With Memorial Day just around the corner, summer is officially here—and with it, time to relax and unwind. At PAN, many of us are looking forward to spending some time by the beach or pool with a good book. Here is our fifth annual PAN Summer Reading List.
There are several picks for true beach reads, including Erin Hilderbrand’s Beautiful Day. I kicked off my summer reading a little early and just dove into a great beach read, Eligible: A modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice. We’re also reading (and re-reading) classics like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned.
Our contemporary fiction picks include Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (named the Wall Street Journal’s most anticipated book of the year), & Sons by David Gilbert, and Miller’s Valley by Anna Quindlen. For thrillers, we’re enjoying Before I Go to Sleep, The Girl With No Past, and the latest in David Baldacci’s Amos Decker series, The Last Mile.
We’re also spending some time brushing up on our PR and marketing skills. A few of our top choices for fellow PR practitioners include: Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Masters of Disaster: The Ten Commandments of Damage Control, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, The Reputation Economy: How to Optimize Your Digital Footprint in a World Where Your Reputation Is Your Most Valuable Asset, and Gary Vaynerchuk’s Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World and #AskGaryVee. We can’t forget Disrupted by Dan Lyons, which has generated a lot of buzz.
For those of us who are looking to learn about ourselves and the world, we’re recommending Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, and The Seasons on Henry’s Farm: A Year of Food and Life on a Sustainable Farm.
Autobiographies are always popular on our list, and they range this year from Going Off Script by Giuliana Rancic, to The Rainbow Comes and Goes by Anderson Cooper and his mother Gloria Vanderbilt, to the inspiring story of college basketball player turned ESPN analyst Jay Williams, Life is Not an Accident.
Rounding our our list is a title that also appear Bill Gates’ summer reading list, the science fiction epic, Seveneves.
What are you looking forward to reading this summer?
