Summer reads recommended by AN’s editor in chief

This season’s out-of-office adventures require printed companions. Summer reads are lightweight tomes that can put up with being stuffed in a weekend bag or spiced with sand. This roundup includes a mix of titles, from thoughtful general-interest nonfiction about the built environment—landlords turned arsonists in The Bronx, the mining of lithium and other “critical minerals,” and a well-reported chronicle of El Paso’s borderlands, among others—to releases that advance architectural history, theory, and criticism.

Consider, for your nerdy enjoyment, a book that examines Rem Koolhaas’s early years as a journalist at The Haagse Post, a Dutch weekly. Totems is an exquisitely pleasing collection of essays by the architecture critic Irénée Scalbert. Beigeification™, an essay by Edgar Rodriguez, takes on our world’s growing blandness. The Gumshoe paperback series hosts image-rich detective-style texts: The two subjects in the series so far are Oscar Niemeyer’s headquarters for the French Communist Party and OMA’s Villa dall’Ava.

In August, Mark Lamster publishes his new book, a critical history of Dallas as told through its architecture. We lost Leijia Hanrahan, a “revolutionary, geographer, essayist, and poet,” in 2022. Now a book anthologizes her work, including two pieces she wrote for AN.

Not interested in nonfiction? Fine. Try George Saunders’s Vigil. Yes, its premise is haunted by the climate crisis, but Saunders soaks his lyrical prose in a human tenderness that is all too rare lately.