The Great American Retro Road Trip is a clever, offbeat, encyclopedic travelogue that celebrates roadside attractions from the kooky to the classic, and everything in between. ... Read full Story
Royal dynasties, niche cultural histories, data science and long-put off classics: Here’s what BookPage staffers are reading off the clock to make the most of the season. ... Read full Story
Susan E. Clark’s illustrated, pocket-sized guide to clouds both explains meteorological science and marvels at the poetry of the sky. ... Read full Story
In Claire Jia’s incisive and witty debut, former best friends Lian and Wenyu are reunited when Wenyu returns to Beijing for her engagement party, setting the two down a reckless path. ... Read full Story
In the quietly enchanting The Place of Tides, James Rebanks spends a season with the “duck women” of a Norwegian archipelago and reminds us that small acts of care for our environment can result in great things when done over time. ... Read full Story
Rachel Joyce wields her descriptions and impressions like an artist wields paint in this portrait of how four adult children become unmoored in the wake of their father’s death. ... Read full Story
Both hopeful and determinedly honest, Leila Mottley’s The Girls Who Grew Big follows three Floridian teenage mothers, and reflects on how and why we love. ... Read full Story
Take a trip to the beach, watch fireworks, visit the public pool: There are countless ways to spend these long hot days, and these books cover a few of the possibilities. ... Read full Story
Dragonfly migrations, bioluminescent plankton and “hardcore mammal spotters”: In his refreshing, playful Nature at Night, naturalist Charles Hood shows that nighttime is almost like an undiscovered country. ... Read full Story
The acclaimed author of the Tess Monaghan series and Lady in the Lake takes a walk on the less wild side with Murder Takes a Vacation ... Read full Story
You’ve Awoken Her is the perfect beach read for daring sorts who enjoy gothic Lovecraftian fiction along with their sunshine, sand and unknowably deep waters. ... Read full Story
If these rugs could talk, they’d keep you up late with their life stories. In Threads of Empire, historian Dorothy Armstrong is a passionate interpreter of history as seen through 12 carpets. ... Read full Story
Dana A. Williams’ affectionate, vibrant biography of Toni Morrison illuminates how the Nobel Prize-winning author championed other writers as an editor at Random House. ... Read full Story
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 3, 2025 is:
desultory \DEH-sul-tor-ee\ adjective
Desultory is a formal word used to describe something that lacks a plan or purpose, or that occurs without regularity. It can also describe something unconnected to a main subject, or something that is disappointing in progress, performance, or quality.
// After graduation, I moved from job to job in a more or less desultory manner before finding work I liked.
// The team failed to cohere over the course of the season, stumbling to a desultory fifth place finish.
“One other guy was in the waiting room when I walked in. As we sat there past the scheduled time of our appointments, we struck up a desultory conversation. Like me, he’d been in the hiring process for years, had driven down from Albuquerque the night before, and seemed nervous. He asked if I’d done any research on the polygraph. I said no, and asked him the same question. He said no. We were getting our first lies out of the way.” — Justin St. Germain, “The Memoirist and the Lie Detector,” New England Review, 2024
Did you know?
The Latin adjective desultorius was used by the ancient Romans to describe a circus performer (called a desultor) whose trick was to leap from horse to horse without stopping. English speakers took the idea of the desultorius performer and coined the word desultory to describe that which figuratively “jumps” from one thing to another, without regularity, and showing no sign of a plan or purpose. (Both desultor and desultorius, by the way, come from the Latin verb salire, meaning “to leap.”) A desultory conversation leaps from one topic to another, and a desultory comment is one that jumps away from the topic at hand. Meanwhile a desultory performance is one resulting from an implied lack of steady, focused effort.