What We’re ReadingWelcome to What We’re ReadingIllustration by Greg ClarkeSave this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyWhat was the last good thing you read? I get asked this a lot when people learn that I edit book reviews for a living. It can be surprisingly hard to answer, because what counts as good depends on the particular taste of the inquirer. There’s an element of mystery to the relationship between reader and text: the qualities that attract one person to a story may be precisely what put off someone else. Finding the right book at the right time is a process that requires continual scavenging—which is exactly what we happen to do here at The New Yorker. With the What We’re Reading newsletter, we hope to help inform your search. Each week, a rotating group of writers and editors will deliver to your inbox New Yorker-approved recommendations of the best books out now and coming soon.To start, here’s what I’ve been recommending lately, to those who ask.For aimless millennials: “Down Time,” by Andrew Martin. At the outset of this slyly observed COVID novel, its five protagonists—preposterously high-minded, obnoxiously self-absorbed—are all in varying degrees of flight from who they are and what they want. By the end, four years later, they have become, if not wiser, at least somewhat less annoying.For history dads: “The Spy and the Traitor,” by Ben Macintyre. This true-life espionage story—gripping even if you’re not a Cold War aficionado—is built around an intricate operation to smuggle a highly placed M.I.6 spy, a K.G.B. double agent, out of Moscow after his cover was blown. An impeccable Father’s Day present.For M.F.A. students: “Lonely Crowds,” by Stephanie Wambugu. This exceptional début novel did not get the recognition it deserved when it came out last year, perhaps owing to its misleadingly generic title and unaccountable nineteen-nineties setting. Don’t let either dissuade you: it’s a standout entry in the canon of female-friendship novels, which follows its entwined protagonists from a childhood in Rhode Island to art school in upstate New York and beyond, written with a kind of unaffected precision that takes great skill to pull off.For the audiobook-curious: “Vineland,” by Thomas Pynchon. The work of the reclusive, forbiddingly erudite author turns out to be perfect easy-listening material. The audio version of this mid-career novel, which loosely inspired Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “One Battle After Another,” unfolds like a shaggy nearly sixteen-hour podcast, full of surreal digressions and stoner humor. Call it the Thomas Pynchon Experience.For neat freaks and masterminds: “Cold Comfort Farm,” by Stella Gibbons. In this very funny parody of portentous British novels about nature, a pragmatic young woman goes to live on the family farm with her cousins, the passionately miserable Starkadders, and decides to reform them. Read it, and then stream the movie version, starring a young Kate Beckinsale.For new moms (my own cohort): “A Life’s Work,” by Rachel Cusk. This book of essays, notorious for its ambivalent portrayal of early motherhood when it was published in the U.K., in 2001, is Cusk at her best. Frank, moving, and just slightly deranged.We’ll be bringing you more recommendations every week—no matter your particular taste. Feel free to pass these along to family, friends, and fellow book-club members. Sign up here »Our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Find your next great read »On Our RadarComing soon:“Radical Duke,” by Danielle Allen, reveals, for the first time, the secret authors of Britain’s seditious Junius letters and their role in fomenting political revolution. It’s out on June 16th.Janet Fash was the first female lifeguard chief at Rockaway Beach. “Lifeguard: A Love Story,” out on June 23rd, is her memoir of the shore in the seventies and eighties.Everybody’s talking about:“East of Eden,” John Steinbeck’s novel, first published in 1952. Set mostly in Salinas Valley, California, the story is a reimagining of the Book of Genesis. With a Netflix adaptation starring Florence Pugh and Christopher Abbott coming this fall, the book is back in the Zeitgeist.The Pulitzer Prize-winning Andrew Sean Greer’s newest romp, “Villa Coco,” which came out yesterday. It’s about an American man living in Tuscany as the assistant to a baronessa.Mary H. K. Choi, the best-selling author of “Emergency Contact,” has a new novel out: “Pool House” centers on a fraying mother-daughter relationship.P.S. Bed-Stuy is getting a new bookstore—from the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. She plans to call it The North Star. ?