Nine artists recommend their favorite summer books

Roger Ballen

What is the best book you have read recently?

The best book I’ve read recently is Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle. Extraordinary and revealing. Bridle examines various forms of intelligence, encompassing plants, animals, humans and man-made, and how they reshape our understanding of humanity’s position in the universe. This is related to the exhibit at my new Inside Out Center for the Arts [in Johannesburg]which examines the supposed superiority of man over nature.

What is the ideal summer reading?

The best reading of the summer is that of Thich Nhat Hanh Call Me by My Real Names: The Collected Poems. This renowned Buddhist monk passed away last year, but his lessons still resonate. The poems are a call for calm, stillness and a flavor of connectedness in a time of global fracture and our contemporary affliction of distraction. Centering, beautifully soft.

Olafur Eliasson

Best recent book

At Amitav Ghosh The Curse of the Nutmeg: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021). Ghosh writes about the end of worlds, about empathy and more than human voices, about who can be counted as human. It is a text that touches me. And in that touch, there is potential for transformation. Ghosh writes: “So if it is true that the human ability to speak and think can only be actualized in the presence of other species, can we really say that these faculties belong exclusively to humans?”

Jenny Holzer

Best recent book

a great book, Homeland Elegies (2020), a novel by Ayad Akhtar. The book is good because the author is smart, and he packs in the subject.

Perfect summer read

For the summer I recommend with pleasure, for the title in addition, Art is a Tyrant: The Unconventional Life of Rosa Bonheur (2020) by Catherine Hewitt.

Janet Cardiff

Best recent book

I am currently reading When we stop understanding the world by Benjamin Labatut. So far, it’s been an entertaining and fictionally embellished dystopian biographical account of major scientific personalities. It is also about our relentless readiness for the potentially disastrous consequences of their research, including the invention of poison gas and its use. Labatut also mixes mathematical geniuses such as Shinichi Mochizuki and Alexander Grothendieck, who eventually gave up math as a destructive force. I can’t help but think of the story of the atomic bomb and the exponentially unstoppable expanding field of AI.

Perfect summer read

Two of my favorite fiction books are Why be happy when you could be normal? by Jeannette Winterson and On Earth, we are briefly beautiful by Ocean Vuong. Both are written in an incredibly inventive poetic diaristic style and both deal with the unbreakable bond between mother and child, even with “monster mothers”. There is so much in both books that keeps you as a reader from marveling at the beautifully constructed narratives. But in addition to their writing skills are their powerful personal stories of immigration and adoption through the difficult but beautiful journeys from childhood to adulthood.

Cornelia Parker

Best recent book

Beastly: A New Story of Animals and Us (2023) by Keggie Carew.

Perfect summer read

The Brilliant Abyss: True Stories of Deep Sea Exploration, Uncovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed (2021) by Helen Scales.

Zadie Xa

Best recent book

I haven’t had time to sit down and read anything properly for the past few months, but I’ve listened to a few audiobooks while working. A recent favorite is Neil Gaiman’s Never (1996), excellently narrated by Gaiman himself. I love the idea of ​​an underworld of London existing unbeknownst to the rest of us living here.

Perfect summer read

The perfect summer read will be something that takes me out of my daily routine and into someone else’s world. I have a soft spot for fantasy and science fiction, especially if they incorporate elements of traditional folklore from cultures I’m not too familiar with.

Adrian Villar Rojas

Best recent book

The best book I’ve read recently is actually a rereading, in my opinion, of a classic: that of Eric Hobsbawm The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (1962).

Perfect summer read

I don’t plan readings related to seasons or “holidays” – probably because I don’t take or plan vacations.

Petrit Halilaj

Best recent book

I loved the book So the waves come in pairs: Thinking with the Mediterraneans (2023), edited by Barbara Casavecchia. I contributed drawings and the texts are beautiful. Simone Fattal and [her late partner] Etel Adnan talks about [the different] seas; I love this conversation.

Ali Kazim

Best recent book

The Urdu Poetry Book Safir-E-Laila by Ali Akbar Natiq.

Perfect summer read

Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River (2008) by Alice Albinia.