Something is coming for the Solstice
The Summer Reading Ritual returns, and this year it's taking me somewhere new
I have been sitting with a secret since April, and I think it is finally time to let it out.
Every year, around this time, I disappear into a project that takes over my reading life completely. A season’s worth of books, read slowly and with intention. Notes in the margins. A mood that builds, page by page, until it becomes something I can hand to you in the form of a guide.
Last year’s Summer Reading Ritual found its readers in more places than I had expected. This year, I started over. New theme. New books. A new arc.
I have always been an armchair traveller. I know with certainty that this one lifetime will not be enough for all the places I carry in my imagination — and so books have always been the solution. They are the only passport that never expires, the only way to arrive somewhere fully before you have ever set foot there. Or perhaps instead of setting foot there.
This summer, my books are taking me to the Caribbean.
From Cuba to Haiti, from Jamaica to Saint Lucia, I have spent months inside these novels, and the guide grew around them the way a journey does: not as a list, but as a day. A long, unhurried Caribbean day, moving from the early morning heat through the slow middle hours and into the soft collapse of evening.
The guide is a free download, as always. It carries the books, of course. But also the rituals that gathered around them as I read: beauty gestures borrowed from the islands, recipes that came directly out of the pages, a mood that is less about escapism and more about genuine arrival. The kind you only find in literature.
It releases on the Summer Solstice, June 21st.
If you would like to be notified the moment it goes live, the waiting list is open — you will find the link here. A quiet note in your inbox on the longest day of the year.