The "Mega-Reads" That New Yorker Staff Writers Are Reading This Summer
These are the "mega-reads" – big novels, enrapturing trilogies, and illuminating histories – that the staff writers of The New Yorker are diving into this summer.

The Morning Star
Karl Ove Knausgaard"We live in a rational, scientific age. But what if it turned out to be only that—an age—and we were plunged back into the mystical, spiritual, enchanted, haunted world that existed before? The novels explore this question in an existentially grounded way. When an actual miracle occurs, and materialism is revealed to be an illusion, people who were already trying to understand their lives have to revise their views, just as we often have to change our minds about what it all means, when our world views falter."


Paperback, 2022
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War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy"It’s a novel I first read in college, and have thought back on frequently in the past year and a half as images from Israel’s assault on Gaza and the ensuing humanitarian crisis have sat strangely on my social-media feed alongside reactions to celebrity gossip and debates about the state of book reviewing. The boundaries of war and peace were collapsing in Tolstoy’s time as well."
Paperback, 2009
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The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien"I did not grow up with 'The Lord of the Rings' in my life, and, reading it now with my son, it’s hard to pinpoint what about it he finds so entrancing...despite all that I’d heard about dark magic and epic battles, [it] is mostly about walking through the forest... [But as] I lay down next to him, taking the book from him and starting to read aloud... after a while, almost despite myself I felt the hypnotic lull overtake me, too."


Paperback, 2005
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Moby Dick
Herman Melville"I can already hear you saying that you’ve read 'Moby-Dick,' but have you, really? And if you have, have you read even the horse half or the alligator half of all there is to read about it? 'God keep me from ever completing anything,' Melville writes in his masterpiece, and the fantastic thing about making 'Moby-Dick' your summer read is that you’ll never stop reading."


Paperback, 2011
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The Third Reich in Power
Richard J. Evans"I’ve been drawn in for the obvious reasons—wanting to understand how the Weimar Republic, the fledgling democracy that emerged in Germany after the First World War, teetered and then collapsed, as the country fell under the thrall of the Nazi movement. I’ve found myself unable to avoid drawing parallels to our current moment in the United States."


Paperback, 2006
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Fifth Business
Robertson Davies"I read these books when I was a teen-ager and was floored by their intensity and grandeur. Rereading them now, drowning in text—and specifically in voiceless text, with no human behind it—I love their talkiness. Davies’s characters are mesmerizing speakers, who live to spar, lecture, and lie. They’re old-fashioned and pretentious and peevish, and they hold forth about everything from theatre to polyamory to the nature of the Devil. Their speeches, at their headiest, inspire hope and a kind of holy terror. "


Paperback, 2001
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The Light Years
Elizabeth Jane Howard"One of the only unambiguous extended pleasures I experienced in 2020 was that of reading all five volumes of 'The Cazalet Chronicles,' by Elizabeth Jane Howard, back to back... That calm, bright, tarnished deliciousness—the immediate re-attunement of your attention to the slow secret unfolding of a summer’s day—that’s just what it feels like to read these books, which refract the political and social upheaval of the twenty years surrounding the Second World War through the life of an upper-middle-class English family."


Paperback, 2003
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The Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu"'The Tale of Genji,'" by a Japanese noblewoman known to posterity as Murasaki Shikibu, is as dewy as the tears staining its protagonist’s fine stationery—or the kimono sleeves of his lovers, who tremble as they yield to his immaculately calligraphed verse. Genji, the Shining Prince, is one of literature’s most irresistible f***boys, and his escapades remain a scandalous delight."


Paperback, 2006
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Possession
A. S. Byatt"In general, I’d rather read beautifully rendered histories like Hughes-Hallet’s, or novels actually written in the eras that they depict, than contemporary historical fiction. One exception is the wonderfully heady A. S. Byatt 1990 novel 'Possession,' which offers the pleasures of two artfully conjured time frames: the then contemporary world of two young academics in the late eighties and that of the Victorian poets whose previously hidden romance they sleuth out. It’s a sexy novel about research—what’s not to like?"


Paperback, 1991
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House of X/Powers of X
Jonathan Hickman"These were dense, thrilling explorations of faith and fallibility, genocide and politics, that had little to do with the quippy heroes of my youth. Hickman’s worlds are vast and immersive, filled with heroes that come across as philosophical and troubled, uncertain of what makes life meaningful or what aspects of our world are worth preserving."
Paperback, 2020
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