This book critic's 2026 summer reading picks include the return of '80s-style free pizza

With summer approaching, lots of us are looking for a good summer read — either for the beach or other travel, or just sitting on the couch in our air-conditioned homes.

Mark Athitakis, a book critic based here in the Valley, joined The Show to talk about some of his favorites of the season.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Mark, good morning. Thanks for being here.

MARK ATHITAKIS: Good morning. Thank you so much for having me.

MARK BRODIE: So I’ve got to ask starting off, there’s so much talk in every area that we talk about about AI. What is the conversation in the publishing and the book world right now about this?

MARK ATHITAKIS: There’s a lot of anxiety. There have been books that have been pulled from publication because things have been uncovered that they’ve used AI. There’s recently a short story prize that various readers — and, you know, it’s hard to prove these things — but said that with 99% certainty that this was generated by AI, and Granta, which is a very prominent, prestigious literary magazine in England, ran it. So their reputation is under scrutiny.

Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature a few years ago, she made a statement that made people think that she was using AI to write her next novel. Now she walked that back and said, “I use AI the way that a lot of people use AI, I just use it as kind of a research tool.”

But all of this is kind of circling around the idea of what is appropriate and what is not appropriate when it comes to writing books or being creative and using AI?

MARK BRODIE: Yeah. Any particular uh trends you’re seeing in terms of the kinds of books that that are coming out for this summer?

MARK ATHITAKIS: I don’t know about specific trends, but when I think about AI, I think about how writers being the creative people that they are are looking for workarounds. And I think about like a month ago, the Pulitzer Prizes were announced and the winner in fiction was a novel called “Angel Down” by Daniel Kraus, which I highly recommend.

Now Daniel Kraus is not the kind of person who wins a Pulitzer. His background is in horror fiction. He collaborated with George Romero, who directed “Night of the Living Dead,” on various projects. But this novel is a really intriguing mashup of a war novel. It’s set during World War I. It has all those kind of grotesque horror elements that he is very used to. It has a very spiritual edge to it. It is all one sentence.

MARK BRODIE: The whole book is one sentence?

MARK ATHITAKIS: Yes, and it is remarkably propulsive, it is very readable, it’s a fun summer read if you don’t mind a few gross-out scenes. But it is like nothing else, and I think maybe that’s the kind of conversation we might be having when it comes to what makes for good fiction.

Genre fiction is not going to go away, but I think we’re going to have a lot of writers who are looking for ways to kind of sidestep things that are maybe obvious or things that can be produced by prompts.

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MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, so you have a list of some uh some books that you’re excited about for the summer. I want to start with one that takes place in the West. It is called “Yellow Pine,” dealing with a woman living near Joshua Tree, which is of course not that far from here.

MARK ATHITAKIS: Yes, so this is by Claire Vaye Watkins, who has written a couple of previous novels, including a well-received one called “Gold Fame Citrus,” and she is kind of in the environmental tradition of even going back to Mary Austin or Ed Abbey.

This novel is very rich in conversation about what happens when the environment is being taken over. In this case, she’s living in an area that is about to be taken over by a solar panel array. And this does all sorts of things to the environment, including displacing desert tortoises. I have learned more about desert tortoises reading this novel than I even knew that there was to know.

But she also writes in a very sensitive, intelligent sort of a way. This is a story about a domestic relationship tethered to a conversation about what is happening to the environment, especially in the desert West.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. So sticking in the West, another book that you’d recommend called “The Flayed Man.” Sounds like a slightly different plot here.

MARK ATHITAKIS: Yeah, this is a little lighter. This is a vampire story that is set around Las Vegas, and its narrator is working as an ER nurse, which comes in handy if you are a vampire. Now in this world’s imagining, you don’t necessarily have to bite into people’s necks. You can just talk to your local phlebotomist and have blood injected that way.

MARK BRODIE: That seems much more efficient.

MARK ATHITAKIS: It does, it does. But this novel is dealing with her shortage of getting access to blood and also dealing with a mother who is dealing with some medical issues as well. So there is some heft here, and there’s a romance that buds around it as well. So if you want to have something that pushes those romance buttons, pushes those buttons in terms of scary horror vampire stories, it’s a fun read.

MARK BRODIE: That sounds like maybe more of a classic beach read than the first one.

MARK ATHITAKIS: Yes, exactly. As you get closer to Halloween and reading it on the beach.

MARK BRODIE: All right, so Richard Russo, who I think a lot of uh folks uh will remember from a number of novels has one that’s coming out a little later this summer called “Under the Falls.” The setting will be familiar to a lot of people who have read his books before.

MARK ATHITAKIS: Yeah, Richard Russo is a product of upstate New York and especially the working-class industrial area of that uh part of the state. And this concerns a successful country singer who’s the local boy who made good and returns back to the town of Stone Mountain to perform for the locals.

And this brings up all sorts of issues about like, OK, you’ve gone away and are you just being condescending toward us — and also triggers some memories about some childhood friends, including one who was severely injured under his watch and perhaps because of his involvement.

So it has all of those Richard Russo stock elements. He is very good at writing about intimate relationships between, you know, friendship, he writes really well about the working class. And he’s been doing this for decades now, but I don’t get the impression that he’s off his game in this new one.

MARK BRODIE: Oh, interesting. What are you seeing in terms of new writers versus familiar faces on the scene this summer? Are you seeing new folks come along as well as some of the more established writers?

MARK ATHITAKIS: I think absolutely. I mean, I think you’ll see that more of the more established writers will come back as we get closer to Labor Day and we start getting into the fall months when a lot of those big Christmas books start coming out.

I think about one writer named Edwidge Danticat, obviously a very well-known Haitian-American author, her first novel in the better part of a decade is going to be coming out later on this summer. It’s called “Dèy,” which is Haitian Creole for mourning, and this involves a woman who is involved in a mass shooting at a shopping mall.

She is a witness to this and talking about burying the trauma of that and how it relates to her experiences with her family, not just in her native Haiti but also living nearby her in Miami.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. You mentioned in some of the notes you sent over about a chain restaurant that … has sort of been going back to its roots in some ways, is reviving something else in its roots.

MARK ATHITAKIS: I don’t know if you blame “Stranger Things” for this or kind of like Gen X trends or whatnot, but Pizza Hut has revived its reading program. And I think this is a remarkable thing as the father of a son who has a hard time reading and doesn’t see reading as necessarily as integrated into your daily life or your summer life as it was when I was growing up.

But yeah, it has this Book It! program. Read a certain number of books, go get a free personal pan pizza. So hey.

MARK BRODIE: Whatever it takes to get people uh into the library or into the bookstores, right?

MARK ATHITAKIS: Or into the Pizza Hut.

MARK BRODIE: Or into the Pizza Hut, absolutely. All right, that is Mark Athitakis, a book critic based here in the Valley. Mark, good as always to talk to you. Thank you.

MARK ATHITAKIS: Thank you so much.

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