It’s not every day that two seemingly-polar-opposite blockbusters come out in theaters on the same day, and it’s even more rare that the venn diagram of those two releases has some significant overlap when it comes to existential crises about appearances and reality and... death! Who doesn’t love spending their summer afternoons awash in existential crises via Cillian Murphy’s cheekbones?
We wanted to celebrate this delicious double bill in the only way we know how: with a list of books that we think would pair nicely. But before we go long on books about appearances and reality and death, it feels important to call out the writers and actors currently striking. We stand in solidarity! They’re the reason we have these movies that we’re so excited to watch (while snacking on popcorn in an air-conditioned theater).
Happy summer watching! Happy summer reading! Solidarity with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA!
BARBIE
Below, please find books that are a cocktail of the uncanny valley, “do you ever think about dying,” doll parts, and "Kenergy,” garnished with ruminations on girlhood and capitalism. All would make for perfect poolside reading at Barbie’s Dream House.
by Nelly Reifler
A book where Barbie and Ken are a pair of vigilantes who have a ton of sex (by removing their limbs and sticking them into the other’s empty sockets)? Absolutely a shoo-in for this list. Elect H. Mouse State Judge is such a joyfully weird, vaguely noir story set in the sordid world of children’s toys. Elections are shady, daughters are kidnapped, cults are cult-ing: a world where Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie would be right at home. This one is so strange and so much fun.
by Alissa Nutting
Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love is such furious, technicolor fun. Our main character, Hazel, has recently escaped from the tech-heavy world of her tech-mogul husband, Byron Gogol (Byron does NOT have Kenergy), only to find her dad shacked up in his trailer with a sex doll. And this is just the set up; what follows is riotous and unsettling and thoroughly enjoyable. The world of this novel, filled with dolphins and grave sitters, con artists and microchips, is delightfully off-kilter — the kind of world where an IRL Barbie showing up wouldn’t be out of the question.
by Mona Awad
This book is fun and surreal, riotous and unnerving. Set at an MFA program (spooky in its own right), writer Samantha is pulled into a co-dependent, cult-like clique of fellow writers who all call each other Bunnies. This is a gruesome, gorgeous book about the female experience, friendships, bodies, and the easy cruelty of playing with men like they’re dolls (Kens). A perfect complement to the dark side of Barbie World.
by Lucy Score
We would’ve been remiss not to include at least one book on this list that tips the (Barbie-branded cowboy) hat to the golden retriever Kenergy of Barbie’s companion. Maggie Moves On is a delightful romance about a YouTube star moving to a new town to start a new project, only to find herself distracted by a very attractive and very easygoing landscaper. Charming and sexy — a perfect, small-town romance to add some spice to your Barbie-pink summer.
by Dizz Tate
The brutes in Brutes would absolutely have dismantled their Barbies, dragged them through the dirt, cut their hair. Brutes is a beautiful debut novel that swirls around the sinister, mesmerizing undertow of girlhood. The story is mythic and startling; the writing is lush and moving and strange. A great companion to Barbie’s party-stopping question: “Do you guys ever think about dying?”
by Hilary Leichter
Barbie is a multihyphenate. She’s the president. She’s an astronaut. She’s a lawyer. She’s everything. (And he’s just Ken!) Hilary Leichter’s jaw-dropping (and I mean it) debut, Temporary, follows a temp worker who may not be everything, but she certainly is a lot of things: a corporate worker, a shoe shiner, an assassin, a pirate, a barnacle. She’s also got a number of boyfriends, many of whom cluster in her apartment, eagerly waiting to return from her latest placement. It’s a transient life, and our hero just keeps searching for something that might feel okay to accept as permanent. As surreal, playful, and strange as a world where Barbie and Ken can rollerblade down the Venice Boardwalk.
by Lyssa Kay Adams
Is there anything more Ken-tastic than Gavin, a man who’s just realized that he’s never given his wife an orgasm, forming a romance book club with his baseball teammates in a desperate attempt to fix his marriage? Add in heartfelt conversations among bros about toxic masculinity and emotional labor (imagine!!!), the Regency romances they read, and Gavin’s very sincere and big-hearted attempts to fix his relationship, and you’ve got a story that any Ken (and any Barbie) would approve of.
by Samanta Schweblin (tr. Megan McDowell)
The little eyes in Little Eyes belong to small toy animals (called kentukis) that have become ubiquitous in homes across the world and are controlled remotely by random strangers. Little Eyes is a commentary on capitalism and connection, on empathy and solitude, and it will make you think twice about the inanimate objects you fill your home with. Do they ever think about death??
OPPENHEIMER
For
Oppenheimer book recommendations, we leaned into questions of destruction and death, culpability and power, and what the world might look like on the other side of an everything-altering invention like the atomic bomb.
by Paul Tremblay
Two fathers and their young daughter escape to a remote cabin for what they hope will be a relaxing, off-the-grid vacation — things, of course, do not go to plan. This fantastic (and fantastically surprising) horror novel from Paul Tremblay plays with our fears about the titular end of the world, whether or not we’ll know when the end is near, and what we would do to protect those we love. 10/10, just like I know Oppenheimer will, this story stuck to me for days after finishing.
by Denis Johnson
Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro — as ever, reliably startling and beautiful — is set sixty years after nuclear destruction in Florida, one of the only places to sort-of survive. The world that’s survived is one that’s gone through a warped, funhouse mirror. There are reminders of the world that once existed, and many more reminders of just how far gone that world has become. There are clarinet lessons and voodoo cults, dream-like sequences and apocalypse-specific sland. Oppenheimer may not have been able to imagine this nuclear-devastated landscape, but it feels like an appropriate sequel to Nolan’s destroyer-of-worlds epic.
by Cormac McCarthy
The Passenger, alongside Stella Maris, is one of legendary author Cormac McCarthy’s final novels. Focused on Bobby Western, a salvage diver whose father worked alongside Oppenheimer, The Passenger is a gritty, lyrical book that reckons with American myth and American sins, family and inheritance, guilt and forgiveness. McCarthy is always a reliable author, and the depths that The Passenger digs into would make a perfect shot/chaser to the reckoning that Christopher Nolan is also doing with myth, sin, and inheritance.
by Hilary Mantel
This one feels like such a gimme on this list: the first in Mantel’s incredible trilogy about Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in Henry VIII’s court. The book is dense and textured and the world and characters are all lovingly, beautifully rendered. Mantel pumps this historical fiction full of blood and guts and humanity, in much the same way that (I imagine) Nolan has imbued his movie with the subjective, wildly human nature of a man trying to make his mark on the world.
by George Saunders
Over the course of this book, Lincoln grieves the loss of his son, and the consequences of being a powerful man tasked with the health of his nation. Lincoln in the Bardo is a sharp, compassionate, and haunting elegy that understands the consequences of power and the deep trenches of loss.
by Jinwoo Chong
Flux is one of those debut novels that is so self-assured and so fully formed, that it’s hard to believe it’s actually a debut. Flux follows three characters — Bo, Brandon, and Blue — in three different timelines, as they navigate an increasingly absurd, tech-dystopic reality. Bo loses his mom in a tragic accident; Brandon gets an enigmatic, maybe-insidious, job; Blue participates in an exposé of a failed startup. Flux is about the impossibility of navigating grief in a consistently strange, opaque world; reality-altering inventions and the people caught in their blast radius; and the struggle to stay human in the midst of it all.
by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
If I’m being honest: I have not read this book! But it’s the book that Oppenheimer is based on, so it felt wrong not to include it. To quote the New York Times: “A work of voluminous scholarship and lucid insight, unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer’s essential nature.... It succeeds in deeply fathoming his most damaging, self-contradictory behavior.”
by Colm Tóibín
Biographers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin titled their biography American Prometheus because: “Prometheus stole fire and gave it to men. But when Zeus learned of it, he ordered Hephaestus to nail his body to Mount Caucasus. On it Prometheus was nailed and kept bound for many years.” Which is why I felt like I needed a retelling from Greek mythology on this list, and Colm Tóibín’s fit the bill. House of Names, based on Clytemnestra and her family tragedy. This is a book filled with the depths of human emotion — despair, betrayal, love, loss — and the lengths that a mother will go to protect her child. This is a tragedy whose scale rivals that of Oppenheimer.
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For more reading recommendations, check out the
Powell's Book Preview: Third Quarter, our
Midyear Roundup, and
Hot Book Summer: 24 Bookseller-Recommended Titles.