After a long winter, readers look to summer for a respite — an opportunity to sink into stories that are magical, mysterious and memorable. If some downtime is in your plans, we have some reading to suggest.

Our book critics have previewed what’s coming to the library and bookstores this summer. Here’s what they are most looking forward to reading — and seeing you read too.

Water in the Desert: A Pilgrimage by Gary Paul Nabhan

I love books that explore nature through a sociocultural lens. Lebanese American Gary Paul Nabhan’s new book traces the story of his unusual life. Nabhan grew up along Lake Michigan’s southern dunes and was negatively singled out as a student with “disabilities.” He found his path through ecology, poetry, travel, studying Indigenous Mexican communities, becoming an Ecumenical Franciscan brother and exploring his own ancestry — all of which shape his view that Earth is “the original scripture.” An ethnobotanist, Nabhan was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” for “insights into the relationship between culture and land.” I can’t wait to read this book. (June 2) — Martha Anne Toll

Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez

Natalia Fuentes has a plan. Violeta, the only child of the Miramontes family and the last in a long line descended from Spanish settlers and Mexican rancho owners, is magically trapped in her own body, and Nati is going to break her out. For a fee, of course. With the help of a doll, she finds a way to communicate with her client, and an unexpected romance sparks between them. But she also attracts the attention of the person who cursed Violeta, and they would do anything to stop Nati from interfering. This gothic horror tale touches on colonialism and colorism, queerness and feminism, generational trauma and familial curses. It’s at once romantic and frightening. We may be only just heading into summer, but this one is already in my top 10 for the year. (June 2) — Alex Brown

The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris

Whenever I encounter a belted kingfisher here in coastal Virginia, my spirits rise as I gaze at a bird with a spiky mohawk and an attitude to match. My summer nonfiction reading will kick off with The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by nature writer Robert Macfarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris, which celebrates the lives of declining or endangered birds from kingfishers to avocets, nightingales and yellowhammers. Though British species remain the book’s focus, the joys of bird-watching span the globe, as does this pair’s invitation to revel in and protect the multispecies worlds of which we humans are one part. (June 9) — Barbara J. King

Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth

I discovered Deb Olin Unferth’s work years ago via her flash-fiction piece “Likable,” which became a staple on my syllabi. Years later, and now firmly a fan, I was thrilled to learn about her forthcoming novel, Earth 7. A story about a decimated future Earth and those working to collect DNA samples from its past in order to rebuild it, the novel is also about love — between two people, yes, but also the broader, more universal love their work entails. After all, preservation of what was and hope for what will be are both acts of immense care for the world. (June 9) — Ilana Masad

Twenty Minutes of Silence by Hélène Bessette, translated by Kate Briggs

This riveting translation at once slays and reinvents the mystery genre. Set in an affluent villa in Manche, France, this 1955 “poetic novel” reconstructs the clashing narratives around the 20-minute interval between a patricide and the arrival of the police. The titular concept of silence, purportedly about the accomplices’ erasure of evidence, in fact represents a linguistic and structural red herring. The articulate, seemingly uncounseled testimonies of the deceased’s adulterous wife and abused son, along with biased speculations by the chief inspector, his deputy, the journalists and the bookseller, are replete with operatic revelations. (July 14) — Thúy Đinh

Charity and Sylvia by Tillie Walden

Tillie Walden’s long-anticipated Charity & Sylvia is a graphic biography in five parts, tracking the love story of two women who openly lived together for 44 years in Weybridge, Vt., in the 1800s. Walden builds on an archive of letters, journal entries and various biographical material to offer this moving portrait told in vignettes, most captured as delicately drawn, copper-tinted, nine-panel comics. Family affairs, religious musings and intimate scenes between the two women are set against the backdrop of a young country, and state, moving through constant, and colossal, transformation. The effect is a slow, dense, contemplative read — a rare gem of a book. (June 16) — Tahneer Oksman

Names Have Been Changed by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

There have been a slew of entertaining novels in the past few years about average people stumbling into criminality — think Kirstin Chen’s Counterfeit and Nina McConigley’s How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, to name just two. But I’m especially looking forward to Names Have Been Changed. Ophir, the Singaporean protagonist, is on the run from the law for her involvement in a money-laundering scheme, and she podcasts about it from an undisclosed location. This picaresque is off to a rocking start, the first-person narration is charmingly self-effacing, and the story promises depth as well, exploring the emotional toll of being a fugitive. (June 23) — Leland Cheuk

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay has made a career out of reinventing himself as an author with every novel, and in his upcoming Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep, he does it yet again. The book is a creepy and unexpectedly humorous science-fiction romp about a young woman who takes a job using a cellphone/remote control to pilot a man in a vegetative state from California to the East Coast while the man goes through a surreal nightmare. A master storyteller, Tremblay’s b(l)ending of genres here truly is a perfect beach read. (June 30) — Gabino Iglesias

Country People by Daniel Mason

I so loved Daniel Mason’s North Woods, which spans four centuries in the life of a Massachusetts house, that I’m eager to read whatever he writes. Country People is quite different. His first contemporary novel spans just one year — the length of a visiting professorship that brings Kate and her family from California to Vermont. The hope is that her husband will finally finish his long-overdue dissertation on Russian folktales, but instead he gets pulled in by some colorful locals and a bizarre, fantastical legend. It’s apparent from a quick peek that Mason has fun exploring marriage, friendship, parenthood and the beguiling allure of storytelling and fantasy in this upbeat romp. (July 7) — Heller McAlpin

An Infinite Love Story by Chanel Cleeton

An Infinite Love Story is a sweeping romantic drama with a touch of magical realism from the bestselling author of The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes. Chanel Cleeton is one of my auto-buy authors — and I was hooked on this new book immediately. Cleeton’s ability to pull readers in quickly and deeply through her storytelling makes her a go-to author for an immersive reading experience. Set during the Space Race of the 1960s, this story follows the wife of an astronaut who is lost in space, who refuses to believe her husband is gone forever. Vivian and Joe’s love is unforgettable, and so is Cleeton’s writing. She had me from the dedication. (July 7) — Denny S. Bryce

The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders

After winning the LA Times Book Prize for her story collection Company, expectations were running high for Shannon Sanders’ first novel. A playful and poignant intergenerational saga about a haunted farm in which ancestors watch over and critique the living for posterity and entertainment, The Great Wherever leaps over that bar. The story pays tribute to the lasting legacy of Sanders’ ancestors (land that’s been in the family for a century), while creating something inventive and new. From an undead perspective, haunting is believably bittersweet; it’s “better than the best reality TV,” but “lesser, of course, than the thrill of both seeing and being seen.” I was hooked from the first sentence. (July 7) — Carole V. Bell

Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate by Roopika Risam

Data centers have been making me anxious for a while, largely because of the environmental impacts — the massive draw on the electrical grid, the millions of gallons of clean water they require for cooling, the massive carbon footprint. The harm caused by data center infrastructure is only part of the problem, though. Roopika Risam’s newest book, Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, explores “how data has always been the seed of power,” tracing its centrality from Mesopotamia to today. A book that promises not to just show how empires have collected and weaponized data over the ages, but also how we can resist, is an easy must-read for me. (July 14) — Ericka Taylor

Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast by Pamela Colloff

I have been a fan of Pamela Colloff’s investigative journalism since 2018, when ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine published a narrative feature on junk forensic science. Her first book builds on her 2019 feature about a con artist who became one of America’s most prolific jailhouse informants. Despite his reputation as a liar and grifter, prosecutors were all too willing to believe the “useful” stories he spun — including about defendants who were ultimately sentenced to death. Unfolding in cinematic detail, Catch the Devil offers a riveting and disturbing account of the potentially fatal consequences of a criminal legal system that is more concerned with securing convictions than determining the truth and delivering justice. (July 14) — Kristen Martin

Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins

I’ve been an admirer of Claire Vaye Watkins since her debut book, the story collection Battleborn, was published in 2012. As good as that book was, I was blown away by her novels, Gold Fame Citrus and I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, both of which brought the American West to life with Watkins’ formidable wit and audacity. I can’t wait for her new novel, which follows a single mother living in an intentional community in the Mojave Desert. Watkins is known for taking risks, and she never repeats herself — I’m betting that her latest book will showcase her genius at storytelling and her love for the rugged landscape of the West. (July 21) — Michael Schaub

Dèy by Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat is an author whose work truly captures the Haitian American immigrant experience with prose that is so languid and all-consuming that one never wants to be released from its grasp. In her first novel in over a decade, she offers a beautiful exploration of migration, gentrification and political instability. The title — Dèy, the Haitian Creole word for “mourning” — immediately caught my attention, as many Americans are in this state today, for their own country. The novel introduces us to Magnolia, a successful real estate agent in Miami whose outlook on life changes after she is caught in a mall shooting. A story that allows us to reassess love and grief, Dèy is a novel of now. (Aug. 25) — Keishel Williams

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ends its run on Thursday night. Our critic-at-large, Eric Deggans, will be posting his takes on the last episodes right here.

Most TV shows wrapping up after more than 10 years in the game would start off their finale week with an avalanche of clips capturing the most impactful moments from the program’s long run.

But The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is no ordinary program.

So Colbert kicked off the show’s last four episodes Monday, with a “best of the worst of” episode, featuring a bunch of comedy bits so awful they mostly never aired at all. Which was really a sideways strategy for paying tribute to the show’s staff – who packed into the seats at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York for this cavalcade of awful, shouting out comments on stuff like video clips featuring a fake ad for “erotic body gravy” that Colbert originally declined to air because the good-looking actors featured in it just looked like “soft core gravy porn.”

Words cannot describe how right Colbert was then.

There was more: A Graphics Graveyard bit featuring a never-aired image proclaiming Hillary Clinton the 45th president (they had hoped to use it during live election coverage in 2016 – sad trombone sound here). A middling field piece featuring Colbert and a staffer buddy surprising a perplexed woman living in the apartment where they once stayed in Chicago. And longtime staffer Brian Stack playing Shrieking Joe, a Kid Rock parody so abrasive that ratings took a nosedive whenever he was on – a trend I don’t expect to end with Monday’s episode.

It all unfolded in a way that left this critic feeling like he crashed the show’s last office party – watching lots of mildly funny material that probably hits a lot harder when you know the office drama behind making it.

As the show counts down its final nights, Colbert has tried hard to deflect anger, sadness or lionizing of his work. So I can see how an episode like this might have felt like a saucy way to redirect the inevitable nostalgia. But Monday’s episode didn’t give fans much to celebrate, beyond the obvious camaraderie the staff enjoys, even now.

In the end, as David Letterman’s former bandleader Paul Shaffer joined Colbert, the band, a bunch of dancers and one of his writers to sing a fish-themed parody of Shaffer’s 1982 disco pop classic “It’s Raining Men” – by the way, it’s not hard at all to believe that Colbert’s writers rejected this bit four times since 2011 – it all felt like a bit of a missed opportunity.

Here’s hoping the next three episodes give fans what they really want – a chance to celebrate the final hours of one of late night’s best satirists.

It is not just any Tuesday.

It is 9 p.m. on a dreary night in Shadow Hills, just miles away from the lush foothills of the Verdugo Mountains. The delicate pitter-patter of a drum’s cymbal is the only sound to break through the thick brick wall of the obscure performance venue, Sun Space, and reach the wide, desolate Sunland Boulevard.

There is no sign outside, but follow the noise inside to find the Host arrive on stage from a door hidden behind a hypnotic dayglow projector visual. He’s wearing a gold sequin jacket over a fresh-pressed polka-dot shirt, fuchsia bell-bottoms and yellow trucker hat and he has an Appalachian-style beard.

The Host is just one of a strange cast of characters to escape the loose folds of Noel Rhodes’ mind and make it on-time to the circus. Rhodes, 63, founded Sun Space in 2017 as a performance art venue for wayward artists who don’t properly fit the rigid mold of the Los Angeles club and bar circuit. The space is “not quite open mic,” Rhodes says, but all lovers of experimental ambient music, free-form jazz, observational comedy, paleontology and asteroseismology lectures or just plain old rock ‘n’ roll are welcome on the schedule, nearly every day of the week.

Patrons gather outside Sun Space during a break between performances in the intimate setting for Unusual Tuesday.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Tuesdays, however, are somehow more unusual.

The crowd drowns in the second-long tension as they sit below teardrop-shaped papier-mâché stalactite hanging from handmade alien geodes on the ceiling. A 2-foot-tall, human-goat lovechild mask rests on the stage. Demographics for Unusual Tuesday range from late teens to septuagenarians, mingling and meandering as they await the start of the show.

“Let’s all together, as one great rising cluster, try, together, to accomplish one thing,” says the Host.

“Let’s figure out what this whole thing is!”

The house band drums intensify, a violin cries and guitar chords growl.

“It’s Un-usual Tuesday,” the congregation replies in song. “And all of those other days, like Friday and Saturday and Sunday … are just big wastes of ti-ime!”

Chaos breaks loose. Rhodes’ bones transform into wild, loose cartilage. Tonya Lee Jaynes, the drummer, puts her entire life force into the bass and snare. The crowd sings the chorus in dissonant harmony.

On an entirely normal Wednesday walk through a nature preserve north of Los Angeles, Rhodes says the idea for Sun Space and the hallmark Unusual Tuesday came from small fundraiser shows his father put on for their small Pennsylvanian town when Rhodes was a child. Vague memories of “The Little Rascals” and “Monty Python” influenced the sketch-based, psychedelic feel of Unusual Tuesday, with Sun Space serving as an outlet for other misfit artists looking to perform on the other days of the week.

“My goal was just to cover the rent with volunteers and equipment already bought,” Rhodes says. “I knew it would work if we weren’t having to pay our home rent on it, you know, our medical bills … as long as it stayed afloat.”

Despite its obscure location, stuck between a cafe and vacant building, the weekly show began to attract an eccentric crowd of artists and attendees.

“The whole ethos is creativity, expression and most importantly, freedom,” says Eddie Loyola, who has attended Unusual Tuesday near-weekly since 2017. “It’s really unusual. It helps support the idea of ‘come show us what you got’ rather than something that’s just cliquey, like at other venues.”

For a fledgling artist like Bailey Zabaglio, who most commonly performs electrocrash music at small house shows, Unusual Tuesday can be a time to experiment with other genres outside of their comfort zone. On the last Unusual Tuesday of April, Zabaglio performed soft electric-indie ballads to a roar of applause as the first act of the night.

Musician Bailey Zabaglio performs an original song on an electric guitar during Unusual Tuesday.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

“The fact that the demographic is so vast and wide and every person you meet is such a f— character, it’s really cool,” Zabaglio says. “It’s so beautiful that everyone agreed to get off the phone, off their couch on a Tuesday in the middle of the week.”

The social media presence of Sun Space is sparse, so Unusual Tuesday attracts most of its attendees by word of mouth. Zabaglio’s brother, Jamie, visited from Washington and performed a witty free-form comedy act only a few slots after his sibling.

“I used to have a variety show in Washington, and this whole trip has been very healing for me,” Jamie says. “I started my own show and I was just doing whatever I could. … I felt like I would never experience something like that again, but I got it again tonight.”

Booking for this specific show is a strange calculus, says Jamie Inman, who does scheduling, sound engineering and other odd jobs for Sun Space, which he now co-owns with Rhodes. Acts are booked two to three weeks in advance and selected from a pool of artists who expressed interest in performing.

“Every single Tuesday is different. Some weeks are singer-songwriter heavy, some weeks are modular synth heavy, some weeks are everything in between,” Inman says. “Sometimes we have expert lecturers come. … We just mishmash everything together until it makes sense. Or if it doesn’t make sense, that’s fine too.”

The only break in the show’s near decade-long history came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when artists all around the city were holed up in their homes with nowhere to play. Rhodes, Inman and Chris Soohoo, Sun Space’s visuals engineer, threw together a Twitch livestream to continue the chaos.

“[Unusual Tuesday online] was nothing like this, but we all learned some new stuff, like, I got into all the visual stuff,” Soohoo says. “Someone said that their first Unusual Tuesday experience was the stream, and now they get to come here in person. … It’s good to know that we did what we could.”

During the online show, Rhodes’ character Austin Drizzles, who performs the crackpot weekly weather report, would field calls from crazed viewers. Now, back on the regular news cycle, Drizzles accepts photo submissions from viewers before the show with added commentary at the end of Unusual Tuesday.

“This was sent in by Rebecca,” Drizzles says of a photo of a squirrel. “That is a cute little wild dog. … The effervescence there. I hope they eat a banana just like they always do.”

Left Unsaid, a jazz breakbeat fusion duo, performed live for the first time at Unusual Tuesday‘s last April show. Lucian Smith and Sander Bryce, who formed the group this year, say performing in L.A. proper to an attentive audience can be a difficult feat, but Unusual Tuesday provides a full venue for nontraditional acts.

A patron watches the Unusual Tuesday show in very low light at Sun Space.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

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“There’s so many venues where people are waiting for you to pull them into it,” Smith says. “But here everyone seems like they’re getting something special, and they’re excited to see what they’re gonna find out. … Coming from having no audience, I loved having this.”

For the faithful observers, many of whom attend weekly, Unusual Tuesday is welcomed as a reprieve from the stress, struggle and day-to-day drag of the working week, says August Kamp, an artist and regular attendee of the weekly sermon.

“I think we’re over-saturated with mundane everything,” she says. “The fact that there is a day of the week where I know I’ll feel extra alive and that it’s a day that is otherwise not allocated for that is really valuable.”

Many interviewees likened Unusual Tuesdays to church, a cult or a religious movement. Rhodes, raised Swedenborgian — a Christian denomination that emphasizes “divine love” based on the writings of theologian Emanuel Swedenborg — does not outright reject the comparison.

“Unusual Tuesday is definitely a church service in that we get together and hypnotize the musicians, get into a rhythm and all that stuff,” Rhodes says. “Get people into us — into a vibe.”

Near midnight, following Austin Drizzles’ weekly forecast, the church once again erupts into the Unusual Tuesday gospel. A rapturous feeling takes over the room, as if all of the disparate identities and backgrounds came together in spiritual tune — the cluster having finally risen. Some mouth the words, but others belt away, letting all the emotion built up over the six other days of the week fall onto Rhodes, who’s not Rhodes then, but simply the Host.

He delivers only one promise, which he no doubt will keep: “I will see you in six days, 22 hours, and however many minutes, for Unusual Tuesday!”