Do you miss the days of choosing five books off of a long list to read over the summer? Is your to-be-read list where your best reading intentions to go die? Do you like it when opinionated people make decisions for you? This one’s for you.

The Lost Man, by Jane Harper: Assuming you’ve read Tana French (and if you haven’t, you start with either The Witch Elm or In the Woods), this is your next move, and it takes you to an Australian ranching community.

Every Anxious Wave, by Mo Daviau: This crosses High Fidelity with time travel. What else do you need to know?

The Library Book, by Susan Orlean: An absolutely wonderful book about the LA Public Library, and a huge fire there in the 80s.

The Luminous Dead, by Caitlin Starling: My book club loved this. We read it in 2019 and I still think about it. It’s full of atomospheric creepiness and is really well paced.

The Spellman Files, by Lisa Lutz: The first in a very fun series about a family of private detectives. Yes, they’re as dysfunctional as you think.

Hench, by Natalie Zina Walschots: So, you know how supervillians are surrounded by hench people? Well, what if one of them got really mad at a particular superhero and channeled her rage into big data?

The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi: If you read Gold Fame Citrus and have been wondering if there’s any other speculative fiction out there about the droughts in the Western US, there is. Read this.

Wanderers, Chuck Wendig: If you liked The Stand, and you’re ready for a novel about a respiratory pandemic, try this. (If it’s too long for you, pick up Severance by Ling Ma.)

Lastly, two wildcards:

A Marvellous Light, Freya Marske: The July book club book.

Something New Under the Sun, Alexandra Kleeman: The most recent book I started but am not going to finish. I got too irritated by a couple of the characters who feature prominently in the first chapter.