Summer Reading List

Summer is a bracingly honest season for readers: it's too hot to pretend to be clever, so you just read books you actually like. TIME asked some of its favorite writers what they read when they read for fun

Jennifer Weiner

Jennifer Weiner

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Jennifer Weiner picks Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

How to describe Geek Love? It's the story of a family of circus freaks headed up by a matriarch who deliberately ingests poison when she's pregnant so that her kids' resulting deformities will guarantee their lifelong employment. Our heroine, her daughter, is a hunchback albino dwarf named Olympia, and the book details her childhood; her lifelong love affair with her limbless brother Arturo, who forms a cult of voluntary amputees; and her quest to rescue their lovely (but with a little something extra) daughter Miranda from unspeakable peril. Huh. Maybe just say it's a story about a dysfunctional family, the longing for normality and the enduring bond of a mother's love, and tell your friends they won't be sorry.

Weiner's new novel, Best Friends Forever, is out in July

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