction. There will be no shortage of options at your local library or neighborhood bookstores this summer. It turns out a lot of you are already turning to books to beat the heat.
Deanna: Hi, this is Deanna from Massapequa Park. A great summer reading might be The Third Pole by Mark Synnott. Reading about climbing Mount Everest and the history of adventures to Mount Everest really made me feel very cool while I was sitting in the sun, finishing that excellent novel. Thank you so much.
Denise McQueen: Hi. my name is Denise McQueen. I'm calling from Dallas, Texas. Anything by Tom Robin. He's a great writer and he makes you laugh out loud. Carl Hiaasen, I love his writing style and humor, too.
Amy: Hi, my name is Amy and I'm calling from Ferndale, Washington. Right now I'm reading Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi. It's about Nigerian twin sisters who are coming together in their mother's house in Lagos after spending years apart in different parts of the Anglo world. The theme of how family breaks apart and comes back together feels very relevant to me.
Melissa Harris-Perry: As always, our listeners have lots of great recommendations, but I know I like to have a big stack of books ready for the summer. We've got you covered if you're like that. Back with us is Constance Grady, culture writer at Vox. Constance, you were saying that obviously, the industry is interested in being able to actually sell text, write sell books. These books, the kinds of things that we all sit by the pool with or at the beach, or maybe even just like try to sneak and read in the car while you're dropping your kid off at camp. [chuckles] This is where some of that real reading time happens. What are some of your specific recommendations for good summer books?
Constance Grady: Yes. One book that I'm really excited for that I think fits into what we were talking about in the previous segment really well is The Other Black Girl. This is a debut novel by Zakiya Dalila Harris. It was a really, really fought over, anticipated book. It sold at auction for I think, seven figures. It is about a young woman, a Black girl who is an editorial assistant at a big publishing house. Then one day they hire another Black girl so that they're finally two of them. At first, our heroine things, "Oh, this will be great, we'll be able to have solidarity. I'll finally have someone I can talk to you in the office," but then things slowly become more and more sinister.
It's a really fun read, but it's also really interested in these questions that publishing as an industry is facing right now about this industry that thinks of itself as being really liberal and progressive, but it's still mostly made up of white people and why that is, what the structural issues are that lead to these problems, and how it affects the books that they put out into the world.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I have absolutely been anticipating that book, I cannot wait to read it. I've carved out time for this summer. I'm also interested in thinking about how artists, how novelists are writing about the pandemic. I'm wondering if we have books that are coming out in this summer or that maybe are already on our shelves that help us to maybe reflect on what we've all just been living through.
Constance Grady: Yes, there are a couple of the first wave of nonfiction books about the pandemic have come out. I just finished reading The Premonition by Michael Lewis. He's a Vanity Fair journalist. He also is the author of Moneyball. This is a really interesting book because it's mostly about the figures who did see the pandemic coming, and were able to predict it pretty accurately and figure out what, as it turned out, really effective public health measures would have been for it. Then infuriating me, it's about the ways that they were all sidelined from decision-making, and we ended up in the crisis state we found ourselves in. It's incredibly infuriating to read, but there's also something calming about seeing these experts figure out what's happening and place order over the fear of chaos.
Another one that's also in a similar vein is The Plague Year by Lawrence Wright. He writes for The New Yorker. He's won a Pulitzer for his nonfiction previously. That one's just going through all of the wild events of 2020, not only COVID but also everything that happened with the election and with Trump and with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
What's interesting about Wright is that he has a lot of access to major political figures, so he's able to bring in quotes from all of these players who are actually involved with everything. You find yourself in the cockpit of this year of chaos and can see how everything went so terribly wrong. We're getting two different perspectives on all of the horrors of last year, and it's really, really enraging to read but also pretty clarifying.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, we're moving into June next week, which is Pride Month, and Torrey Peters has a text "Detransition, Baby" It's gotten a lot of praise for how it addresses trans experiences. Tell me a little bit about it.
Constance Grady: Detransition, Baby deals with two trans women who are exes and one of them is in the process of actually detransitioning. She was living as a trans woman for a while, and now she's decided that she's happier going back to life as a man. It's a really interesting novel because the idea of people who detransition has been used as a political cudgel a lot. This sense that not everyone's really committed to transitioning, so we should somehow make it harder for them to do it in ways that are really not helpful and really not nuanced, but this book is able to make that experience really personal and really embedded in the trans experience.
I read it and I thought the writing was so playful and lovely, but I wasn't sure I was really qualified to say how it handled trans issues authentically. Emily VanDerWerff, my colleague at Vox, who's our critic at large and is a trans woman and writes really beautifully about trans issues. She said that she read it and it was like someone had reached inside of her and pulled out all of her deepest, darkest feelings about being trans and then just show them to the world so everyone could see her guts and stuff.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh, that is both a fantastic and also exactly what you want a book to do, to be disruptive and discomforting in that way. We're going to be signing up but I do have to say I love that the June pick for the Vox book club is Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind. I read that sucker in one night. I love that book. I cannot suggest it enough for folks.
Constance Grady: It's so fun. It's just a great vacation book because it's the world's worst vacation, so yours will feel much, much more fun.
Melissa Harris-Perry: [chuckles] It is really is true. Constance Grady is a culture writer at Vox. Constance, thank you for being here and for all your recommendations.
Constance Grady: Thanks so much for having me.
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Vicki: Hi, this is Vicki, I'm calling from Pahoa, Hawaii. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a great summer read.
Cathy: Hi, this is Cathy [unintelligible 00:07:55] in San Rafael, California. I'm currently reading The Nest. It's a good summer read, has great characters, and just a nice light read.
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