What I'm Reading This Summer 2026

Five Weeks of Summer Left

I've said before that I don't believe in reading seasons (and I still don't). I read every night before going to sleep and every morning before getting out of bed, and that doesn't change just because the weather does. Summer only changed what's loaded into my iPad's books library.

Most summer reading lists are posted at the start of the season, when they're pure intention and nothing has been tested yet. For this one, the season is already two-thirds gone, so I can tell you which books have been read (so far), which one I'm in the middle of, and which ones are still sitting there, waiting.

It's a Pool, Not a Queue

What makes this list different from most: there are eleven books in it, and there is no order.

I don't have a queue. I keep a pool and choose from it based on whatever I'm in the mood for at that moment: a dense one when I have the attention for it, or a short one when I don't. I wrote more about matching the book to the moment → if you're interested, and that's also why I'm comfortable with several books open at once →.

The pool only works because all the books are ebooks. Eleven books added to my iPad mini means no packing decision. At the end of this month, I'm taking an eleven-hour overnight flight, and the entire summer stack will come with me in a bag pocket. A pile of paper books would force me to choose two or three at most. That's the whole ereader trade-off → in one sentence: you give up the object, you get the option.

What's Already Out of the Pool

Three books have come out of it so far.

I finished Alchemy by Rory Sutherland in July, and it set the tone for everything after. I wrote some more about the book in last month's recap →. Then there are these other two, which I finished in the first half of August:

Positioning

by Al Ries & Jack Trout

You don't win a market by being better, you win it by owning a specific spot in someone's head. A fast read, and still super relevant (it was first written in 1981).

Est. read: 3h 44 min

Get your reading estimate →

Alongside it is Derek Sivers' Hell Yeah or No – also short and straight to the point. I'm not going to go into detail on either book here, because they belong in my August recap at the start of September. (I'll link it here once I've written it!)

What I'm Reading Right Now

Time to say the obvious thing out loud: this stack is what I'm reading because I'm building the thing you're reading it on.

Talking to Humans

by Giff Constable

Eighty-eight pages on how to interview the people you're building for without leading them into telling you what you want to hear. Closer to a field manual than a book.

Est. read: 1h 32 min

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Positioning showed me where ReadingHabit fits. Talking to Humans is how you find out whether anyone actually wants it, and I need it – there are no substantial customer conversations behind this project yet. That's an uncomfortable thing to write on my own blog, but it's why I'm reading the book.

It's also eighty-eight pages, showing off how my pool works in practice. This one I reach for, because a dense book isn't happening right now.

Still in the Pool

Six left. Three worth showing you:

The Science of Storytelling

by Will Storr

Why stories work on the human brain, told through neuroscience and craft rather than conventional writing advice. The odd one out in a stack of business books.

Est. read: 5h 12 min

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The Making of Prince of Persia

by Jordan Mechner

The actual journals from building a landmark game, mostly by the author himself in the late eighties. A solo builder's diary, doubt and all, published unedited.

Est. read: 5h 53 min

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Excellent Advice for Living

by Kevin Kelly

450 words of wisdom Kelly wrote for his kids. A book you can open at a random page and close two minutes later.

Est. read: 3h 55 min

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Kelly's is a re-read, and I'm using it as the palate cleanser between the heavier books. On nights when the dense books won't move, three pages of Excellent Advice keep the reading habit alive.

The last three are The Lean Startup, Paul Jarvis' Company of One, and Sivers again, this time with Useful Not True. Same thread as the rest: one person, building something small, trying not to get it wrong.

The One I Can't Wait to Get To

Influence

by Robert B. Cialdini

The six principles behind why people say yes, catalogued from decades of research. The book everybody quotes secondhand.

Est. read: 10h 39 min

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This one, and for a specific reason: it's Alchemy's systematic sibling. Sutherland shows that people run on psycho-logic rather than logic, and he lays it out the way he would at dinner – anecdote, detour, a joke, then something that rearranges your thinking. Cialdini covers the same territory, but with the research attached. Reading them back to back is what's interesting to me.

Will I Actually Finish It? No.

I did the math, and I'd rather show you than pretend.

Eight books left in the pool come to about 1,907 pages. I read at 0.7 pages per minute and average roughly 25 minutes a day – about 17 pages. Summer ends on September 22, so I've got 39 days and something like 680 pages in them.

That's a third of the pool. Three books out of eight.

I'm not disappointed, because the pool isn't a to-do list. A pile you can finish is a pile with no options left in it. Building it bigger than the time is my trick. (For the same math run over a full year instead of a season, check out how many books you can read in a year →.)

But knowing the number matters. It makes the difference between a stack of books you chose and a stack you're kind of anxious about.

Build Your Own Pool

You don't need eleven books or a theme, and you definitely don't need mine – swap every title here for whatever you'd reach for. What's worth stealing is this: pick more books than you can finish, keep them all in one place, and let your mood do the picking instead of a schedule you set earlier in the year.

Then check how much time it'll cost you. The pool is the first half of a habit; the recap on the first of the next month is the second half. I'll tell you how much of this I got through in the next two recaps (August and September).

Pick five books tonight. Start whichever one you want.