SUMMER READING LIST READING LIST
The season’s best books, perfectly calibrated (Escapism! Romance! Enlightenment!) for maximum poolside enjoyment.
THE SURVIVAL GUIDE
Option B, as the title suggests, is not a book that Sheryl Sandberg planned or wanted to author. “The personal stuff was part of the journalling I did for five months. I didn’t write it for a book; I wrote it for myself,” says the Facebook COO over the phone from her office at the tech giant’s HQ in California. The period Sandberg is referring to was right after the unexpected death of her husband, Dave Goldberg, who collapsed in the gym while the couple was on vacation two years ago. “I later learned that journalling was a very, very important part of the healing process,” she says. In fact, Sandberg has become a bit of an expert in the art of surviving the undesirable, having penned, with co-author Adam Grant, a book about “resilience, our capacity to recover from adversity.” The book, which combines Sandberg’s own story with research and the experiences of others, is designed as a how-to manual for building what she refers to as a “muscle” for surviving and then thriving after life’s bumps. “Obviously I was happier before, and I would trade all this growth a hundred times to have Dave back, but my life is definitely more meaningful,” she says, noting that she’s a lot more focused on the little moments of happiness, like “how good [her] coffee tastes or when [her] daughter smiles.” She has kept up her journalling, in a way: Each night, she writes about three happy moments she experienced during the day. Most recent entry? “My son had his birthday party on Saturday, and he wrote me a thank-you note the next morning. That’s a moment of joy.”
THE CL ASS ACT
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Plum Sykes’ new book, Party Girls Die in Pearls, is set at Oxford University in the 1980s, and The Bergdorf Blondes author was herself a student at Oxford in the late ’80s. So, yes, it’s a bit autobiographical (minus the “heiress found murdered in her tutor’s apartment” stuff, of course). “I had such a laugh when I was up at Oxford,” says Sykes from New York, one of several stops on her book tour this summer. “I also know it’s a world that’s very interesting for other people to read about, especially that time period. It was very extravagant, very decadent, and there was no social media so people were pretty unreserved about what they were doing.” The novel—which is an OTT romp through the lives of overprivileged undergrads seen through the eyes of a newly arrived country lass named Ursula—is also a murder mystery, which Sykes, 47, describes as “Nora Ephron meets Stephen King, a funny horror.” She wrote some of it from her home in London and some from her cottage in the Cotswolds—all of it threaded through with a delightfully dark satirical streak. “It’s a social comedy; I tried to make it light and witty, but there’s a lot of heavy lifting that goes into that!” she says. “Like any joke, it takes a lot of work.”