Many of us are guilty of buying, borrowing or collecting books throughout the year to save for our summer reading. Now, with the warm weather beckoning, it’s time to dive into those beach reads—and maybe even consider a few more. Here, we round up ten new and enticing vacation books for your summer reading pleasure, from a rock star memoir to an engrossing study on artificial intelligence. There’s also a look back at yuppies in the unbridled 1980s, a moving retelling of living in the shadow of a famous artist family and a behemoth class novel in the vein of Bonfire of the Vanities.

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Wherever your refuge this summer—the beach, the pool, even the loungeroom—there are plenty of new releases to help you beat the heat and find some escape. The question of whether to turn back time to 1974 San Francisco or retrace the history of reality TV is up to you.

From corporate capitalism to conspicuous consumption, the 1980s was a period of unrestricted excess. Tom McGrath, in his new biting study of the decade Triumph of the Yuppies, examines its grim underside to show the widening social and economic divide born from this deeply neoliberal era. The journalist charts how the Baby Boomer generation got political in the ‘60s, turned their attention inward in the ‘70s and climbed the corporate ladder in the ‘80s. Such a forward motion created significant gentrification in big cities that turbocharged social and economic disparities that are yet to be reconciled decades later. Triumph of the Yuppies is a searing cultural analysis of a time—bookended by the rise of conservatism and Ronald Reagan and the fall of the “Iron Curtain” and Berlin Wall—when a new corporate elite was born, all seemingly at the expense of the blue-collar man.

Chris Stein, the co-founder and guitarist of legendary band Blondie, has finally chronicled his fabled time in the spotlight helming one of music’s most iconic acts. Blondie was founded in 1974 by Stein and Deborah Harry with daring goals: abandon strict genre loyalties and challenge stereotypes of the vacant blonde bombshell. With its edgy sound, Blondie becomes one of the most disruptive acts to help “kill off” disco with new wave. But fame came with a price, as it often does, and Stein chronicles the pains of drugs, alcohol, and a debilitating chronic illness that betrayed him at........

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