Junkee’s Summer Reading List

We’ve teamed up with new initiative Pretty Shady to create a series of stories to inspire the generation that will stop skin cancer, one summer at a time. It’s all about positive action — shade, clothing, hats, sunglasses and sunscreen — and this piece is an homage to shade. To celebrate, Pretty Shady are giving away 50 Basil Bangs beach umbrellas which you can enter to win here. 

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What makes a good summer read really depends on the kind of reader you are. Some like it all romantic and trashy. Some like it packed with robots action. Others want it dominated by illustrations —  because sometimes they’re better than words. Our writers have each recommended a summer read, for you to spend time with under the shade of a tree.

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The Stench of Honolulu, by Jack Handey (2013)

Recommended by: Luke Ryan

In a recent New York Times profile, Jack Handey  – who you’d know from his Deep Thoughts – was described as the “envy of every comedy writer in America”. The Stench of Honolulu is his first novel, and sentence-to-sentence it’s probably the funniest work of fiction ever written.

Handey’s jokes are perfectly refined crystals, all sharp edges and unexpected facets, and here he’s put 200 pages of them back to back. It’s not a book you’ll get lost in, but you’ll laugh out loud on every page — it’s hard to know what more you’d want out of your summer read.

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Monsieur, by Emma Becker (2012)

Recommended by: Estelle Tang

I bought this book because the cover is a leg covered in lacy lingerie, and the author is French. That should really tell you most of what you need to know about it. If you want a sexy, trashy summer read, pick this.

Monsieur is a thinly veiled roman à clef about a 20-year-old ingenue who is super into erotic French literature. She finds out that a 45-year-old family friend is into the same shit, and she seduces the saucy pervert into having an affair with her.

Perfect beachy/Euro/wish-I-was-Euro read; not Lolita, but good fun.

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Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger (1953)

Recommended by: Steph Harmon

J.D. Salinger is a master of the short story — the kind of pieces you’ll be driven to read two, three times in a row, pulling each sentence apart to find out exactly how he did what he just did. His honest dialogue and complex, real characters always stand out, the wit and humour undercut so grippingly with the ever-present threat of darkness – and of course there’s his nimbleness with children, who in his work contain multitudes: innocence, wisdom, heart and sadness. It’s all there in Nine Stories, Salinger’s first collection, published two years after The Catcher In The Rye and eight years before Franny and Zooey.

In Nine Stories you’ll find more pieces about Salinger’s fictional Glass family (Booboo, Buddy, Walt and Seymour specifically; the siblings of Franny and Zooey), and three of the most moving stories I’ve ever read: ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ (gulp), ‘The Laughing Man’, and the semi-autobiographical rumination on PTSD, ‘For Esme – With Love And Squalor’.

If you’re after more Salinger, some of his unpublished works are beginning to trickle through online — with the promise of more.

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The Last City and The Forgotten City, by Nina D’Aleo (2012 & 2013)

Recommended by: Patrick Lenton

For me, summer reading is about having a damn good time. Throw away the enormous family drama about six generations of rich British people being sad about a dead baby, with its themes of abandonment and sexual ennui in pre-industrial era Guam. Burn that book.  And pick up The Last City, by Australian author Nina D’Aleo.

The Last City is very immediately a sci-fi novel, set in the dystopic city of Scorpia, where android rebels battle gangs of genetically enhanced humans. But it’s also a crime-thriller, focusing on the daring heroism of Captain Copernicus Kane and his future-crime solving team of Oscuri Trackers. And also there are these terrifying flying Skreaf demons who have evil magic so, you know, add some fantasy in there. And there’s a pet otter, too. That’s pretty much four genres.

After you’ve finished The Last City, mix up another gin and tonic and read the second book in the series, the recently released The Forgotten City.  Enjoy the most entertaining mash of storytelling you’re likely to find since Sir Ian McKellan broke into your house and drunkenly told you stories of his youth upon the Thames.

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Rumble Fish, by S.E. Hinton (1975)

Recommended by: Rob Moran

It’s been exactly 30 years since Francis Ford Coppola made his moody cinematic adaptation (featuring Mickey Rourke at his brooding best), but S.E. Hinton’s original novel packs just as much atmosphere in its descriptions of trouble-making teens as they instigate knife fights and poetically shoot the shit amongst the sweltering pool halls, drunken street parties and abandoned water sewers of some small-town American ‘burb.

Focusing on two charismatic and tragic heroes in 14-year-old gang kid Rusty James and his mysterious, world-weary older brother The Motorcycle Boy, Hinton’s sweat-drenched novel is a compact 140-page gut-punch — meaning you can read in one quick seaside sitting before the summer heat drives you inside.

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Preacher, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon (1996-2012)

Recommended by: Erin Turner

Jesse Custer is a possessed preacher hunting down God. He’s accompanied by Tulip and Cassidy, the drunk Irish Vampire that makes Spike look like a choirboy. It’s the shady characters of Preacher that make it the perfect summer read.

People have tried to bring the graphic novel to the screens for decades. A TV series was abandoned by HBO in 2008 because it was too dark and controversial (yes, the makers of vampire soft-porn thought this was too much). But last month AMC announced that they had commissioned a pilot, with rumours that Seth Rogen is involved. Read Preacher before it’s bigger than Breaking Bad.

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This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Diaz (2012)

Recommended by: Genevieve Fricker

I read this book last summer upon a friend’s recommendation, and I haven’t read anything since that has affected me as much. It’s a collection of short stories about love — new love, fading love, doomed love — centred around the deeply romantic yet ultimately flawed Yunior. I’ve made it sound like it should have been published by Mills and Boon, but let me tell you, it is utterly shattering.

Incredibly intimate and vividly detailed (despite Diaz’s sparse prose style), This Is How You Lose Her is highly recommended for a shot of summer feels.

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Seven Little Australians, by Ethel Turner (1894)

Recommended by: A.H. Cayley

Every Australian child should read Seven Little Australians. Every Australian adult should read Seven Little Australians. I read it once a year, not so much by choice as by compulsion, when a deep yearning fills my heart, pulling me back to Misrule — the loving but chaotic home of the Woolcot children, up the Parramatta River.

In this book is a nation’s identity, still amazingly constant 120 years later. The heat, the deafening hum of cicadas, the heavy scent of eucalyptus and the sad but brilliant fury of every summer sunset are the perfect reader context for a book that so effortlessly portrays the soul of our land, and of us.

The seven devils with whom we concern ourselves evoke at once both the larrikin spirit and the historic sadness of our young country, and the personality of our summers, which blaze bright and fierce — as though they may never die — until the sombre Autumn moves in as it always will, despite our heartbreak, to hush proceedings.

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The Scott Pilgrim Series, by Bryan Lee O’Malley (2004-2010)

Recommended by: Cameron Tyeson

Graphic novels! They’re fun. They’re light. And they make for a great summer read. The Scott Pilgrim series (you know, the ones that got made into a bloody brilliant little movie not too long ago) are a perennial favourite of the genre, following titular Canadian hero Scott Pilgrim, who must battle and defeat the seven evil exes of American ninja delivery girl Ramona Flowers in order to win her heart.

There’s nothing too heavy in any of them to weigh down the mind. Plus each volume will only take about an hour to read, which is precisely the right amount of time during which you’ll be able to continuously be outside without melting into a sweaty, sweaty puddle of dead.

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Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent (2013)

Recommended by: Brigid Dixon

Based on real events, Burial Rites follows Agnes, the last woman to be executed in Iceland. Needless to say, this isn’t your usual summer literary fling — but for all its seasonal inappropriateness, it is completely enthralling.

The debut novel from young Adelaide author Hannah Kent has received a lot of heavyweight praise, and for good reason. It is beautifully descriptive, full of engaging characters, and leaves you feeling a little bit haunted and totally enmeshed in the harsh Icelandic setting — no small feat in the height of an Australian summer. Take it with you on a trip to the beach, and I challenge you to not be seasonally transported.

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“BUT YOU DIDN’T INCLUDE MY FAVOURITE BOOK!” we hear you yelling, loudly and quite rudely, at your screen. Post your own recommendation in the comments below.