So many summer reading lists, so little summer…  The Daily Beast recommends…

The Girl Who Played with Fire
by Stieg Larsson

In an American mystery writer’s hands, this novel—the second in a trilogy that began with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—might read like a Law & Order episode. But the late Swedish journalist-turned-novelist’s brooding tone and the fantastically odd bisexual geek heroine Lisbeth Sander make this everything the folks at Knopf have been crowing that it is: riveting, unputdownable, a sure bestseller.

The Accidental Billionaires
by Ben Mezrich

Lucky for the hundreds of millions of Facebook devotees that Mark Zuckerberg’s parents apparently never made him shut off his computer. Zuckerberg, an unpopular nerd at Harvard, invented the social-networking site one night in his dorm room, becoming, by age 25, a billionaire several times over. The author of the bestselling Bringing Down the House chronicles that success—and the relationships it both created and destroyed. 

The Invisible Mountain
by Carolina de Robertis

This debut about three generations of strong women in late 20th-century Uruguay is the brainiest dynastic novel in years. A high-end, Euro Danielle Steel story full of sex, politics and family—with just a little bit of magical realism to give literary heft to the whole delightful concoction.

 Satchel
by Larry Tye

Woody Allen named one of his children for the “majestic and enigmatic” pitcher born Leroy Paige in pre-civil-rights Alabama. (The nickname comes from his work as a railroad porter.) Well-known for his remark about age—“If you don’t mind, it don’t matter”—Paige emerges here as a child of a washerwoman who developed his pitch in reform school and went on (at age 42!) to lead the Cleveland Indians to the World Series.

The Bolter
by Frances Osborne

The author is the great granddaughter of Idina Sackville, a Jazz Age femme fatale who flouted convention by doing exactly as she pleased, the woman some say inspired the character of “the Bolter” in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. Through diaries, letters, and countless interviews, Osborne recreates her ancestor’s life and loves, from England to Kenya and back again.

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