What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in July

Max Porter, writer Related: Grief is the Thing With Feathers: why Max Porter’s strange but ‘magnificent’ debut keeps inspiring adaptations I recently read Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot. It’s one of the best novels I’ve ever read about what it means to live with others, or decide not to; what we owe the people we love, the natural world, and ourselves. I also really enjoyed Robert Frost, by Robert Frost and Stacy Skolnik. It’s not that Robert Frost; it’s an itinerant young American Robert Frost who jots down his thoughts and observations on homelessness, food, value, music, drugs, the philosophical wastelands of contemporary life, and Stacy Skolnik has turned them into these delightful, oddly profound, poems. Also, coming soon, End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. Everyone should read it. It tells us exactly what’s going on. • Max Porter is the author of books including Shy and Grief Is the Thing With Feathers *** Richard, Guardian reader I am reading Headlights by the American horror writer CJ Leede. This is her third novel. I think she has the potential to be the 21st century’s Stephen King – she’s that good! Headlights is a pitch-black horror novel with overtones of Silence of the Lambs and Osgood Perkins’ fabulous film Longlegs. It is also a love letter to King’s The Shining and has a strong environmental message too, concerning man’s uneasy and destructive relationship with the natural world. Leede is such a wonderful writer of prose. Her characters are three-dimensional and you care about them almost immediately (which makes what she does to some of them all the more horrible!). She has an obvious love of the American landscape and describes it beautifully, and the book’s relationship with The Shining will have horror lovers squealing with delight – there are little Easter eggs peppered throughout the book. *** Daisy Johnson, writer Related: Daisy Johnson: ‘I wasn’t a fan of David Szalay, but Flesh is a masterpiece’ Lately I am to be fo…