Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

Bring along a new friend on your summer vacation. Below, is our curated list of recommended reading for the season, from business to tech to fiction to memoir.
 
The critics and staff of the New York Times are recommending “Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasia, a tale of family, slavery, and colonialism that spans 250 years, as well as “The Girls,” a fictional step into a Charles Manson-esque world by newcomer Emma Cline. You may also enjoy this year’s winner of the Man Booker International Prize, “The Vegetarian” by Han Kang. The critics also recommended some “from the bookshelf.” They’ll be returning to Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre,” Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” and Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and the Margarita.”
 
The reading lists of the highly successful are chock full of nonfiction and biographies. Bill Gates, for instance, isn’t afraid of a 900-page dose of science or math. Some notable reads on the nonfiction bestseller lists recently: Cass Sunstein’s book on fatherhood and Star Wars fandom, “The World According to Star Wars,” as well as Angela Duckworth’s “Grit,” which argues that success is based on individual passion and perseverance. We also urge you to check out Ron Chernow’s, “Hamilton,” the biography that started all the Hamilton-madness.
 
Bloomberg News listed 10 essential reads on finance, tech, medicine, and philosophy. If you’re particularly interested in artificial intelligence, virtual reality or robots, Bloomberg suggests Martin Ford’s “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.”  Siddhartha Mukherjee, who won the Pulitzer for “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” has a new book out called “The Gene: An Intimate History,” which is a meditation on humanity and our future. Also recommended: William N. Goetzmann’s “Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible,” a historically rich study of the financial institutions underpinning our prosperity, or lack thereof.
 
If you’re a summer road-tripper (or suffer a long commute), audio storytelling can be a convenient and engrossing alternative. We recommend the The New Yorker Fiction Podcast. Each episode features fiction editor, Deborah Treisman with a famous author discussing a short story from the magazine’s archive. Short commute? Consider the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day podcast. Only a few minutes long, each episode is a reading done by the poem’s author. Think of it as a daily dose of culture, existential pondering, or emotional tenderness.
 
And finally, we turned to well-read ZEITGUIDE friend Deb Newmyer, a film and TV producer, for her picks. If you are looking for an addictive summer read, she suggested Elana Ferrate’s box set of her Neapolitan Novels. The series begins in the early 1960s with “My Brilliant Friend” vividly set in slums of Naples, where two best girlfriends spend a lifetime bolstering and undermining each other to jaw-dropping perfection. Also, grab this year’s Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Sympathizer”. It’s a literary spy novel from the point of view of a Lieutenant in the South Vietnamese Army who barely escapes with his best friend on the last plane out of Saigon, and becomes a clever refuge in Los Angeles. Nguyen offers a sympathetically sardonic look at the modern American dream. Both of these reads will leave you with the mantra: “Wow, just what I was thinking…. only much much better…. wish I could write like that”
 
“Sure Summer reading can be fun and fluffy,” Newmyer acknowledged. “But when you get a chance to read ‘literature’ that is also a page-turning blast, you double your delight.”