Inspiring Summer Reads for Hobbyist Reader Types
Cook, Create & Reflect with New Hobby-Focused Books This Summer
If you love books that spark creativity, nurture your well-being, or help you master a new skill, you’re a Hobbyist Reader. At Bookfinity, we match you with reads that feed your passions—whether you're in the kitchen, crafting corner, yoga mat, or deep in self-discovery.
This summer’s new releases, arriving June through August, are packed with inspiration. From beautiful cookbooks and calming mindfulness guides to creative crafts and insightful psychology reads, these books are perfect companions for a slower, more intentional season.
August New Releases
Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time: How Mamie Fish, Queen of the Gilded Age, Partied Her Way to Power
by Jennifer Wright
From the author of Madame Restell and Get Well Soon, a biography of Mamie Fish that explores how women used parties and social gatherings to gain power and prestige.
Marion Graves Anthon Fish, known by the nicknames "Mamie" and "The Fun-Maker," threw the most epic parties in American history. This Gilded Age icon brought it all: lavish decor; A-list invitees; booze; pranks; and large animal guest stars. If you were a member of New York high society in the Peak Age of Innocence Era, you simply had to be on Mamie Fish's guest list. Mamie Fish understood that people didn't just need the formality of prior generations -- they needed wit and whimsy.
Make no mistake, however: Mamie Fish's story is about so much more than partying. In Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time, readers will learn all about how Fish and her friends shaped the line of history, exerting their influence on business, politics, family relationships, and social change through elaborate social gatherings. In a time when women couldn't even own property, let alone run for office, if women wanted any of the things men got outside the home--glory, money, attention, social networking, leadership roles--they had to do it by throwing a decadent soiree or chairing a cotillion.
To ensure people would hear and remember what she had to say, Mamie Fish lived her whole life at Volume 10, becoming famous not by playing the part of a saintly helpmeet, but by letting her demanding, bitchy, hilarious, dramatic freak flag fly. It's time to let modern readers in on the fun, the fabulousness, and the absolute ferocity that is Ms. Stuyvesant Fish--and her inimitable legacy.
Nights and Weekends: Recipes That Make the Most of Your Time - A Cookbook
by Alexis Deboschnek
As a veteran recipe developer, Alexis thought she had home cooking on lock until she became the primary caretaker and chef for her mother, which inspired her to think harder about cooking the daily task. Nights and Weekends is the solution to this quotidien dilemma, offering recipes that are eminently achievable for every time and effort constraint. In the Nights section, which is divided by type of food (such as Soups, Vegetable, Meat, Pasta, Fish), recipes have a short ingredient list that can be easily sourced, will come together in under 40 minutes, and only one pot or a sheet pan. The Weekend section is organized by type of meal--Brunch, Dinner, and a chapter on Snacks for informal gatherings--and features recipes that are slightly more adventurous, as well as a chapter on homemade desserts. Through dishes such as One-Pot Gnocchi Ragu, Everything Bagel Tomato Panzanella, Hot Butter Garlic Shrimp, 7-Minute Eggs with Mayo and Chile Oil, and Curried Chicken and Cauliflower Phyllo Pie, this cookbook not only gives you delicious meals, but it also gives you your invaluable time back to enjoy them.
Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Ukraine
by Olia Hercules
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, award-winning Ukrainian chef and food writer Olia Hercules decided it was finally time to tell her story.
Strong Roots is the story of a century in Ukraine told through four generations of one extraordinary family. It takes us from years of Russification, to Olia's grandmother's deportation to snowy wastelands under Stalin, to her aunt Zhenia's school protest, to her own parents' flight from Ukraine when their village was occupied in 2022.
This is an ode to the land, to ideas of home and belonging, and to family stories and recipes passed down the generations--the tang of sour cherries, the best way to make borsch. It is an account of resilience in the hardest of circumstances.
Strong Roots brims with hope and fear. It lays bare the compromises and betrayals of generations struggling and surviving through war, peace, invasion and exile. It is an uplifting reminder of how much the human spirit can endure when born from a land rich with strong roots.
Trying: A Memoir
by Chloe Caldwell
If you're writing about your life in real time, are you inherently fucked?
Over the years that Chloé Caldwell had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she'd read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected her experience; for one thing, most stories ended with in vitro fertilization, a baby, or both. She wanted to offer something different.
Caldwell began a book. She imagined a selective journal about her experience coping with stasis and uncertainty. Is it time to quit coffee, find a new acupuncturist, get another blood test? Her questions extended to her job at a clothing boutique and to her teaching and writing practice. Why do people love equating publishing books with giving birth? What is the right amount of money to spend on pants or fertility treatments? How much trying is enough? She ignored the sense that something else in her life was wrong that was not on the page . . . until she extracted a confession from her husband.
Broken by betrayal but freed from domesticity, Caldwell felt reawakened, to long-buried desires, to her queer identity, to pleasure and possibility. She kept writing, making sense of her new reality as it took shape. With the candor, irreverence, and heart that have made Caldwell's work beloved, Trying intimately captures a self in a continuous process of becoming--and the mysterious ways that writing informs that process.
We Should All Be Birds: A Memoir
by Brian Buckbee - Carol Ann Fitzgerald
On a spring evening in Montana, Brian Buckbee encounters an injured baby pigeon. Heartbroken after the loss of the love of his life and increasingly isolated by a mysterious illness that overtook him while trekking through Asia, Brian is unaware that this bird--who he names Two-Step--will change his life. Brian takes in Two-Step, and more injured birds, eventually transforming his home into a madcap bird rehabilitation and rescue center. As Brian and Two-Step grow closer, an unexpected kinship forms. But their paths won't converge forever: as Two-Step heals and finds love, Brian's condition worsens, and with his friend's release back into the world looming closer, Brian must decide where this story leaves him.
We Should All Be Birds follows Brian, unable to read or write due to a never-ending headache, as he dictates the end of his old life--as an adventurer, an iconoclastic university instructor, and endurance athlete--through his relationship with a pigeon that comes to define his present. Limited to dictation, Brian teams up with Carol Ann Fitzgerald, an editor who channels the details of his personal history to the pages. Raw and perceptive, delirious and devastating, We Should All Be Birds is an unflinching exploration of chronic illness, grief, connection, and the spectacular beauty of the natural world--and the humble pigeon. The surprising, heartwarming relationship between man and bird provides insight into what it means to love, to suffer, and to "never forget, even for a second, how big it all is."
Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef
by Slutty Cheff Slutty Cheff
A hilarious, hot, and steamy account of coming of age in and out of the kitchen, from the anonymous chef and columnist, Slutty Cheff.
"It's the two best things in the world: food and sex."
When Slutty Cheff finds herself bored and fed-up with her 9-5 job in corporate marketing, she turns to the only thing that she really likes to do: cooking. So she quits her job, swaps emails for emulsions, and sets off to pursue her dreams of becoming a chef.
The world of London's fine dining restaurants is so much more than she imagined: it's more challenging, and more exciting too. There are the exhausting lows of sixty-hour work weeks in windowless kitchens, and the shock of stepping into the changing room as the only woman. There are the thrilling highs of a busy night, when service is running smoothly; electrifying run-ins with hot bartenders and even hotter chefs; and, always, the exhilaration of cycling hands-free through a city that is still sleeping, on a morning where anything can happen.
This is a story about searching for your purpose, and experiencing and embracing life to the fullest along the way. The pleasure and the chaos too...
An exquisite mix of raw Anthony Bourdain-style honesty with the sharp wit of Lena Dunham's Girls, Tart is THE book for those who like to eat and f**k.
july new releases
Autism, Sensory and Behavior: Everything You Need to Know
by Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin draws on her own experience to deliver an essential resource for guiding and nurturing autistic individuals with sensory differences. She gets to the REAL issues of autism in this book--the ones parents, teachers, and individuals on the spectrum face every day.
Most autistic individuals deal with a variety of sensory differences, and in this book Dr. Grandin sheds light on the best ways for them to adapt and thrive. In these helpful pages, Dr. Grandin offers do's and don'ts, practical strategies, and try-it-now tips, all based on her insider perspective and extensive research.
She argues that individuals on the autism spectrum must focus on their overlooked strengths to foster their unique contributions to the world. She has packed a wealth of knowledge into this book, which serves as an excellent reference resource for parents, educators and caregivers on how to manage sensory issues.
A Beginner's Guide to Dying
by Simon Boas
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - Lessons for all of us in how to approach life--from someone in the process of dying. - "Simon Boas was a gifted storyteller with a rare ability to find humor and humanity in life's most profound moments. A Beginner's Guide to Dying showcases his wit, warmth, and wisdom, offering a deeply moving and unexpectedly funny meditation on mortality." --Hospice Nurse Julie McFadden, author of Nothing to Fear
In his mid-40s, aid worker Simon Boas was diagnosed with incurable cancer--it had been caught too late, and spread throughout his body. But he was determined to die as he had learned to live--optimistically, thinking the best of people, and prioritizing what really matters in life. Deemed "a funny, touching meditation on death" by the Sunday Times, this warm and wise book offers lessons for all of us in how to approach life.
Cold Canning: The Easy Way to Preserve the Seasons Without Hot Water Processing (a Cookbook)
by Bruce Weinstein - Mark Scarbrough
Discover this food preservation bible for the modern cook, with a collection of 425 recipes for small-batch jams, jellies, chili crisps, pickles, krauts, kimchis, and more that will safely keep for months to years in your fridge or freezer.
Cold canning is a revolutionary new approach to preserving the best produce of the season, without the headache of traditional canning methods. Whether you're canning for convenience, frugality, or fun, these small-batch recipes are simple to make and can be safely stored for months or even years in your refrigerator or freezer.
June New Releases
The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life
by Helen Whybrow
"Helen Whybrow is a to-the-bone writer, and this is a to-the-bone book--beautiful, real, full of life."--Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
Set in Vermont's Green Mountains, a profoundly moving meditation on the lessons and wisdom that come from raising a family, tending sheep, and living close to the land.
In the heart of Vermont's Green Mountains, Helen Whybrow and her partner set out to restore an old two-hundred-acre farm. Knowing that "belonging more than anything requires participation," they begin to intertwine their lives with the land. But soon after releasing a flock of Icelandic sheep onto the worn-out fields, Whybrow realizes that the art of shepherding extends far beyond the flock and fences of Knoll Farm.
Kitchens of Hope: Immigrants Share Stories of Resilience and Recipes from Home
by Linda S Svitak - Christin Jaye Eaton - Lee Svitak Dean - Loan Huynh - Tom Wallace - Lee Svitak Dean
Culinary journeys from around the globe: recipes and stories from immigrants to the United States
Immigrants carry more than hope as they cross oceans and traverse continents to come to the United States. They hold tightly to stories and recipes, remembrances of what they left behind. Kitchens of Hope brings together these memories from contributors who hail from more than thirty countries, offering a glimpse into their kitchens and insight into their lives. This book is a celebration of people and cuisines from around the world, infused with the aromas of epazote and cardamom, the tang of fish sauce, the heat of chile peppers, and the bite of mustard greens.
Lavender for All Seasons: A Gardener's Guide to Growing and Creating with Lavender Year-Round
by Paola Legarre
An essential guide to to the multifaceted plant, from a passionate gardener.
Lavender for All Seasons covers everything you need to know about the basics of growing lavender. Inspirational crafts and recipes that follow the seasons of the year will empower readers to discover how to integrate lavender beyond the garden and into the apothecary, pantry, and crafting space. For over twenty years, gardening expert Paola Legarre has been implementing sustainable farming practices, nourishing soil life, avoiding herbicides and synthetic fertilizers, rotating plantings with cover crops, and encouraging pollinators and beneficial insects through diversified plant hedgerows, and companion planting.
Steve Martin Writes the Written Word: Collected Written Word Works by Steve Martin
by Steve Martin
With an exclusive new introduction and some never-before-published pieces, a collection of greatest hits from one of the most beloved comedians of our time, Steve Martin, now starring in Hulu's Only Murders in the Building.
Steve Martin Writes the Written Word is a perfect introduction for new fans and a must-have for longtime fans, showcasing the longevity, range, and--above all--hilarity of the master. Filled with his singular characters and musings--Daniel Pecan Cambridge, a modern-day neurotic yearning to break free in The Pleasure of My Company, to the comedic and heartbreaking relationship between Neiman Marcus shopgirl Mirabelle and businessman Ray Porter in Shopgirl, to meditations on bad neighbors and so much more--this collection shows the breadth of Martin's work, which is bolstered by a mix of brand-new and previously published selections of his writing for the New Yorker's "Shouts & Murmurs" column.
Life Is a Lazy Susan of Sh*t Sandwiches (Original)
by Jennifer Welch - Angie Sullivan
From the beloved hosts of the hit podcast I've Had It, an honest, irreverent and inspiring guide to overcoming life's unexpected challenges and finding joy, stability and humor in today's chaotic world, for fans of Big Friendship and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Long before their blockbuster podcast, I've Had It, Jennifer Welch and Angie "Pumps" Sullivan were simply two best friends, supporting each other through the ups and downs of life. Together they've celebrated family milestones and cheered on professional successes, but they've weathered the storms together too. When Jennifer's husband battled alcoholism and drug addiction, she turned to Angie for support. When Angie's own marriage began to crumble, she turned to Jennifer. And crucially, through it all they've kept one another laughing in stitches.