The Atlantic's Summer Reading Guide

"I Capture the Castle has the enjoyably familiar trappings of the Jane Austen marriage plot—there are wealthy bachelor neighbors and sisterly schemes in the damp yet charming English countryside. But in this book, the tropes collapse in on one another in comic and quietly poignant ways as the reader is welcomed into the nostalgic mood of interwar Britain, with its tea cozies and tweeds and trousseaus bought in London. It’s a novel that you sink into like a chintz armchair, only to emerge warm but wistful as the light fails and the evening mist appears..."

"The novel rewinds more than 100 years, beginning in the 19th century with a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and following his bloodline through the decades, with characters wandering to and around California until they end up back in the present day, in Oakland... he brilliantly captures the confusion of the youngest generation, which feels disconnected from its roots even as its inheritance weighs heavily."

"The soul of this short, disorienting book, which drifts between continents and cities, does indeed lie in the anonymous, dense suburbs north and south of Washington, D.C..."

"After following him from specialty-food shows to shrimping boats to new-employee orientation, you’ll never think of groceries the same way again."

"...he makes a convincing, mind-opening case that “the history of life on Earth is the history of life remaking Earth,” which means that humans are just one part of a changing, multifarious whole—and that we must work urgently to mitigate our disproportionate effects on the planet."

"It’s a powerful lesson that an artist is not only a person who planes towering poplar sculptures but also someone who removes a splinter from a child’s finger."

"You might not ever have heard of Schwartz, and it doesn’t really matter. Atlas’s biography of him is such a psychologically acute, stylishly executed portrait of a doomed genius and his milieu of New York intellectuals that it effortlessly propels the reader through its pages."

"This mix of memoir and efficiently recounted history covers 80 turbulent years...This book’s power comes from Wong’s broad sense of the patterns of Chinese history, reflected in the lives of a father and son, and from his ability to toggle effortlessly between the epic and the intimate."

"The book will have you scrutinizing your own preferences, but its true pleasure is unlocked simply by following along as a critic listens to music and thinks deeply about it—particularly one as intelligent, rigorous, and undogmatic as Wilson."

"Kristin’s saga, rich with detail, has shades of Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ tragedy and Brideshead Revisited’s piety, but more than anything, the story is deeply human."