The Public Discourse Summer Reading List: 2024
Editors’ Note: Our editorial team compiled a list of the books we are reading, or plan to read, this summer. Here are our top picks, ranging from provocative to purely entertaining; from classic literature to psychology; from laid-back reads for family vacations to texts worth sitting with and returning to again and again. May they challenge, stretch, inspire, and delight you.
Editors’ Picks: Fiction
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Editors’ Picks: Nonfiction
- Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith
- Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland
- The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
- Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout by Cal Newport
- Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect by John Inazu
- Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church by Stephen O. Pressly
- What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman
- The World We Have Lost by Peter Laslett
- Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought by Jean Elshtain
- Women and the Common Life: Love, Mariage, and Feminism by Christopher Lasch
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