We’re not quite halfway through 2016, but our previous list of books we were looking forward to peters out just around now. Plus, Book Expo America blew through town a few weeks ago, leaving heaps of publisher catalogs and free galleys in its wake. Winter—or, rather The Winds of Winter—may not be coming anytime soon, but summer is definitely here. And you’re going to want something to read besides that new Harry Potter book.
Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War by Mary Roach (6/7, Norton) A few weeks ago, a group of Reader staffers chatted in the lunchroom and began to wonder, for some reason, if Roach was still writing entertaining books about popular science with punchy one-word titles (eg, Stiffed, Bonk, Gulp). The answer, emphatically, is yes. —AL
Brighton by Michael Harvey (6/21, Ecco) Harvey, who usually writes Chicago-based thrillers (such as The Chicago Way) ventures further afield to Boston, where a journalist returns to the rough neighborhood where he grew up to save an old friend from murder charges. —AL
The Voyeur’s Motel by Gay Talese (7/12, Grove) Before he was famous for being a geriatric misogynist, Talese was best known for his writing. Judging by a sample in the New Yorker, his next book should reaffirm the latter (not sure there’s any going back on the former). —TR
American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin (8/2, Doubleday) The tale of Patty Hearst, the heiress who was kidnapped by a band of left-wing terrorists and then joined them in robbing banks and other crimes, captivated America during the 1970s. New Yorker writer and CNN legal analyst Toobin retells the story in all its weirdness. —AL
Terminated for Reasons of Taste: Other Ways to Hear Essential and Inessential Music by Chuck Eddy (9/2, Duke) The title of the book references the reason Eddy, another former Village Voice writer, was given for being fired from the New York alt-weekly. Their loss—his taste is unpredictable and unparalleled (his favorite album of last year was Nena’s Old School; number of other music writers who listed it at number one: zero), and without being condescending or snobbish, his fun, discursive, conversational writing will make you reexamine what you like and why you like it . —AL
