From the banks of the Seine to the seas of the Arctic, here are five books from the desk of The Disco to wash away the summer heat. Jot these down for your next run to the library.
Lucy Cooke | 2022 | 400 pg.
When I think about how I could’ve gone into science as a career, and the many reasons why I did not, it is books like these that bring me the learning satisfaction I crave without the stress of another degree. Popular science is a gift to the science nerds among us who want to know but not study, and Lucy Cooke’s personal, humorous, and exciting addition to the controversial genre is certainly water in a desert. She challenges the overwhelming number of conclusions early scientists made about women and womanhood based on a toxic cocktail of misogyny, confirmation bias, and bad science when studying the females of any species (if they studied them at all). Cooke, with a cutting wit and flowing comedic tone, offers her research and that of her more open-minded modern colleagues in the field of zoology as inspiration to us all to look more closely at the world around us and the conclusions we too have made.
Norman Ohler | 2016 | 368 pg.
Perhaps the book I’ve recommended most to people over the last few years, Ohler, with his unmatched narrative style, made me reconsider everything I thought I knew about historical non-fiction. Fast-paced and unexpectedly intriguing, Blitzed provides a new lens with which to consider a conflict we likely perceived as already completely documented. What Ohler demonstrates, though, is that World War II is a story we only think we know the gist of. But with every page turn of this book, I learned there's so much more to that conflict, period, and the personalities involved than I was ever taught in school. Blitzed introduces a disturbing and largely unspoken layer to the Second World War in a way that nearly reads like fiction. If only it were.
Becca Fitzpatrick | 2009 | 391 pg.
Set in southern Maine during the early aughts, Becca Fitzpatrick captures everything that was beautiful and sacred about the golden age of young adult fiction and fantasy romance. We have the grungy, mysterious new kid in class with a shrouded past no one seems to know but we’re all dying to learn, alongside the rigid straight-A student who has no idea just how much her life is about to change. Released just after the crown jewel of the genre, The Twilight Saga, and in the midst of series like Hunger Games and the lesser-know Knight Angels trilogy, Fitzpatrick ambitiously sought to usher the genre’s growing audience into a world a bit darker, a bit less flashy, and a touch more tragic than that of the stories of the day. She succeeded with the book becoming both a New York Times Bestseller and the topic of conversation amongst my middle school friends for the years that followed.
Maurice LeBlanc | 1912 | 271 pg.
The Crystal Stopper is certainly not LeBlanc’s most famous work, but what it lacks in fame, it certainly makes up for in alluring suspense and a heart-racing mystery that engulfs you early and releases you only once you have closed the book for good. LeBlanc and his gentleman thief, “Arsène Lupin”, have brought us to the edge of our seats time and time again, but I assure you this particular installment in their adventures is unique. It stretches our faith in our protagonist a step and a half further than we’re accustomed to, pushing us to engage our own detective skills with as much fervor as Lupin himself. The layers here, much like the romance LeBlanc added to Eight Strokes of the Clock, add in place of butterflies, something like moths of desperation and anxiousness, equal to true romance in how out of place it is in a Lupin tale. It is a tantalizing read, perhaps more than most, but not so much so that causes stress to the reader. No, it is, despite everything, hope one can expect to feel in this work of LeBlanc’s. Hope we didn’t know we needed, but are delighted to have.
Priya Parker | 2018 | 320 pg.
With an electrifying friendliness, Parker offers us a new way to gather, host, and facilitate the people we love and even the ones we don’t. My parents rarely hosted events at our home, but I have always contained a desire to create a space, an environment in my home in which I can gather people who feel they are better off because they came. This book, soon to be a permanent fixture in my personal library, has the thoughtfulness, the wisdom, and the variety that demonstrates Parker’s principles of communing with others in a way I hope to implement in the years to come. Whether you’re hosting standups, movie nights, funerals, dinners, or conventions, Parker has much insight to offer from her own failures and successes on how we can gather better and therefore have better relationships.
