6 Books You Need to Read Right Now

Mike Crisolago | September 2nd, 2016

Grab your sunscreen and sunglasses, and soak up the last weeks of summer! Here, some of our favourite books to take to the beach.

There’s irony in the fact that The Kingdom of Speech, about how language played a more prominent role in propelling humanity forward than evolution, written by Tom Wolfe—whose grasp of language reshaped journalistic conventions and resulted in 700-page novels—clocks in at a mere 200 pages.

Language can be a simple topic. Take the Seinfeld slang: “close-talker,” “sponge-worthy” and “Festivus,” examined by TV historian Jennifer Keishin Armstrong in Seinfeldia—the behind-the-scenes tale of how Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David conceived a sitcom and, yadda yadda, it’s famous now.

For 84-year-old TV host, singer and writer Sarah Engelhard it took decades before she penned her first book, the story of how she escaped the Nazi invasion of France as a child, fell in love with Montreal poet Avi Boxer and every adventure in between in Sarah & Abraham: The Search for Miracles and the Stuttering Poet.

If it’s the language of mystery you crave, author Sophie Hannah returns Agatha Christie’s famed detective Hercule Poirot to the centre of a murder mystery in Closed Casket.

Spy/art restorer Gabriel Allon takes on ISIS in Daniel Silva’s The Black Widow.

Canadian scribe Steven Price explores the darkness of Victorian London with William Pinkerton, real-life son of renowned detective Allan Pinkerton, in the historical thriller By Gaslight.

A version of this article appeared in the September 2016 issue in the Zoom In, Etc. section, p. 15.