June has finally arrived, which means summer vacations will soon be upon us. Before you know it, you'll be packing for that beach trip wondering, What should I read? The Weekend Beacon has got you covered with our summer recommendations, beginning with a book about what books you should read!

Micah Mattix reviews Christopher J. Scalia's 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).

"Conservatives should be widely read literary people. After all, we believe in beauty and the importance of remembering the past—and all writing is, in a strict sense, memorial. We believe in the inescapabilty of suffering—an idea present in every great work of literature or art. 'About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters,' W.H. Auden writes in 'Musée des Beaux Arts': 'how well they understood / Its human position.' And we reject the idea—at least we used to—that politics can address life’s thornier problems, which are presented in literature as enduringly complex.

"Yet, we also tend to focus on the tried and true (or, in this case, the read and true), which can make us risk-averse when it comes to literature. This is unfortunate, Scalia writes, because it obscures the 'abundance of conservative ideals and principles in literature more broadly.' In short, it makes it seem that literature belongs to the left.

"Scalia doesn’t obsess over the question of why conservatives read—or seem to read—so narrowly, and rightly so. (I suspect that conservative reading is broader than what is reflected in the literary references in our magazines or books.) After a short introduction, he gets right to recommending novels in a breezy style that is one of the book’s many pleasures. There is no moralizing about our duty—as citizens in a democracy!—to read difficult books, no browbeating for our louche reading ways. Instead, we have a brief summary of plot and context followed by a pithy discussion of a work’s key ideas and what makes the novel worth our time.

"Scalia has a gift for capturing the most interesting elements of these novels in a short paragraph or a single sentence. Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas reminds us, for example, that 'enduring … happiness requires well-ordered desire—we need to pursue something of value, and we need to have some goal beyond ourselves to feel satisfied.' Frances Burney’s Evelina suggests that 'corrupt manners can have violent, degrading consequences while respect for civil behavior signals broader sympathy and concern for others.' Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance reminds us simply that 'there are no new truths.' The book is an excellent introduction to these—and other—novels for readers regardless of political persuasion."

It's no mystery why people love Michael Connelly. John Wilson has been a fan of the crime-fiction writer for decades and reviews his latest novel, Nightshade.

"Nightshade, published two weeks ago, is Connelly’s 40th novel. It introduces a new protagonist, an L.A. County police detective named Stilwell, who—just over a year before the action of Nightshade commences—blew the whistle on a colleague, Ahearn, who had manipulated evidence in a homicide case they were both working. The black mark against Ahearn didn’t get him fired, but it put a ceiling on his prospects for promotion. Meanwhile, unfairly, Stilwell is shifted from the county’s homicide desk to Catalina Island, a beautiful place but a far cry from the challenging urban setting in which he had thrived.

"Stilwell misses his old job, but he has come to love Catalina, and—recently divorced—he has connected with a woman who has spent her entire life on the island: Tash Dano, the assistant harbormaster, eight years younger than Stilwell. He is beginning to feel at home there. But the discovery of a murdered woman’s body in the harbor—she’s been stuffed into a bag weighted with chains—rekindles his instinct for solving murders and achieving a measure of justice for victims.

"Like two of Connelly's signature protagonists, longtime LAPD detective and freelancer Harry Bosch and the much younger Renée Ballard (also an LAPD homicide detective), Stilwell has an unusually deep and intense empathy for those whose lives have been taken and a relentless drive to track down their killers. Connelly’s ability to create characters in this vein—and to connect them with one another—is surely one reason for his extraordinary success. After this first outing (oddly, in the entire book, Connelly never gives us the protagonist’s first name, a quirk I found mildly irritating), I am sure Stilwell will be a keeper."

Laurie Woolever was a keeper of all things confidential, having worked for Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali. But now she's out with a memoir, Care and Feeding. Bonnie S. Benwick has a review.

"Woolever had been journaling along the way, in effect honing her literary skills. That is surely one reason this account of Batali’s behavior is specific: He pats the seat of their shared cab and says, 'Slide those thighs on over.' She plops her bag between them and thinks: 'Had he really expected me to fucking cuddle with him in the first five minutes of my first day on the job? He was testing my boundaries.'"

"When he squeezes Woolever’s backside later on, she calls him on it but then laughs it off. Why? The fact that the chef harassed his female employees was being tolerated, and Batali had opened those editorial doors for her. Woolever’s writing chops soon earn bylines in Wine Enthusiast and the Los Angeles Times."

Anthony Bourdain "gets her to join Twitter—reposting her first tweet and earning her an immediate throng of followers. He connects her with his pals at Lucky Peach. He invites her to join his television crew on a shoot in Vietnam, where she slurps a bowl of Bun Bo Hue, the spicy beef and pork noodle soup Bourdain calls 'the greatest in the world.' They collaborate on a second cookbook, this time as coauthors.

"Woolever admits that she admires, and is envious of, Bourdain’s 'public-facing' life. Privately, she watches as he frees himself from his first marriage, achieves crazy fame, falls in love hard, and suffers for it. Knowing his fate, reading the final 60 or so pages of Care and Feeding is akin to witnessing Bourdain lumber toward the edge of a cliff."

From troubled chefs to troubled restaurateurs, Alexander Larman reviews Keith McNally's I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir.

"There were few books this year that I was looking forward to reading more than McNally’s memoir, I Regret Almost Everything. I had expected it would be a gloriously delicious tasting menu of his famous diners’ indiscretions, served up with a side order of McNally’s own buccaneering career through the fleshpots, bars, and speakeasies of Manhattan. Even though the entrepreneur had a near-fatal stroke in 2016 that left his right side paralyzed and his speech badly impaired, his hugely popular, endlessly witty Instagram account suggested that McNally was as talented a raconteur as he was a restaurateur. By rights, readers should have been in for a three-course feast of an autobiography.

"That the book isn’t at all what was anticipated is clear from its first sentence: 'In early August 2018, I tried to commit suicide.' Describing in unsparing detail the mental and physical collapse that took place after his stroke, McNally, tiring of a painful and often humiliating existence, decided to end the misery he felt by taking a massive overdose of pills. Discovered by one of his sons, he was committed firstly to hospital, and then to a psychiatric institution for therapy. While there, he began to explore the idea of committing his thoughts to his typewriter, which he did slowly and laboriously, using his good hand to do so. I Regret Almost Everything is the result, and even the most sympathetic of readers will regret that this is a book so clearly influenced by trauma, rather than triumph.

"The first third of the book contains its two most jaw-dropping revelations: firstly, the suicide attempt, and secondly, McNally’s account of a love affair that this otherwise heterosexual man embarked upon with the playwright Alan Bennett, when Bennett was aged 35 and McNally was 18. The two had met when McNally, who briefly worked as a boy actor, had appeared in Bennett’s 1968 satirical play Forty Years On. The relationship, which began as that of mentor and student, eventually developed into something else, although McNally is quick to note, 'While I loved Alan, the attraction was never physical, and our nights together were more intimate than passionate.'"

Speaking of questionable relationships, Nora Kenney reviews Matthew Gasda's latest novel, The Sleepers.

"The year is 2016, and Dan is dating the beautiful but 'aging' actress, Mariko, a Tisch graduate whose stagnant performances are precise but uninspired. ('Aging' in quotes because she’s only 32, yet frets over her supposed crow’s feet and fading glow.) As the 2016 election simmers in the backdrop—notifications humming ambiently across Twitter and Facebook—The Sleepers unfolds, saturated in paradox.

"Perhaps the most central of those: that so-called male feminists often make the worst boyfriends—their performative wokeness a Trojan horse for ego, entitlement, and resentment. But subtler paradoxes surface, too: that Mariko, the neurotic older sister, is less professionally successful than her free-spirited sibling, Akari; that Dan, a proto-'Social Justice Warrior' online, yawns at the suffering of individuals in real life. There’s also the paradox that the meritocratic hamster wheel he builds a brand critiquing is his only source of meaning. And that his separation from it is only possible through the patrimony of a father whom he scorns, both in the abstract (deeming the nuclear family an 'overrated configuration') and the concrete (his unwillingness to be a decent, communicative son).

"I think—but am not always sure—that the novel is satirizing Dan. So many of his lines are cringe-inducing, with surrounding characters viscerally recoiling. Like when Mariko suggests a movie night, and he retorts that he only watches 'Lars von Trier films.' Or, when trying to be seductive, he drops the hilariously corny line: 'I like your soul. It’s pretty fucking fascinating slash amazing,' using the Reddit-brained, theatre-kid convention of saying 'slash' out loud. There’s also his absurd insistence that the New York Times isn’t elitist enough. But this isn’t just performative pedantry. It’s a self-absorbed strategy to talk about himself when he should be focused on his girlfriend. 'He wanted to talk about himself, examine himself before her: his ideas, politics, habits, his soul,' the narrator explains. 'This was part of the ruse: he would inquire into her inner life, really, her moral life, only so that he could feel justified in talking about his own.' Dan is, in so many ways, an abhorrent, repulsive, narcissistic character—the embodiment of everything people hate about millennials—which the novel captures brilliantly."

WB addendum: Congratulations to this year's Bradley Prize winners, including Weekend Beacon contributor James Piereson and the subject of a book review by Dan Blumenthal, freedom-fighter Jimmy Lai. Be sure to catch Prof. Piereson's review of Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus in the next edition of the Weekend Beacon.

Happy Sunday.

Vic Matus
Arts & Culture Editor
Washington Free Beacon