Five Books To Help You Feel The Heat, fun stuff edition

A bonus recommendation, our monthly playlist, a poem, and more

On The Beach At Biarritz by Joaquin Sorolla, 1906.

Welcome to this month’s Fun Stuff Edition of Five Books For, a newsletter for people who love great stories. This edition used to be paywalled so if you haven’t joined us for this before then welcome!

Over at Global Comment this month’s Great Adaptations column is on Agatha Christie’s Evil Under The Sun - a great book and the most fun summer movie you could wish for. If you’ve seen the movie, I’d love to hear your favourite outfit moment from it.

As always for this edition, we have a bonus recommendation, a poem, a playlist and some reading links, all in keeping with this month’s theme of simmering summer reading. I hope you’ll find something here to surprise and delight you. If you’re not already subscribed, you can receive this newsletter directly to your inbox by clicking the button below. Everything is free although if you’d like to support the newsletter with a paid subscription, the option is right there too.

Let’s dive in!

---

Bonus recommendation: My Summer Darlings by May Cobb

“Inky pines sway above me, their trunks groaning in the breeze. It’s not the first time I’ve been out here, not by a long shot, but it’s the first time I’ve been in this position where all I can see is the sky above me. The moon is like a silver hook caught in the treetops, and as I gaze up at it, I want to yell for help, I want to shriek, but I can’t form the sounds, so the scream stays trapped in my throat.”

So what’s it about? Jen, Kittie and Cynthia are childhood friends, having grown up together in the charming East Texas town of Cedartown. Jen has recently moved back after an acrimonious divorce and is in the process of rebuilding her life, happy to have the support of her friends. But when the mysterious Will Harding moves into the neighbourhood, all three friends will find themselves caught up in a deadly game of attraction, and no one will emerge unscathed.

What’s great about it? You do need to suspend quite a bit of disbelief for this novel to work (I mean really, no one is THAT attractive) but if you can do that, it’s a lot of fun - if fun is quite the right word for a thriller. Told in alternating chapters by each of the three women, you can feel the sticky Texan heat radiating from the pages as each of the women becomes more deeply obsessed and involved with their new neighbour until we reach the end of the book, where one final twist awaits.

Give it a try if: you love easy thrillers; you like mystery or detective stories; you love female characters who misbehave; you love books set in the southern US; you love books about rich people doing bad things.

---

This month’s playlist

I can’t think of a band that more encapsulates the idea of summer than The Beach Boys, so this month I've linked to their Greatest Hits album so that you can revel in the sound of summer. There’s also a documentary about them on Disney+ which I’m looking forward to watching when I can find the time.

---

This month’s poem

This

By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Walking mid-summer
in the warm summer rain
there is summer in my
step and summer in my skin,
summer in the scent of soil
and summer in my blood
and there is nothing else
I’m searching for but to walk
in the rain in the summery world
with summer in each stride
and in each breath summer
and a summer breeze with its
warm summer touch and it’s
summer, mygod, I’m alive,
and it’s summer right now,
and I, no stranger to winter,
say yes, I say yes, yes to summer.

Found via Words That Fly, my favourite poetry Substack.

This

---

This month’s reading links

Following on from our trashy books edition, this article explores how Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann changed the publishing industry. (LitHub, free)

A Sherlock Holmes opera? How has this not already happened? (The Times, paywall).

Agatha Christie experts share their thoughts on Kenneth Branagh’s latest Poirot adaptation (LA Times, free).

An unpublished interview with Gabriel García Márquez (El País, free).

A new interview with Kate Atkinson to introduce her latest Jackson Brodie book (The Guardian, free).

If you also find language fascinating, this article will interest you: 16 Heartwarming Words And Phrases With No English Equivalent (Nice News, free).

On the same topic: how Great British Bake Off recipes sound to American viewers (McSweeney’s, free).

A light summer read: what it was like to design for Barbie (LitHub, free).

A summer essay from

Holly Huitt

entitled Whisper Sting. Great writing. (Substack, free).

Whisper sting

---

Thanks for reading!

I hope you’ve had a great summer (or winter, if you’re in the southern hemisphere!) and that you’re excited for the season to turn. I certainly am, mostly because it’s so hot where I live that summer is our dead season nature-wise and we end up stuck indoors a lot of the time, so autumn is going to be very welcome indeed.

Let’s chat in the comments, or you can reply to me directly via DM or email. I’ll be back next month with a new theme and more reading joy.

Happy reading!

Kate

All content here at Five Books For is free, but if you’d like to support the newsletter with a paid subscription then I’d be immensely grateful. You can click the button below to switch to paid subscription at any time. I have kept the prices low to make it more manageable so the cost comes in at only €5 per month or €50 per year - less than the cost of one cup of coffee a month! Thank you to all of the paid supporters who make this newsletter possible.