An Unexpected Type of Beach Read

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Last summer, I spent a shocking amount of time at my local D.C. pool reading about the Ebola virus. As my friends tanned on nearby chairs and tweens did cannonballs, I sat happily in the water, arms and e-reader barely staying dry, learning the details of an outbreak of a terrifying disease just two dozen miles from where I was wading. That’s how I tore through Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, a nonfiction story about the origins of filoviruses such as Ebola, the scientists who study them, and a potential disaster on U.S. soil.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section: The lost idealism of heartland rock The books that take revenge, centuries later Two poems by Luis Muñoz This mismatch between dangerous tales and leisurely environs makes up a significant part of my reading life—flipping through Adam Higginbotham’s book about Chernobyl at the beach, for example, or picking up Maurice Herzog’s classic account of the first ascent of the Himalayan mountain Annapurna during a romantic vacation. I agree fully with what Eva Holland wrote in The Atlantic this week: “Life-and-death stakes? Dangerous mysteries? Motley crews pitting themselves against impossible odds? Sign me up—but only vicariously, please. I like my adventures paired with a cup of tea and my softest blanket.”Holland collected a list of great adventure narratives that will send you somewhere incredible from the comfort of your couch (or, in my case, the shallow end of the pool). She mentions a few on my to-be-read list, as well as one that is famous in my household. My wife has adopted my nonfiction-thriller habit, which led her to David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, one of the books Holland recommends, just as I dug into Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl. As we read side by side, I’d often share with her some awful blunder on the part of a Soviet nuclear scientist, and in ex