Dear Aa readers,
Summer is near, and with it comes a season of movement, exploration, and the subtle magic of stepping outside feeling just a little easier. Between terrace hangouts, flights caught, and the usual hop from one thing to the next, there’s one feeling we find ourselves returning to: summer stillness.
Those quiet moments when time slows down, when your only task is to follow the sun, stare into the blue, and follow the clouds, or get lost in a really good book.That’s exactly what this post is about. We’re sharing our Aa Summer Reads, a personal selection of old and new favorites we love, and hope you will too. Think of them as travel companions, memory markers, and portals to somewhere else entirely.
We can’t wait for you to dive in.
Xx,
Nanuka, Zaina & Awa
Nanuka’s Reads
These aren’t your average beach reads, but if you like your sun-warmed days laced with melancholy, mystery, and a touch of metaphysical awe, here’s your summer syllabus. Strange, spare, a little sad, and a little sublime, they’re perfect for long, lazy days when you’re craving a heatwave for the soul.
Morning and Evening — Jon Fosse
A man is born, a man dies, and the in between is told in Fosse’s signature, sparse, rhythmic prose. It’s slow, introspective, and deeply existential. More about being than doing, perfect if you’re into meditative reads about life’s quiet edges.
Han Kang builds an elegy out of white things: snow, rice, salt — layering memory, grief, and rebirth like a minimalist art piece. It’s a ghost story told in fragments, haunting not with plot, but with pure, distilled feeling.
Alphabetical Diaries — Sheila Heti
Imagine spilling your soul and then letting the alphabet sort it out. That’s what Heti does in this rule-breaking remix of her private thoughts. Raw, funny, and weirdly revealing, it’s like reading a personality through a kaleidoscope.
An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures – Clarice Lispector
A love story, kind of, but mostly a deep dive into one woman’s inner world as she learns how to be, how to want, and how to not disappear in the process. Lispector’s writing is disjointed, intimate, and quietly explosive. The kind that hits harder the lonelier you feel.
Small Boat — Vincent Delecroix
Based on a real 2021 tragedy, Small Boat follows a French coastguard operator who takes a call from drowning migrants and does nothing. It’s a chilling meditation on bureaucracy, moral detachment, and the stories we tell ourselves to sleep at night. It’s spare, unflinching, and lingers like guilt you can’t quite name.
Awa’s Reads
Reading feels like sunshine to me. A way to escape, to dream, to find refuge. So you can imagine how overjoyed I get when summer rolls around and I finally have the time and space to read without interruption. There’s nothing better than ending the season with a stack of books to look back on. Likely (most definitely) all a little shriveled from ocean water, tossed in beach bags, and carrying a grain of sand or two between their pages.
Death in Midsummer – Yukio Mishima
Each short story gave me full-body chills. So immersive and precise in their emotional weight, they reminded me why I fell in love with reading in the first place. Mishima captures the stillness of grief and the subtle violence of ordinary life in a hauntingly beautiful way.
Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone – James Baldwin
Baldwin holds up a mirror to what it means to be Black in America, revealing the emotional and spiritual toll of constantly having to become ‘someone’ in a world that rarely sees you fully. It’s about the beauty and the burden of self-expression, the fragility of identity, and the cost of the relentless pursuit of belonging: in art, in love, in life.
Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle – Carl Jung
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an easy read. It’s dense, abstract, and often asks more questions than it answers (upsi). But that’s exactly what makes it so compelling. Jung’s exploration of meaning, chance, and the patterns that shape our lives left me both disoriented and a little more grounded than before.
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This story has stayed with me since I first learned how to read, evolving from a bedtime story into a guide through questions of love, loss, and what it means to truly see. I love how The Little Prince reflects the way we change with time. How a single story can shift meaning as we grow, offering new wisdom with each revisit. It’s more than a book; it’s a mirror for the soul.
There is something so tender about Bâ ’s writing. Since I am also from Senegal, I found myself seeking solace in her words, plunging myself into the familiar unknown through her storytelling. It is a reflection on womanhood, friendship, and navigating the weight of tradition and change.
Zaina’s Reads
In the summer, I’m no longer focused on the pure survival instinct of staying warm and dodging rain. I’m focused on learning. There’s room to explore the weird, uncomfortable, and the unknown. Nothing like a bit of existential discomfort, philosophical prose, a few tears, and politically-charged sociological thought by the beach.
Black Skin, White Masks – Frantz Fanon
Fanon uses a blend of philosophy and psychoanalysis to examine race, selfhood, and the distortion of Black identity under the colonial gaze. It’s brilliant, honest and urgent.
What Design Can’t Do – Silvio Lorusso
If chaos is the common denominator of our lives, Lorusso offers a sharp, meme-filled critique of design and its failure to impose order in that chaos. He explores the field’s power and its inescapable limitations, driven by a deep sense of disillusionment with both design and the world. You don’t need to be a designer to understand it.
A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
Two Afghan women’s lives are intertwined through decades of loss and survival, as they navigate amid the shifting, often brutal landscape of Kabul from the early 1960s to the early 2000s. Very heartbreaking and very tender.
SCUM Manifesto- Valerie Solanas
For a short booklet, SCUM Manifesto is… a lot. Though it’s not meant as satire, reading it like a metaphorical rant makes it easier to digest— it’s messy, extreme, sometimes hilarious, and often deeply flawed. Some parts haven’t aged well, but still an iconic work of radical feminist frustration.
Norwegian Wood- Haruki Murakami
Controversial and questionable, yes – but also dreamlike, melancholic, and intimate. For me, this had an ache to it that captured the raw, uncomfortable edges of young adulthood, first loves, and mental struggle. Some parts shocked me, others left me with some soft, painful truths.
Phantom Tollbooth- Norton Juster
A childhood favorite I recently returned to (and a breath of air between heavier reads). A mysterious tollbooth sends a boy into strange lands of logic and language, reminding us not to take meaninglessness for granted. It’s a whimsical, punny adventure about turning boredom into curiosity.
