Summer Reading Assignments for Adults

Cover of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”.

Read “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” for your book club this month. Do you have any clue what your friends are talking about during the discussion? Is it possible that you accidentally read “All the Light We Cannot See” instead?

Visual instructions for building a dresser.

Read the manual for the dresser you swore you’d build over the summer, now that you have so much more time.

Two people's hands and a tiger's paw all wearing wedding rings.

If you could be the wife of an aviator, a time traveler, or a tiger, which would you choose, and why?

Three people standing around water cooler.

Skim the online recaps of all forty-four episodes of “Ozark.” How much of the viewing experience is lost by not actually watching a single episode? When you talk about it over lunch, can your co-workers tell?

A stack of four books one book open and pagedown and a crumpled bill and coins.

Rank the following books by how much money you spent in late fees at the library in order to finish them: “The Goldfinch,” “City on Fire,” “War and Peace,” “Middlemarch,” “Dune,” “Infinite Jest.”

SpiderMan sitting crosslegged and reading on laptop.

Pore over an article about the new Marvel show. Do you agree with the author about how this show fits within the overarching Marvel Cinematic Universe? Share your pointed and scathing opinion in the comments section. Follow this up with a Twitter battle over the casting of the new Marvel feature film.

Person at beach sitting in chair and reading a book.

Read the first ten pages of “Beach Read.” Express your disappointment with the lack of sex scenes. Ask your friend Jackie to tell you when things start to get juicy, then skip to that section.

A typewriter.

Finally agree to read your cousin’s screenplay. Is it just you, or does the plot feel a lot like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” only set in Victorian England?

Hand reaching toward Michelle Obama's book Becoming.

Open your copy of Michelle Obama’s “Becoming.” Read the first chapter. How does it compare with the first time you read Chapter 1, more than a year ago? Close the book and outline a plan to re-read that same chapter, a year from now.