Summer reading, if you ask me, should meander, without a plan. Pick up, put down, misplace, leave crusty with sand or warped with humidity.

A lot of what’s here is due to be published over the next six weeks. Some, released in spring but better for summer, are out now.

“King of Ashes” (June 10), by crime writer S.A. Cosby, at the peak of his powers, nods quietly to “The Godfather,” though at times, it’s more ambitious: The controlling son of a small-town Southern crematorium owner, whose wife disappeared years ago, returns to the family business, only to find it indebted to another family, of killers. It’s rousing, queasy — and being adapted by Steven Spielberg and the Obamas for a Netflix series.

“Pan” (July 22), by Michael Clune — of the harrowing 2013 memoir about heroin addiction, “White Out” — finds suburban Chicago childhood as an ethereal, cultural testing ground for a student convinced his panic attacks are linked to Greek myth, and a vaguely menacing clubhouse called the Barn.

“Baldwin: A Love Story” (Aug. 19) is sure to devour the last days of summer for James Baldwin fans. It’s the first sizable bio in decades, and Nicholas Boggs’ approach (alternately inspired and frustrating) is to tell the author’s life through Baldwin’s relationships with lovers and collaborators.

Ron Chernow, the contemporary king of doorstop biographies (Hamilton, Washington), is back with “Mark Twain,” which plays the greatest hits, with an emphasis on unpublished papers, Twain the iffy businessman, Twain the fame addicted, and Twain the unknowable Zelig.

Take a second to admire the titles: “The Girls Who Grew Big” (June 24) by Leila Mottley, and “Clam Down” by Anelise Chen. Inside isn’t bad either: Following her viral hit “Nightcrawling,” Mottley finds a new path for coming-of-age tales, sketches of young moms, wound together with heartbreaks and pushback.

“Clam Down,” billed as a memoir, tinkers so cleverly with form, I kept forgetting it wasn’t fiction. After a divorce, the author takes her mother’s typo-filled emails to heart: She will, indeed, clam down, adopting the humble crustacean as a model for her future, pulling inward. A break-up tale, natural history and family story. Totally original.

“Charlottesville,” in its own way, brings a simmering “High Noon”-esque unease to its retelling of August 2017 and the “very fine people on both sides” who converged over a Civil War statue. Despite being a decade removed, journalist Deborah Baker discovers a “Gimmie Shelter”-ish, era-defining immediacy, and decades of backstory to a seismic event often reduced to tiki torches.

Want to read something fun this summer? Smart? But also classic? Valancourt Books, one of my favorite small presses, just reissued six works by Robert Bloch, who went on to write “Psycho,” the basis for the film. He was also one of the most influential scary writers of the 20th century. Start with short stories: “Pleasant Dreams,” from 1960, collects 15 pulpy tales of witches, devils, ravenous houses. If you’re thinking crime: Picador just started a three-year-long reissue of 70 novels by Georges Simenon, whose Inspector Maigret became known as the French Sherlock Holmes, with a little Chandler angst. Start here: “The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien” (1931), in which the stakes are primarily Maigret’s guilty conscience.

“So Far Gone” (June 10) is “True Grit” by way of “Big Lebowski,” rippling in 2025 disgust. Which means it’s both hilarious and desperate. The always underrated Jess Walter (“Beautiful Ruins”) sculpts an indelible outcast, Rhys Kinnick, former journalist. He punches his MAGA son-in-law, ditches his cell phone and retreats to a cabin — until his grandchildren are taken by a militia. As a summer read, it’s an escape, and a sharp stick in the eye.

“That’s How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor” is funny. Roy Wood Jr. of “The Daily Show” on bombing at the Apollo. A group chat about West Virginia toilets. Grandmas who say: “I don’t like people hovering over my shoulder when I’m working.” Read slowly, savor.

“The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich” gathers a decade of stories by New Yorker writer Evan Osnos on the grotesquely wealthy. A profile of Mark Zuckerberg. How to hire a pop star for a birthday party. Support groups for disgraced investor bros. You will throw this book across the room — albeit, lovingly.

Alison Bechdel’s “Spent: A Comic Novel” is just vaguely fiction. It tells the story of a Vermont cartoonist/pygmy goat farmer named Alison Bechdel, whose memoir (like the real Bechdel’s “Fun Home”) becomes a smash, changing her relationship to family and neighbors. It’s also a funny skewering of cultural pretense — on the right and left, though most cuttingly on the left.

Rich Cohen is never short on good bingeable books. “Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story” only resembles tabloid fodder. It’s a color guard of red flags above a Connecticut town within a disjointed marriage, among “American aristocracy,” leading to the ugliest of deaths.

“Nothing Compares to You: What Sinead O’Connor Means to Us” (July 22), the passion project of Martha Bayne, is an overdue assemblage (by Megan Stielstra, Neko Case and others), touching on protest, resilience — the ways O’Connor’s career, as Stielstra puts it, “lives in the body.” The hard part is dissecting a legend without soiling a mystery.

“Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of ‘Born to Run’” (Aug. 5), by Bruce biographer Peter Ames Carlin, shows the unapologetic awe familiar to Boss appreciation, but his meticulous recreation of a struggling artist crafting his own mythology sings.

Likewise,”The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership That Rocked the World” (Aug. 5) is no addendum. Peter Guralnick’s beloved two-part Presley bio was definitive, but here, a great writer complicates old accusations of exploitation lobbed at Parker, using a ton of unreleased letters.

What says summer more than a novel about friendships splintering while on vacation? Hal Ebbott’s “Among Friends” (June 24) works a spell reminiscent of John Updike’s, showing how class angst and way too much familiarity can sever the bonds between a pair of families at a country home. Dwyer Murphy’s “The House on Buzzards Bay” (June 24), in keeping with his underrated thriller “The Stolen Coast,” inserts a David Lynchian dreaminess into a whodunit about a tight group of college friends reuniting on Cape Cod. There’s a vanishing, then an intrusion.

The latest Laura Lippman, “Murder Takes a Vacation” (June 25), is what publishing calls a “cozy,” as in cuddly. A grandmother, assistant to Lippman’s Tess Monaghan P.I., attracts an unlikely beau in Paris. Lippman, like Stephen King, or Megan Abbott, brings such an assured voice, you don’t mind the familiarity. Luckily, Abbott is comfortably back with”El Dorado Drive” (June 24), about a pyramid scheme that pulls several women into a dangerous bond.

Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service