Need a Break from the Heat? Chill Out With These Outdoor Culture Picks

Time slows down in the summer. Where I live it’s too hot to do much unless you’re out early in the day or late in the evening. It seems like everyone else is on vacation, and the academic back-to-work creep of September is still off in the distance.

In short, it’s the perfect time to laze about in the midday heat—for long afternoons of reading on the porch or hiding out in the dark in front of a fan watching a movie.

And this summer we have a lot of good options.

What Books Should I Read This Summer?

My neighbor spotted a mountain lion on our street when she took the garbage out the other night so I have been thinking a lot about human-wildlife interaction. It helps that I’ve been reading Bear, Julia Phillips’ novel about what happens to two sisters when a grizzly shows up on San Juan Island.

The story culminates when their diverging reactions to the bear—fear and fascination—split them apart. To understand which of those reactions I should realistically have to my local predators, I’ve also been reading Brandon Keim’s non-fiction tale, Meet the Neighbors. On the surface, the book is about how we can better live with wildlife, but really is a charming dive into all the way animals interact with each other, and with us. We’re not as far apart as we might seem, according to Keim.

If summer has you thinking about plants more than animals, check out Olivia Liang’s new book The Garden Against Time. It’s a whirlwind essayistic mashup of the history of cultivating and colonizing plants, and the ways gardens have been an important source of liberation and inspiration and survival, all set against the background of Liang’s own quest to rehabilitate a historic garden in the depths of COVID. She fumbles a little when she tries to address warming summers, but she makes up for it in her lush descriptions of growing things.

If gardens (or nonfiction) aren’t exciting enough for you, the perfect summer read might look something like Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods which incorporates summer camp, family drama, and a set of missing siblings into a twisty, hard to put down thriller. Moore’s language, and her knack for building character and scene give it that jumpy feeling of stepping outside the campfire’s light and wondering what’s around you.

Indie Flicks and Summer Blockbusters

Movies more your summer speed? In Peak Season, Amy, a visiting New York consultant, in town with her negligent fiancé, develops a reciprocated crush on Loren, a fishing guide barely skating by in Jackson Hole. The summer light of the Tetons is a character all its own, and the film nails the details of skid life (multiple jobs, insecure housing, the performative localism of second home owners). But the best parts are the painfully tender ones about the shiny, hard-to-achieve appeal of a place like Jackson, and about the ache of not getting to live all the lives you can imagine for yourself and having to commit to just one.

Speaking of films, we could talk about Twisters, this year’s biggest tease of a seasonal blockbuster (Why don’t they kiss? Why don’t they talk about climate change?) But the real standout from the movie is the music.

Summer, in my house, is weekend road trip season and the Twisters’ soundtrack feels like exactly what you should be playing on a Friday night when you’re driving down a dirt road hunting for a campsite.

There are a couple skippable bro-country bombs, but there are also standouts from Oklahoma artists like Wyatt Flores, and a Shania Twain song that sounds exactly like a Shania Twain song should.

Perfect Podcasts for Long Drives

If you’re not a music in the car person, and if you’re already missing the drama of the Olympics, there are a couple of podcasts that might scratch your itch. Consider Ghost in the Machine, about mechanical doping in bike racing, or Broomgate, a CBC podcast about, um, broom doping, in curling, the most adorably Canadian drama ever. They both fall into my favorite category of podcasts: twisty investigative journalism where no one gets hurt or killed.