Published July 29, 2026
A 2025 YouGov poll revealed some interesting factoids about Americans’ reading habits — or lack thereof. Forty percent of us didn’t read a book last year. About a quarter of the country read one to four books in 2025, and 13% clocked in at between five and nine books in all formats (print, electronic, audio). Nineteen percent of us did 82% of America’s book reading.
So let’s up our game. Herewith, some suggestions for your own reading pleasure this summer, which I hope you’ll pass along to friends:
Bishop Erik Varden, Alight With Hidden Glory (Bloomsbury): A Trappist monk and the bishop of Trondheim in Norway, Varden was invited by Pope Leo XIV to give the 2026 Lenten retreat to the Roman Curia. It was a wise papal decision, as there are very few Catholics who can break open the riches of biblical faith like Bishop Varden, whose command of sources ranging from literature and music to theology, philosophy, and the lives of the saints is amazing. That he writes in a crystalline prose accessible to all makes this small book, composed of Varden’s papal retreat conferences, a spiritual feast worthy to stand with Karol Wojtyła’s Sign of Contradiction in the history of the genre.
Carl Trueman, The Desecration of Man (Sentinel): When the New York State Legislature, with time on its hands and nonsense on its mind, decides that the terms “mother” and “father” are transphobic and should be replaced on state birth certificates with “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent,” you know we’ve gone far beyond Alice’s Wonderland. Carl Trueman, America’s most scintillating Protestant thinker and a veteran pastor, explains how the rejection of God in Western high culture led to the self-harming and self-degrading deconstruction of the human now evident in Albany and elsewhere.
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George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Catholic Studies Program. A Catholic theologian and New York Times bestselling author, he is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Catholic Church and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He served as president of EPPC from 1989-1996.
