School’s Out for Summer Reading
by Librarian Lynn Lampert, Coordinator of Instruction & Information Literacy - June 11, 2026
Cue the iconic chorus from Alice Cooper’s 1972 hit School’s Out: “School’s out for summer!” With classes on break (or perhaps a lighter summer course load) hopefully you have more time to unwind, making now the perfect opportunity to read for the sheer pleasure of it. Choose a book not because it’s assigned, but because it sparks your curiosity. As part of your plans for summer relaxation, we invite you to explore the Gohstand Reading Room Collection, where the shelves offer both a mix of new releases and timeless classics for your next great read.
The concept of “summer reading” is a distinction between school year reading and summer leisure reading that has endured for generations, shaping contemporary summer reading programs and recommended books that emphasize choice, relaxation, and the joy of reading for its own sake. Summer reading has long been associated with leisure reading rather than academic study. The tradition of reading for pleasure rather than assigned reading began in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as formal education became more structured and seasonal. During the summer months, when schools closed and families often spent more time outdoors or traveling, reading was promoted as a pleasurable pastime that could offer entertainment, personal enrichment, and support intellectual curiosity. Public libraries, publishers, and educators encouraged readers, to explore books of their own choosing rather than assigned texts, reinforcing the concept that summer reading should be driven by curiosity and enjoyment.
Today avid readers look forward to the annual recommended lists of summer reading titles from publications like the New York Times or former President Barack Obama’s recommended summer reads that comes out at the end of each summer. With the tradition of recommending some “summer reads,” The Book Drop invites you to consider checking out the following highlighted titles from the Gohstand Reading Room for a summer reading selection. The following works of fiction share a common connection: they are all stories about people trying to uncover a hidden truth, only to discover that the mystery is inseparable from questions about their own identity.
Cosby, S.A. King of Ashes: A Novel. Pine & Cedar, 2025.
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3603.O7988 K56 2025
Publisher Summary: "Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby returns with King of Ashes, a Godfather-inspired Southern crime epic and dazzling family drama. When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father's car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family-and the family business-together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante's recklessness has placed them all in real danger. Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But in his work with wannabe tough guys, he's forgotten that there are real gangsters out there. As his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his brother: himself, and his own particular set of skills. Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything. Because everything burns."
Kitamura, Katie. Audition: A Novel. Riverhead Books, 2025.
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3611.I877 A93 2025
Publisher Summary: One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her—and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best. Taut, hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.
(Also a 2005 President Barack Obama Summer Reading Recommendation)
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. First Perennial Classics edition., Harper Perennial, 1999.
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3566.Y55 C79 1999
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels
“The comedy crackles, the puns pop, the satire explodes.”—New York Times
Publisher Summary: Thomas Pynchon’s highly original, postmodernist classic, a satire of American life about a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a seeming international conspiracy. When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern California, she meets some extremely interesting characters—including a teenage rock band called the Paranoids, a right-wing historian and critic of the postal system, and a former child actor with whom she has an affair—and begins to unravel conspiracies she suddenly sees all around her.
Written in 1966, The Crying of Lot 49 demonstrates the piquant wit and power of invention that are the hallmarks of Pynchon’s acclaimed works. It is the shortest of his novels and widely held to be the benchmark of this literary lion’s career.
McDaniel, Tiffany. The Summer That Melted Everything. St. Martin’s Press, 2016.
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3613.C38683 S86 2016
Publisher Summary: Fielding Bliss has never forgotten the summer of 1984: the year a heat wave scorched Breathed, Ohio. The year he became friends with the devil. Sal seems to appear out of nowhere - a bruised and tattered thirteen-year-old boy claiming to be the devil himself answering an invitation. Fielding Bliss, the son of a local prosecutor, brings him home where he's welcomed into the Bliss family, assuming he's a runaway from a nearby farm town. When word spreads that the devil has come to Breathed, not everyone is happy to welcome this self-proclaimed fallen angel. Murmurs follow him and tensions rise, along with the temperatures as an unbearable heat wave rolls into town right along with him. As strange accidents start to occur, riled by the feverish heat, some in the town start to believe that Sal is exactly who he claims to be. While the Bliss family wrestles with their own personal demons, a fanatic drives the town to the brink of a catastrophe that will change this sleepy Ohio backwater forever.
Lea, Caroline. Love, Sex, and Frankenstein: A Novel. Pegasus Books, 2025.
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3612.E2127 L68 2025
Publisher Summary: Villa Diodati, Lake Geneva, 1816. The dark summer that birthed a monster. Eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley has fled London with her lover, Percy Shelley, and her sister, Claire. Tormented by Shelley's betrayals, haunted by the loss of their baby and suspicious of her sister's intentions, Mary seeks a refuge. But Lord Byron's villa, lying under ominous, ash-shrouded skies, feels more like a trap. When Byron suggests each guest write a supernatural tale, Mary is as drawn to the challenge as she is, unexpectedly, to Byron himself. And so, an idea begins to form in her mind. It spills out of her in thick, black ink. A thing given life is before her. Day and night, it possesses her. Her heart, her desires. But is she in control, or is it?
Schaefer, Lucas. The Slip: A Novel. Simon & Schuster, 2026.
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3619.C31268 S55 2025
Publisher Summary: Austin, Texas: It's the summer of 1998, and Nathaniel Rothstein has vanished without a trace. His uncle Bob Alexander, who was supposed to be looking after him for the summer, had long thought the boy a bit odd, but Nathaniel appeared to be maturing in his sixteenth year-taking up boxing at Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym and volunteering at the local assisted living center. Until he disappeared, Nathaniel had seemed happier, more confident tanner, even. Across the city, Charles Rex, now going by simply "X," has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works day and night, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, looking for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he's been searching for. But it's never that simple. More than a decade later, after Bob Alexander receives a shocking tip, he becomes determined to solve the mystery of his missing nephew. He'll need the help of the eclectic crew down at Terry Tucker's to put the pieces of this always-evolving story back together, including Alexis Cepeda, an up-and-coming lightweight fighter who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a now-errant driver's license bearing the wrong name and face. Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.
Willingham, Stacy. Forget Me Not: A Novel. Minotaur Books, 2025.
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3623.I57726 F67 2025
Publisher Summary: A pulse-pounding new Southern thriller from the author of the runaway bestseller A Flicker in the Dark. Twenty-two years ago, Claire Campbell's older sister, Natalie, disappeared shortly after her eighteenth birthday. Days later, her blood was found in a car, a man was arrested, and the case was swiftly closed. In the decades since, Claire has attempted to forget her traumatic past by moving to the city and climbing the ranks as an investigative journalist... until an unexpected call from her father forces her to come back home and face it all anew. With the entire summer now looming ahead-a summer spent with nothing to do in her childhood home, with her estranged mother-Claire decides on a whim to accept a seasonal job at Galloway Farm, a muscadine vineyard in coastal South Carolina less than an hour away from where she grew up. At first glance, Galloway is an idyllic escape for Claire. A scenic retreat full of slow-paced nostalgia, as well as a place where her sister seemed truly happy in that last summer before she vanished, it feels like the perfect plan to pass the time. However, as soon as Claire starts to settle in, she stumbles across an old diary written by one of the vineyard's owners, and what at first seems like a story of young rebellion and love turns into something much more sinister as it begins to describe details of various unsolved crimes. As the days stretch on, Claire finds herself becoming more and more secluded as she starts to obsess over the diary's contents... as well as the lingering feeling that her own sister's disappearance may be somehow tied to it all. Galloway was supposed to be a place to help her move forward, but instead, Claire quickly finds herself immersed in her own dark and dangerous past.
Yamashita, Iris. City under One Roof. Berkley, 2024.
Gohstand Reading Room: PS3625.A672227 C58 2023
Publisher Summary: A stranded detective tries to solve a murder in a tiny Alaskan town where everyone winters in the same high-rise building, in this gripping debut by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Iris Yamashita. When a local teenager discovers a severed hand and foot washed up on the shore of the small town of Point Mettier, Alaska, Cara Kennedy is on the case. A detective from Anchorage, she has her own reasons for investigating the possible murder in this isolated place, which can be accessed only by a tunnel. After an avalanche causes the tunnel to close indefinitely, Cara is stuck among the odd and suspicious residents of the town-all 205 of whom live in the same high-rise building and are as icy as the weather. Cara teams up with Point Mettier police officer Joe Barkowski, but before long the investigation is upended by a gang from a nearby reservation who are seeking shelter from the snowstorm. Cara soon discovers that everyone in this town is keeping secrets. If there is anything as elusive as the residents themselves, it's answers.
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