MAY 13, 2024
This summer, we shall maintain the vibes.
Update (May 20, 2024): The summer’s books and discussion schedule are now set! You can find them below.
It’s time again for Camp ToB, the summer companion to the annual Tournament of Books—if you haven’t joined us before, it’s a slower pace, a reading group for you, the commentariat, to discuss some of the most Rooster-worthy novels that have come out in the year so far. It’s less literary bloodshed, more bookish sunburn.
So is it the same as last year? Mostly. This time around, rather than asking you to vote on vibes, we want you to decide—using the form below, before midnight ET on Sunday, May 19 (update: voting is now closed)—which books we’ll read and discuss over the next three months. However, the vibes shall return! Because once we have your votes and our final set of six novels, we’ll find natural pairings for each month’s reading based on themes—or vibes in the parlance of summer camp.
But just like last year, we need volunteers to join us as Activity Leaders—more camp parlance—to lead our weekly book discussions! Unlike in some previous years, it’ll be one Activity Leader a week. So if you’re interested, please use the form below to let us know that as well.
That’s it—we’ll see you at Camp!
This summer’s vibes (and books)
Book descriptions are excerpted from publishers’ summaries and edited for length. We get a cut from purchases made through the book links.
EARLY SUMMER VIBE
“The past is never dead”
JUNE 5–18
James by Percival Everett
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
JUNE 19–JULY 2
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
MIDSUMMER VIBE
“Magic is all around us”
JULY 10-23
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
JULY 24–AUG. 6
The Book of Love by Kelly Link
Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom one year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Mass., having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are. In the room with them is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of a bargain their teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been. In the end, there will be winners and there will be losers.
LATE SUMMER VIBE
“How to marry yourself”
AUG. 7–20
All Fours by Miranda July
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.
AUG. 21–SEPT. 3
The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There’s only one problem—she’s not married. She’s never seen this man before in her life. But according to her friends, her much-improved decor, and the photos on her phone, they’ve been together for years. As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a lightbulb and abruptly disappears. In his place, a new man emerges, and a new, slightly altered life re-forms around her. Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question: If swapping lives is as easy as changing a lightbulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path? When do you stop trying to do better and start actually living?