A few months ago, I started commuting to the office from a small town on Long Island. The train ride, with its cheerful, sunny mornings and hushed, purple evenings, has done wonders for my reading life. For the last week or so, I’ve been hurtling through “Here I Am,” the upcoming novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, marvelling at how it contains and explains my whole extended family; I hope to finish it in the next week or so, along with “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,” the philosophical classic by Richard Rorty, an extraordinary book that seems to take one’s own murky intuitions about life and culture and upgrade them, returning them in vivid, perfect form. After I finish those books, I’m hoping to tackle Svetlana Alexievich’s “Second-Hand Time.”

Those are my morning books; on the ride home, when I’m tired and inclined to play games on my phone, I need page-turners—I keep a little pile of them on my desk at work. I’m looking forward to Emma Cline’s “The Girls,” Patrick Flanery’s “I Am No One,” and Yuri Herrera’s “The Transmigration of Bodies” (all books with an element of suspense); to a few science-fiction books, including Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie” and Liu Cixin’s “Death’s End”; and—confession time—to the novels of Hilary Mantel, which I’ve never read. Maybe, without knowing it, I was saving them for a future commute.

—Joshua Rothman

I finished Anne Enright’s “The Green Road” a few weeks ago, but it hasn’t finished with me. The story of an Irish family, it is the kind of book that refuses quick characterization: it is sprawling and intimate, anguished and hopeful, elliptical and intensely observed. I think of it especially on long, quiet, lucid summer evenings.

—Louisa Thomas

I spent the first several weeks of July reading and re-reading the liner notes to a 2015 reissue of Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk.” For a long time, I thought this band was corny. I don’t go in much for tightly wound folk-rock—frankly, I find anything that sounds too overtly pretty deflating, for reasons that I will continue working out with my therapist—but “Tusk” is just plainly nuts. There’s a quote from Stevie Nicks in the liner notes, about her song “Sisters of the Moon,” in which she admits, “I honestly don’t know what the hell this song is about. I’ve been singing it on tour for the last two and a half years, and every time I’m thinking, ‘What the hell is that?’ ” Then the explanation gets even better: “It was just about a feeling I might have had over a couple days, going inward in my gnarly trollness.” Almost everything Stevie Nicks says is highly valuable, but I’ve had that particular phrase bouncing about my cortex ever since. I continue to believe it would make for a pretty terrific summertime out-of-office auto-reply: “Going inward with my gnarly trollness. Will respond to your e-mail when I return.”

As far as actual literature goes, I’ve gotten pretty heavy into two New Hampshire poets, Galway Kinnell (“Mortal Acts Mortal Words”) and Donald Hall (“Eagle Pond”), this summer. Kinnell, especially, just kills me. There’s a stanza in his poem “The Choir” that I think of often:

Everyone who truly sings is beautiful. Even sad music requires an absolute happiness: eyes, nostrils, mouth strain together in quintal harmony to sing Joy and Death well.

And I devoured Rob Sheffield’s “On Bowie,” which is a kind of master class in how to transmute grief into beauty (and quickly), a lesson that feels especially poignant right now. In his introduction, Sheffield describes the book as “a love letter to everyone who adored him, because bringing us together is what he was really about.” There is a sense, reading “On Bowie,” of being among friends. That feeling—the most beautiful there is—remained for me long after I put the book down.

—Amanda Petrusich

I am embarrassingly late to reading Junot Díaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” which was published nearly a decade ago. But I finally did over the Fourth of July weekend, and rarely have I been so entranced by a novel. It’s such an intimate portrait of a family, and yet such a sweeping story about love and brutality and immigration and America. What’s more, it is narrated with the most magnetic, propulsive voice.

—David Grann

Sometime in June I took an Amtrak from Penn Station to Rochester, New York. The ride takes seven river-guided hours: north along the Hudson, then west on the Mohawk, and between naps and tepid attempts to write, I read Maggie Nelson’s slight, beautiful “Bluets.” I think of summer reading, I guess, as slow and playful, and the form of “Bluets”—a series of numbered paragraphs, some connected explicitly to the book’s several narrative strands, some almost totally epigrammatic—fits these criteria perfectly. My eye flitted between the numbers on each page, dragging me happily ahead and behind of what was, for me, the “present” of the text. (At one point, sort of restless, I started reading backward from the end. It was fun.) “Bluets” is one of those books that I’d been meaning to get to for a while, but when I finished it I didn’t regret having come to it late. What Nelson describes so excruciatingly well in its pages—love, helplessness, horniness, loss, obsession, fear; the act of writing, and of arranging, as a salve for these conditions, and more—is stuff that only experience can bring, and which only distance can help make coherent. The book offers and asks for something like wisdom. I almost wished I’d waited another decade to pick it up, but I guess I can read it again.

—Vinson Cunningham

As the mercury rises, how about some climate-change fiction? My favorite book of the summer so far is Ilija Trojanow’s “The Lamentations of Zeno.” First published in German, in 2011, as “EisTau,” it has just been translated into English—a task that cannot have been easy, given that each chapter ends in a short cacophonic burst, a stream of tourist platitudes, news snippets, earworm lyrics, and VHF emergency broadcasts. The premise is that a German scientist, devastated by the death of “his” Alpine glacier due to global warming, has taken a job leading tourists on Antarctic cruises. It’s short, sharp, bitter, and very funny.

Next on my summer list: Robert Penn’s ode to the endangered ash, “The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees,” and “Romeo and/or Juliet,” by Ryan North, the first Choose Your Own Adventure I’ve read since puberty.

—Nicola Twilley

My twin sons are ten years old now and, without my quite noticing, they’ve been filling up my Kindle, so I’m spending the summer reading behind them and catching up. It’s pure joy. I’m skipping over the standard boy stuff—“The Illustrated Ninja Handbook,” “Learn How to Back Flip in 31 Days”— and zeroing in on the gems. Jonathan Auxier’s “Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes” and his wonderfully creepy “The Night Gardener.” Steve Sheinkin’s “The Notorious Benedict Arnold,” from which I learned an embarrassing amount. Everything by Kate DiCamillo. Last week, at the beach, I lost myself for a full day in the graphic-novel version of Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book.” It tells the story of a boy, Nobody Owens, who grows up in a graveyard, raised by ghosts and a reformed vampire named Silas, until he’s old enough to learn his true name and take vengeance on the man who killed his family when he was a toddler (and who is now coming to kill him). It’s a bittersweet coming-of-age story, and it’s got everything: murder, unrequited love, extra-planar ghouls. It was exhilarating, exactly the read I needed. One great thing about this project is the awareness that there’s a little book club taking shape in my house to which—for a little while, anyway—I’m allowed to belong. But the best part is the feeling that I’m starting anew, as if I’m ten years old again and discovering that there’s a rich world of reading ahead of me, while knowing, as an adult, that it’s true.