My summer best list for 2026

It’s hard to beat summer here in Seattle. The days are long, sunny, and warm, and you’re never far from Puget Sound or a lake. Something about the season just makes me want to relax with a good book or show. (Although to be fair, I also feel that way every other season of the year.)

As I was putting together this list, I thought about what makes something a “summer best.” For me, that means a book or show that pulls me in and completely commands my attention. I want to sit down in the shade with a book and not look up until the sun starts setting.  

This year’s list includes a mix of things I’ve been enjoying lately. There’s a terrific novel, a pair of nonfiction books that will help you understand more about the world, and a show I couldn’t stop watching. I hope you find something here that grabs your attention as much as these did mine.

Best Fiction: Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger.

A family is traveling down the road in their autonomous vehicle when they get into a horrible collision. Someone in the other car is killed. Is the driver responsible? The carmaker? The company that made the self-driving software? A novel that deals with big questions like that could become ponderous, but Holsinger keeps the action moving. You don’t know which way the plot will go next.

Best Nonfiction: 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—And How It Shattered a Nation, by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

I thought Too Big to Fail was terrific, and Sorkin’s newest book is just as thoroughly researched as his last one. The factors that led to the stock market crash of 1929 were super complex, and he really helps you understand the various players involved—although I had to write down the names of the key people to keep track of them! While banking systems are a lot more resilient today, I think it’s important to understand what went wrong to ensure we don’t make the same mistakes again. For example, history shows that the boundary between gambling and investing is less black and white than you’d expect. Financial trends like meme stocks, prediction markets, and particularly margin investing make it clear we have more to learn from the past.

Best Listen: The audiobook of Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery, by Theodore H. Schwartz.

I have become a huge fan of audiobooks in recent years. Although I’ll always enjoy sitting down by myself with a physical book, I love that listening to an audiobook can turn reading into a shared experience. (My girlfriend, Paula, and I often listen while puzzling.) Gray Matters is one of the best I’ve listened to recently. Schwartz does a fantastic job of explaining the maladies of the brain and what it’s like to be a neurosurgeon. There’s so much we still don’t know about how the brain works (although that’s finally changing), but I enjoyed learning about the history of the field. I can be picky about narrators since I usually listen on at least 1.5x speed, but Sean Pratt’s narration here was engaging and easy to follow.

Best Watch: Season 2 of The Pitt.

I’ve become a complete addict of The Pitt. I just finished Season 2, and the show is spectacular (but I get why some people find it too intense or graphic to watch). Set across a single 15-hour shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room, it follows the doctors, residents, and nurses navigating one impossible case after another. From my work with the Gates Foundation, I understand more of the medicine than I expected. But watching with my daughter Jenn, who works in pediatrics, was especially rewarding. She validated not just the medicine but the human dynamics involved in an ER: the satisfaction of a care team clicking into place, and the frustration when the system, the bureaucracy, or a patient’s own choices get in the way. It seems like there’s no other profession where you're exposed to people at their most vulnerable so relentlessly. Clearly, there’s an adrenaline rush to this work that keeps people coming back, even when they wonder why they chose it.