2024 Summer Book Guide: 10 Colorado authors help you pick your beach reads

In this lovely book, written in short sections, Renkl shares botanical, animal, political and personal views from her garden. If you’re a fan of Renkl’s New York Times column, or if you just like the idea of watching a year progress in a highly observant person’s garden, this book is full of rich and thoughtful moments to savor.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with all the plates I find myself juggling, and I wonder what would happen if I put some of them down. I don’t often think about the intersection of overwork and our nation’s complicated human history, and perhaps I’m encouraged not to think about this question by design. In this brilliant and timely book, Hersey, the founder of The Nap Ministry taps into the power of rest to disrupt the corrupting power of capitalism and white supremacy. One of my favorite writers, Lucille Clifton, used to say that she wrote “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comforted,” and Hersey’s wise and helpful book aims to do both.

This is an incredible thriller with a “Black Mirror” vibe about a state-of-the-art AI home designed to meet your every need. I’ll admit that I’m a bit of a prose snob, and Sammy Scott is no slouch. His writing is top-notch, which is what initially drew me in, but what kept me reading was the complex and multilayered plot threaded with heart-rending pathos. And I should probably mention “BETA” is full of twists you won’t see coming. It’s fantastic — a story that feels like it could actually happen in real life.

This book is both tense and tender — a coming-of-age tale about a son growing up beneath a father with tremendous expectations. An exploration of grief and survival … while trapped inside the belly of a sperm whale. Jay Gardiner is a scuba diver who has an hour to escape before his oxygen runs out and his demons claim him. Trust me, this one will leave you breathless.

The first time I tried to read “Wolf Hall,” the first book in Hilary Mantel’s brilliant and moving trilogy of the life of Thomas Cromwell and his boss, Henry VIII, I put it down after only a few pages. I was overwhelmed. Then I tried again, and quit again. Finally, I watched the entire BBC miniseries version of “Wolf Hall,” straightened out who all the Thomases and Henrys and Catherines and Annes were, and tried reading it again, and it finally took. I read all three books and then read them again. At this point I’ve read them all several times over! An absolute tour de force of narrative voice, deep humanity, and ideas about how to live in this strange and wondrous world. It’s a life’s achievement (Mantel’s writing, not my labored reading).

As brief as “Wolf Hall” is long, this beautiful little novel (145 pages) does something very unusual, telling the story of an entire generation of women — young mail-order brides from Japan around 1900 — in the collective first person. “On the boat we carried our husbands’ pictures in tiny oval lockets that hung on long chains from our necks,” Otsuka writes. “We carried them in the sleeves of our kimonos, which we touched often, just to make sure they were still there.” It is a heartbreaking and gorgeous novel about courage, endurance, and facing the unknown. It’s a window into the human experience that will stay with me forever. 

This is a tropical storm of a novel. The real world our main character finds herself in is strange — it won’t stop raining, things and people disappear, and she’s filled with memories of being in a mental hospital when she was younger. It’s all haunted. Still, the novel made me feel strangely joyful. Maybe it’s van den Berg’s incredible clarity of observation and image, or the emotional power of a woman and her family holding tight to what matters, even as the forces around them shift. 

An alien uses a fax machine to send amazing, spot-on observations about Earth to her home planet. But the alien is also a human girl named Adina, living in Philadelphia. But the girl is an alien in her home, in her life. All of those sentences are true, even though they seem to contradict each other. This funny, huge-hearted novel is about the truth of belonging and dis-belonging, and the idea that only from the outside can we see ourselves and our home clearly. I have never felt so human than reading Adina’s alien observations, and I have never identified more with alienation. Brilliant!

This is an action-packed story with a determined main character. Beth will capture your attention on page one and you will find yourself drawn into her fight for survival, then take pleasure in watching her faith and hard work lead to love, when least expected. This is an inspirational novel published by Bethany House in 2024.

This novel is a love story of many depths. This author is a master at probing the human spirit and defining all that a lesser author could not reveal. If you enjoy love, loss and self-discovery, this book will not disappoint. Published by Penguin Books in 2005, this was Kidd’s second novel. Her first, “The Secret Life of Bees,” was a New York Times Bestseller and became a film.

How has humanity lost its way with nature? And how can we find our way back? This book joins the apocalypse genre, yet is like no other I know. OK, this is fiction, but it reveals so many deeper truths, I can’t help but recommend it here. The novella is a concise epic, unpretentious yet ponderous, about a father and daughter, who are the last people on Earth. Through their journey, they reclaim through lyrical tenderness our interconnectedness to the natural world, at last, in our species’ final moments.

Much of the experience of Central American migrants crossing from Mexico into the United States remains veiled. Jason De León is an anthropologist who spent years studying the hidden lives and labor of coyotes, the guides who take migrants along this journey. Obliterating stereotypes and easy assumptions, De León masterfully crafts a readable, gripping popular ethnography. It will haunt you with its tragic stories of how failing politicians have forced so many people into the desperation of migrating north — and created the very conditions for the clandestine smuggling they condemn.

Gardner weaves together a tale about two of the most fascinating individuals in American history: Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Using newly uncovered information, this well-documented book is both scholarly and very readable. From the book’s opening chapter to Sitting Bull’s death at the end, it grabbed my attention and would not let go. Gardner is a master storyteller.

John Muir is regarded as one of the saviors of the American wilderness. Yet his efforts came at a price for the tribal peoples who occupied that wilderness. McNally shines a new light on a man who we can still regard as heroic but also had his darker sides. The book demonstrates that, despite our efforts to simplify them as either heroes or villains, the people who occupy our past were no less complicated than we are.  

Don’t be deceived by this slender volume: This the first of 12 books and counting featuring a warmly compassionate young man (Penric) who is accidentally possessed by/of a snarky, brilliant demon (Desdemona), an incident that sets them on a years-long path of helping others, often in extremely unexpected ways. Moreover, this book is just one of many ways into the extraordinary catalog of sci-fi and fantasy luminary Lois McMaster Bujold, who did a lot of her writing (like I have done) in the midst of finding Band-Aids, making meals, doing laundry and generally keeping a household going.  Her world-building is wildly inventive, but it’s her utterly appealing, deeply human characters who will stay with you.

Another gift for anyone who reads a much as I do and who has perhaps been known to panic when they finish a book and realize they don’t have another one queued up: “Rivers of London” is the first of a nine-book (and counting) series about British police officer Peter Grant, who discovers on one of his first nights on the job that he might be, well, a wizard. From there, Peter’s wry, self-aware first-person voice carries us into every corner of his beloved London in the company of his mysterious mentor, an even more mysterious housekeeper, a best friend who may not be, and a fat little dog named Toby. The magic in these books isn’t a metaphor for anything else; it’s magic — wild, unpredictable, fantastical, and often deadly — and that’s absolutely as it should be.​