It’s summer. The season when most folks take a little time off and travel to somewhere with a beach. It seems like everyone always has the best fiction recommendations to pack in your beach bag. But as much as I love a good romcom, sometimes I just want to read something different. If this is you and you are looking for a great summer read that doesn’t include going googoo over the moon in June, might I recommend some of these great nonfiction books for your beach reading?

If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you know that I’m a sucker for a great book about wildfires. And this one was no exception. When this event happened in January 2025, I remember seeing the online footage of people trying to drive out of their neighborhoods that had become hellscapes. This book gives us the facts and science behind why those images happened. I thought this was fascinating. A word of caution - a lot of celebrity homes burned down in these fires, and I was shocked that Soboroff did not mention one of them. If you are here for all the hot goss, you might want to pass. I mean, you should read it anyway because it’s a good book, but it won’t give you the TMZ content. Overall, this was a highly enjoyable read that I polished off in a few days. Would it be too meta to read about LA burning while getting burned at the beach?

I go in and out with Mr. Doctorow. Sometimes he gets a little to Sci-Fi for me. However, when I saw the title here, I was intrigued. I’ll admit that I didn’t just jump in and read this one the first day I checked it out. It kind of got moved to the bottom of half of my To Be Read pile. But then I read The Coddling of the American Mind (see Brain Work post for more info). That one explained how our thinking has changed. This one seemed like a good follow-up because if you are looking around and thinking, “Man, things have gotten worse,” Doctorow goes into detail about why. I wish his How to Fix It section was maybe a little more actionable for regular people, but other than that, this one was a good read. Be cautioned, though - if you read this one on the beach, you might just want to stay. 

Lindy has been on my radar for a while. I read Shrill and tried to watch the TV show, but only got about two or three episodes in before giving up. I don’t hate her, but I just haven’t found my point of connection. When I saw that she had a new book coming out, I thought, “Why not? I need something to keep busy entertained in traffic.” Turns out Lindy had a crisis of sorts after her TV show ended, COVID happened, her polyamorus husband found a girlfriend, and she got braces. So she set out on a road trip to Key West after hearing The Beach Boys song 
"Kokomo" and thinking there had to be something better. Along the way, she learned there is no place in Florida called Kokomo. However, there is one in Indiana (I grew up there. We drove through it all the time.) I really like this Lindy West. Would I make the same choices she did? Nope, probably not. But I do think we could be friends. This is a great read for summer. Why not read about someone else’s road trip while on your own. And if you listen to the audio, like I did, you can hear audio clips from Lindy’s actual trip. This is my fave of hers so far.

I enjoy saying, “I told you so.” I know it’s not the most polite thing to say, but when someone wants to argue about something which they know nothing about, I love being proved right and bam! “I told you so!” I should probably own a t-shirt that expresses that sentiment. When I saw this book, I knew it was going on my TBR pile. First, let me say that I loved this author. Matt Kaplan is a science writer for The Economist, after having studied as a paleontologist. Both of those areas of study are far outside my wheelhouse. But he has a sense of humor about things and presents it in a way that not-science people can understand. For example, did you realize that the mRNA technology that saved us all during COVID almost didn’t happen because the founding scientist couldn’t get funding when no one saw the value of her work. Yeah, I told you so. Or as Sheldon Cooper says, “I informed you thusly. Oh, I so informed you thusly.” Feel free to add this one to your beach bag…and maybe also be thankful you weren’t a pregnant woman in the 1700 and 1800s.

I don’t know how it happened exactly, but somehow I became nonfiction reader. I know, right? I’ve usually considered myself a fan of fiction, but here lately I’ve been choosing the nonfiction. I hope you enjoy these as much as I did.

Happy beach reading, either way…
:) Amanda