Draft Four: Summer recommendations
20 side dishes for lazy days.
Last Sunday I celebrated my 44th birthday in a great cocktail bar in Lecce, Italy, amazed by their menu of drinks inspired by cities along Puglia’s coast. (It’s called Quanto Basta. Go now!) At one point, my partner asked what were 3 things I hoped would happen by the end of the year. I shrugged her question off at first, but then I realized 2025 is nearing its halfway point (oh shit!) and worried a little about the state of my own promises to myself.
After the holiday I dived into a week that involved three journalism training sessions, and I’m writing this at the end of the last one, over a glass of wine in my brother’s house in Cluj – they left cherries and strawberries out for me. All this to say I will get back to you on the state of my promises to myself and yearly evaluations. (This is what I wrote on turning 43 last year).
Until then I have a longish list of summer side dishes for you – mostly things to read, and listen to. Some are new, some I’ve recommended before since the start of the year but are worth another shoutout.
If you enjoy any of them, please tell me! (I’ll link books to Cărturești, my favorite Romanian bookstore chain. I don’t get any money from this, I just belive in them; especially if you’re Romanian they’re a good place to purchase from).
📗 Perfection, by Vicenzo Latronico. An expat couple in Berlin always chooses the best house decorations, the perfect fonts, the appropriate restaurants; why isn’t it enough? At 120 pages this is a slim book that packs a punch in its critique of the Monocle millennial lifestyle, one that is perfectly curated, yet never enough. Latronico is caring with his characters because, as he puts it, they are also him. And many of us, too.
📗 On Freedom, by Timothy Snyder. In his beautiful book-length meditation, Snyder lays out five conditions needed for freedom: Sovereignty (the ability to see others as free, too), unpredictability (being able to act in ways no one can fully anticipate), mobility (people must be able to move – across borders, classes, and opportunities), factuality (lies serve those who want to control, not liberate), and solidarity (freedom is sustained through mutual care, not isolation.)
📗 Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. This gem of a short book is the 2024 Booker Prize winner, and it tells the story of 24 hours on a space station. If you need a little zooming out filled with wonder and humility, you can’t do better. (Also in 🇷🇴).
📑 European Press Prize winners 2025. We handed out the EPP Prizes last week, and they are all amazing stories. A special mention here for the winner from Moldova, and this essay on motherhood as the icebergs are melting.
📗 Meditations for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman. Read as prescribed: one chapter a day, for a month. It’s an ode to imperfectionism, an acknowledgement our time is finite, our capacity for control is finite, and our ability to do things is finite. It is because and not in spite of this finitude that we should act in the world. (Also in 🇷🇴).
📗 Ce am învățat de la Graham Greene (What I Learned from Graham Greene), by Andrei Gorzo. The film critic adamantly writes against his family memoir as a form of healing, but I don’t think he’ll mind if that’s the effect it had on this reader. A beautiful story about a father and son boding over spy stories in the troubled Romania of the 1990s.
🎧 Ira Glass on 30 years of This American Life. TAL has been a life changing show for me, and it’s taught me most of what I know about storytelling. In this interview, creator and host Ira Glass explains the magic – FYI, it includes serious references to semiotics.
🎧 The Good Whale is a narrative podcast from Serial Productions that tackles a story which took me back to childhood: what happened to Willy (actually named Keiko), the orca from the Free Willy movie, and what does the story tell us about the lengths we go to for redemption.
🎞️ Why Books Still Bind, a keynote by Ruxandra Gîdei from The Power of Storytelling. (Yes, we’ve uploaded some of the talks from our March conference to YouTube). In this one, Ruxandra, a content creator focused on books shows us that in a world racing toward speed and efficiency, literature slows us down just enough to truly see one another.
📗 James, Percival Everett. This fantastic Pulitzer-prize winning novel retells the story you know from Huck Finn from the perspective of Jim (James), the runaway slave. It’s a book about coming into being through taking over the narrative, as Jim does when he gets a hold of a pencil and starts telling his own story. (Also in 🇷🇴).
🎧 Rushmere. The new Mumford & Sons album is just what you need to take a breath and recharge. Also, this line works well for any journalist not yet a cynic: “Don’t leave the liars in the honest places”.
📗 Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler. This classic Sci-Fi story starts in 2024, with fires raging across California, people locking themselves in gated communities to defend from predators and zombie-like poor people, and a “Make America Great Again” president turning the country over to private companies to run water supplies, even company towns. Where does one find hope in such a world?
📗 Otranto, by Maria Corti. I read this while in the fabulous city of Otranto. It’s a classic work fictionalizing the sacking of the Italian port by the Ottomans in 1480. (I’m not spoiling anything). Told from five different perspectives, it’s both about that siege, but also about that time in life when one has to make a life-changing choice.
📑 The Last Hospitals in Gaza, The New Yorker. One of very few accounts from on the ground in Gaza, by an American doctor that went in to visit and help. He shows the destruction wrought by Israel in what should be sanctuaries not cemeteries, much of it done with malice.
📗 One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad. This is a book that has, at its core, a critique of our impassivity at the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. After a year and a half and numerous international organization calling Israel’s retaliation for the October 7 attacks genocide, nothing much has changed there, and we don’t seem to mind.
📑 Is It Happening Here?, The New Yorker. A story about Hungary’s authoritarian regime, and how Orban built it without resorting to the stereotype of exercising state power through violence and jailing. A good reminder of how this illiberal model looks like when it works.
📗 Yellowface, by Rebecca F. Kuang. What happens when a young writer decides to appropriate her more famous friend’s unpublished novel? A page-turner about loneliness, racism, and discrimination in publishing, one that is wickedly funny.
📑 The Superbowl of Internet Beefs, The Atlantic. Charlie Warzel writes about how nobody wins in the Trump-Musk breakup. What is actually worth doing is looking at it as the ur-Internet beef in an era where most of our time is spent fighting Internet wars, or cheering on them. But does that really create any kind of change in the world? To quote Warzel: “A cage match is easier to watch than a discussion about who deserves benefits and resources.”
📗 The Courage to Be Disliked, by Fumitake Koga & Ichiro Kishimi. Master and apprentice converse about letting other people deal with their own problems, the chance to choose what events in your life mean, and finding a purpose outside of yourself. (Also in 🇷🇴).
🎧 Funny Little Fears. This album by Damiano David (of Måneskin fame) is syrupy and perfect for this summer. I developed a mild obsession for Tangerine and Born With a Broken Heart.