The phrase “summer reading” has grown up alongside us. Once a dreaded assignment from our school days, it's since evolved into one of life's quieter indulgences. Whether it's your buoy through long-haul journeys, or your first priority when you hit the beach, this leisurely season of reading only gets better with age. When it comes to our collective reading list among editors at Condé Nast Traveler, the picks are as varied and delicious as summer's vine ripened heirlooms. We've found ourselves nose deep into our paperbacks perched over the Ligurian Sea, on cinematic road trips through the Southwest, and seated on far-flung flights to Asia. Our range includes a meandering cowboy odyssey that sprawls from a nowhere town in Texas to Big Sky country, a poignantly observant memoir from a wild child Dreamlander, and a careful dissection of a situationship set to the rhythms of 1970s Brazil. These are the books Traveler editors have thrown into our carry-ons and brought out on our overnight flights all season long to pass the time and become a little wiser on the way.
Spanning the 1980s, Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz is a transcribed collection of the New York artist’s unfolding, innermost thoughts, which he recorded in the East Village and on the road in the Southwest. He reflects on vivid dreams and nightmares of breaking things; qualms with the art world while being in it; his relationships with language and his contemporaries; and, towards the end, grappling with his HIV diagnosis. These tapes feel far more vulnerable—even invasive knowing they were never meant for anyone else—than reading a diary. Wojnarowicz’s words are immediate and unpolished and affecting, even when he feels betrayed by their limitations. It’s a glimpse into his thought process without restraint, set against the sounds and every day scenes of a version of the city he so heavily influenced. —Skyli Alvarez, editorial assistant