What the Mastermind Team Is Reading this Summer
From Michigan suburbs to 70,000 years of history, here are this summer's literary picks from the Mastermind team.
There’s a particular kind of unhurried and immersive reading that only happens in summer, where you surface from a book and forget what time zone you’re in. This year, the Mastermind team is packing everything from a love story told through two artists’ letters to a coming-of-age novel set in 2000s Michigan to a Dracula-obsessed memoir.
Stakes by Noelle McCarthy
For the past few years now, I’ve devoted each summer break to a volume of Proust’s masterwork In Search of Lost Time. These aren’t books I can easily pick up throughout the year; they require undivided attention, and the prolonged summer vacation provides a prime window for uninterrupted reading. I’m halfway through the third book, The Guermantes Way, so when that’s done I plan to pick up another book I was recently #gifted: Stakes, by the Irish-New Zealand journalist Noelle McCarthy. It’s a memoir written through the lens of her lifelong obsession with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. McCarthy first book, Grand, is the only book I have ever cried* reading, so I’m hoping her second is equally affecting.
*heaving, uncontrollable, embarrassing sobs
– Jeremy Olds, Editor-in-Chief
The Man with Miraculous Hands (Les mains du miracle) by Joseph Kessel
This is the strange, true story of Felix Kersten, Heinrich Himmler’s Finnish doctor. As the story goes, Kersten leveraged his access and Himmler’s gratitude to quietly negotiate the release of thousands of prisoners, becoming a kind of accidental savior operating from inside. However, a new edition includes an introduction by Norman Ohler which complicates the legend that grew up around Kersten, examining where his self-mythologizing outran the facts.
Adolphe by Benjamin Constant
Adolphe follows the story of its titular restless young aristocrat, who is contemptuous of the shallowness around him. Adolphe falls for an older woman (Ellenore) who is in a long-term relationship, pursuing her relentlessly until she agrees. In a tale as old as time, once in the relationship her emotions towards him repel him. The story draws on Benjamin Constant’s own turbulent relationship with Madame de Staël, making the novel more of an autopsy of self-deception than a love story.
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain follows the story of Hans Castorp, who arrives at a Swiss sanatorium to visit his friend with tuberculosis, but ends up being diagnosed himself and staying seven years. Cut off from the outside world, he drifts into the sanatorium’s insular world absorbing conflicting ideologies from the patients and doctors around him.
– Marie-Amélie Sauvé, Founder and Creative Director
Grand Rapids by Natasha Stagg
For some, suburbia is heaven, for others an isolating landscape of uniformity during the most formative years of adolescence. Stagg’s second novel unfolds through fragments and memories to reveal a portrait of a teenage girl trying on different lives. Set in the early 2000s in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Stagg explores identity through teenage drug use, sexuality, anonymous chatrooms, unresolved grief, class consciousness and circumstantial friendship.
Throughout the novel, flickers of Gross Income – a fictional reality TV show set in the wealthy suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan à la Real Housewives – contrast the blur of the everyday. Through scenes of suburban alienation, Stagg tries to find the version of herself that hasn’t arrived yet.
– Lucas Lefler, Graphic Direction
Girl’s Girl by Sonia Feldman
It seems I’m destined for sapphic summer novels: I took Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth on vacation last year, and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden the summer before that. This year, I’m packing Girl’s Girl by Sonia Feldman. In it, an adult Mina looks back on one pivotal summer she spent at age 15 with her two best friends.
Billed as a snapshot of girlhood set during a Midwestern American summer, the novel has all the ingredients that spark the kind of nostalgia I love to bathe in this time of year – though the modern setting, with its DMs and social media, might threaten to snap me out of it.
– Caitlin Hennessy, Deputy Editor
The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek by Andrew Durbin
Even though I began this book in the spring at the time it was released, I will continue it through the summer. It feels timely for the summer in the way it features Peter and Paul writing letters to one another from European destinations, such as the Italian island of Ponza, where Paul lived and worked. It is not only a rich history of two incredible artists, but also shows the beauty and complexity of love and friendship and the endurance of queer relationships.
– Conor Manning, Fashion Director
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Whether a history lover (like myself), fascinated by economics or curious about what makes the human brain tick, Sapiens has something for everyone. Yuval Noah Harari takes readers on a journey from the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago, explaining how homo sapiens jumped to the top of the food chain, to the Scientific Revolution 500 years ago, considering how the greed for knowledge became deeply intertwined with colonialism.
Harari pushes readers beyond their comfort zone, deconstructing many of the myths that underpin our daily lives, drawing on our history to explain why we are the way we are today.
– Grace Jewitt, Editorial Assistant