14 books to read this summer
Chicago has a bunch of beaches, and we love taking a book (or Kindle) to shore, but that doesn't mean this summer reading list is loaded with "beach reads." That's a silly notion, that once the sun comes out, you somehow should start chewing through romance paperbacks with airbrushed hunks on the cover and boilerplate thrillers about detectives who throw more punches than complete sentences.
That being said, we still like a sharp suspense story, or something with rocketships and swords. This batch of new summer books comes packed with poker, the postapocalypse, magicians, Clintons, weird sex, vehicular manslaughter and identity theft.
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Colson Whitehead, 'The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death'

Joshua Ferris, 'To Rise Again at a Decent Hour'

E. Lockhart, 'We Were Liars'

Joël Dicker, 'The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair'

Stuart Dybek, 'Ecstatic Cahoots' and 'Paper Lantern'

Tom Rachman, 'The Rise & Fall of Great Powers'

Andrea Camilleri, ' Angelica's Smile'

Emily Gould, 'Friendship'

Edan Lepucki, 'California'

Rebecca Makkai, 'The Hundred-Year House'

Nick Harkaway, 'Tigerman'

Haruki Murakami, 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage'

David Cronenberg, 'Consumed'

David Mitchell, 'The Bone Clocks'
More books of note
Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Possibilities (Simon & Schuster, May 13) The author of The Descendents jumps from Hawaii to Colorado for fresh familial dysfunction.
Martin Morales, Ceviche: Peruvian Kitchen: Authentic Recipes for Lomo Saltado, Anticuchos, Tiraditos, Alfajores, and Pisco Cocktails (Ten Speed Press, May 27) Because we can't stop talking about food—a gorgeous not-quite-cooking cookbook on the art of Peruvian sashimi.
Kyung-Sook Shin, I'll Be Right There (Other Press, Jun 3) Painful memories are unearthed in the turbulent South Korea of the 1980s.
Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes (Scribner, Jun 3) The Sadaharu Oh of word processing cranks out more blood, this time from a vehicular manslaughter.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hard Choices (Simon & Schuster, Jun 10) POTUS 45 tells it like it is.
Dave Eggers, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (Knopf, Jun 17) An astronaut held captive in an abandoned barracks, from the McSweeney's kingpin.
Josh Weil, The Great Glass Sea (Grove Press, Jul 2) Russian folklore and "space mirrors"? Sold.
John Scalzi, Lock In (Tor, Aug 26) One of the best sci-fi writers going concocts a virus that allows people to "ride" another's body.