7 recent books perfect for your summer reading list — including one by a Columbia author

With summer just around the bend, book lovers will be making library holds, browsing bookshop shelves and stacking their to-read piles precariously high.

A number of early 2024 titles deserve time and space in these (theoretically) roomier months. Here are just seven to consider, including one from a familiar face to Columbia readers.

Hanif Abdurraqib, "There's Always This Year"

Perhaps the most versatile — and best — writer we presently have, Abdurraqib wraps his own experiences of time and belonging, failure and community into the love-hate story of LeBron James and the city of Cleveland. Here, personal lives encounter stakes just as high as in the sporting life, in the sense that every next tick of the clock represents a chance to come together and rewrite our histories.

Kaveh Akbar, "Martyr!"

One of his generation's most sublime poets, Akbar's debut novel revolves around a character much like himself: a young Iranian-American writer in recovery, seeking inspiration. Still working out the childhood loss of his mother, the frustrated poet becomes fixated with the art of death: that is, how to make your final moments count. Akbar's work here is marked both by stark realism and moments of transfiguring prose that reshape the weather around his characters and readers.

James Kaplan, "3 Shades of Blue"

Subtitled "Miles Davis John Coltrane Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool," Kaplan's jazz history is a true character study, digging into the fine musical details, the dalliances with drugs, and the surprisingly gentle bonds which propelled those three figures through the music world and toward each other. Kaplan casts these musical lions as the brilliant, flawed characters they were and exhibits how all great art is made in the spaces between talent and good fortune.

Jason Kirk, "Hell is a World Without You"

If you darkened the door of an evangelical youth group in the late 1990s or early aughts, Jason Kirk's novel will ring painfully, beautifully true. Something like James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man" all amped up on energy drinks and Christian rock, the book compassionately navigates a world of shaky absolutes, persistent shame, young lust and life-jacket friendships alongside its teenaged characters.

Laura McHugh, "Safe and Sound"

A Columbia novelist with a national audience, McHugh excels at excavating the roots of what we take for granted: family ties, small-town values, the ways we talk when we talk about safety. Her latest revolves around a pair of Missouri sisters living in the continued, awful wake of their older cousin's disappearance — she vanished while babysitting, while they slept peacefully in the same house.

Readers will gravitate toward the sisters, realistic but charismatic in their amateur detective work, and appreciate how McHugh continues to write the soul of a place with clear eyes and a compassionate spirit.

Lydia Millet, "We Loved it All"

Millet, one of our finest novelists and an Unbound Book Festival veteran, crafted one of the most virtuosic yet matter-of-fact memoirs in recent memory. Millet does something rare that, upon reading, seems so obvious and vital — situating her personal story in context of the entire planet. This is a work about creativity, community, climate change and the ways we all belong to one another.

More: Acclaimed novelist Lydia Millet brings good-neighbor tale to Unbound Book Festival

Tommy Orange, "Wandering Stars"

A spiritual sequel, with specific threads tethering back, to his remarkable debut novel "There There," Tommy Orange's latest ties together the generations of a Native American family. A citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, Orange creates a clear-eyed examination of the near and distant past, how it weighs some people down to the point of breaking — and just might liberate others.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter/X @aarikdanielsen.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: From mysteries to memoirs, your next great summer reads