Growing One Book at a Time: A Summer Reading Invitation

Growth rarely arrives in one triumphant leap. More often, it sneaks in one book at a time — a paragraph that rearranges how you see a familiar street, a sentence that turns a tree into a small miracle you'd been walking past for years.

These five books did that for me this year. Consider this less a syllabus and more an invitation: pick one, sit somewhere comfortable, and let it quietly rearrange something.

How the Word Is Passed — Clint Smith

history, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves

Smith doesn't lecture from a podium — he gets in the car. From Monticello to Angola Prison to Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal, he visits the places where slavery's legacy is still written into the landscape, if we're willing to read it. Each stop becomes a conversation about memory, truth, and the difference between the past that happened and the past we've agreed to remember. I haven't looked at a historical marker the same way since.

The Serviceberry — Robin Wall Kimmerer

ecology, economics, and abundance without an invoice

Kimmerer opens with a small, delightful fact: the serviceberry feeds birds, bears, insects, and people — and has never once sent anyone a bill. From there she asks a wonderfully subversive question: what might our economy look like if nature, not Wall Street, were the one setting the terms? It's a slim book that somehow contains an entire worldview.

Lab Girl — Hope Jahren

science, memoir, and the parts of us that keep growing anyway

If you've never cheered for a seedling before, brace yourself. Jahren makes plant science as gripping as any thriller, braiding it with her decades-long friendship with her gloriously odd lab partner Bill, and her own experience with bipolar disorder. You will not walk past a tree casually again — and you may find yourself rooting for one.

Picasso's War — Hugh Eakin

art, history, and the people who make greatness possible

Before America embraced Picasso, a small, stubborn cast of believers had to fight for him. My favorite is John Quinn, a New York lawyer who spent himself championing modern art and died before he ever saw it win. We tend to remember the artists and forget the people who taught the rest of us how to look at them. This book is a quiet correction — and a good reminder that the person who believes in you first rarely gets top billing.

Gilead — Marilynne Robinson

fiction, grace, and what a life adds up to

Some novels sprint. Gilead sits on the porch and asks you to stay a while. Written as a letter from an aging minister to his young son, it's a slow, luminous meditation on forgiveness, memory, and the extraordinary hiding inside the ordinary. I finished it feeling like I'd spent an afternoon with someone genuinely wise — the kind of feeling I try to leave people with in my own work.

If a different book is already calling your name, follow it. I'd love to hear where it leads you.