I read all the time but I read most when I’m at our summer house in Quebec. Indoors, there’s a lofted reading nook with a big chair and an ottoman. Outside, there are cushioned lounge chairs (thank you, Georgia Dent, who designed and built them.) By the water, I love to sit on our dock in a deck chair and read read read.
This is what I loved from my last trip, at summer’s end. 
The Editor, How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, by Sara B. Franklin
I love to read a life’s work. This one ticks every box: person, place, profession. Judith Fifield Bailey Jones (1924 —2017) was raised in New York City by parents who strived to look wealthier than they were. Bucking their ways, Judith went to Bennington College in Vermont, where she took up with one of her professors, poet Theodore Roethke. With the war over in Europe, Judith set off for Paris, where she fell in with other writers and worked at a 
glossy magazine. There she met journalist Dick Jones, the love of her life. A job at Doubleday in Paris put Judith in touch with writers in a new way. From its slush pile, she plucked Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and fought for its publication. Back in New York, Judith took a job at Alfred A. Knopf, a prestigious publishing house. Judith shepherded Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and became editor to William Maxwell, John Updike, Anne Tyler. There’s more to life than work, of course, and Judith’s time in Manhattan and in rural Vermont with (and without) husband Dick, is well told. New York and Paris, writing and writers, food and culture: yes, please!
Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories, by Herman Melville
I was charmed by Dayswork: A Novel, a modern meditation on Melville’s work and life, by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel. I’d read and loved Moby Dick but it had been decades since I’d read Melville’s short fiction. I’d been assigned Billy Budd in high school, and remembered mostly that Billy was a Christ figure. This story certainly holds up to a second read. I gasped. I wept. Billy is the handsome sailor who can’t abide the lie that he is mutinous, and is sent to the gallows. This is storytelling at its finest.
Also in this collection is Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. I’d read this sometime after college and appreciated the clerk’s mordant “I would prefer not to” refrain. It seemed funny then, as though he was the first modern man, refusing to do mindless office work. This time I was more taken by Bartleby’s refusal to leave the workplace, which made the story feel newly timeless: what do we as a society do to and for the troubled homeless?
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
Speaking of high school, I read this at my Manhattan girl’s school, which is on Fifth Avenue, opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the time, I felt like character Lily Bart was just around the corner, spending too much, making poor choices, descending into poverty. This time I was more sympathetic to the ornamental life Lily had been fashioned for: she was bred to be seen and admired. She sees the shallowness of this life, but can’t quit it. I’d forgotten the shocking reversal of fortune, and felt for Lily as she tries and fails to support herself. Her end is heartbreaking. Worth a read.
The Shepherd’s Life, by James Rebanks
This had been pressed on me in year’s past, and was waiting for me on a shelf in that light-filled reading nook. I’m glad I plucked it. Rebanks is a shepherd and an Oxford-educated thinker. He describes the lush and craggy Lake District landscape, its people, its herds. (The Lake District in England is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; it was home to Beatrix Potter, William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge.) Rebanks’ pride flashes as he describes a prize-winning ram, or a well-trained sheep dog. We feel his fatigue in a snowstorm, freeing his flock from a mountain pass. Rebanks and his extended family must take outside work to survive. Can such a life be sustained? A lovely read.