20 Books Every Bro Should Read By The End Of The Summer

There’s plenty to do on long summer nights — drinks with bros, hitting on women in barely there clothes and live each night like it could be the last. The summer nights are the reason we love this life.

But oh, those summer days. Those long ass, boring-as-hell, summer days that seem to stretch on forever while we sweat our life away at a crap job. The job is just to make money to fund those summer nights so there’s no reason to do anything but the bare minimum. Find places to hide and nap, do the least amount of work as possible, and grab a good read to kill minutes until quitting time.

If you’ve got plenty of daylight to burn, use it to expand yourself with a good book. Here’s our summer reading suggestions for bros. Every book is guaranteed to pass the time and feed the mind.

SELF IMPROVEMENT

Think Like A Freak — Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. Then came SuperFreakonomics, a documentary film, an award-winning podcast, and more. Now, with Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have written their most revolutionary book yet. With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, they take us inside their thought process and teach us all to think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally—to think, that is, like a Freak. [GET IT NOW]

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing — You’ve accumulated a ton of stuff in your short time on earth. You consider it important, but in all honesty, most of it is crap. Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level in this book, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you’ll never have to do it again. Most methods advocate a room-by-room or little-by-little approach, which doom you to pick away at your piles of stuff forever. [GET IT NOW]

Modern Romance — What does comedian Aziz Ansari know about love and relationship? Plenty, but what he doesn’t know, he learns from NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg in this self-help book/social experiment on love in 2015. Ansari combines his irreverent humor with cutting-edge social science to give us an unforgettable tour of our new romantic world. [GET IT NOW]

A Guide To Improvised Weaponry — Whether you’re out grocery shopping, riding in an elevator, or enjoying a stroll through the park, A Guide to Improvised Weaponry shows you how to control your environment and become your own bodyguard–ready and able to act when you need to. Defend yourself with salad tongs, hairbrushes–and even a dirty diaper! [GET IT NOW]

Cooking (For A**holes) — Nothing says “I’m sorry” quite like food. Take it from noted asshole Zach Golden. He’s discovered an important asshole loophole: If you put a delicious meal on the table, everybody will forget you’re an unspeakably terrible person…until you do something else terrible. But hey, that’s why there’s dessert. [GET IT NOW]

Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ —For too long, the gut has been the body’s most ignored and least appreciated organ, but it turns out that it’s responsible for more than just dirty work: our gut is at the core of who we are. Gut: The Inside Story of our Body’s Most Underrated Organ gives the alimentary canal its long-overdue moment in the spotlight. [GET IT NOW]

FICTION

Wayward Pines — Soon to be a TV show with Matt Dillon, Wayward Pines tells the story of secret service agent Ethan Burke. Burke arrives in Wayward Pines, Idaho, with a clear mission: locate and recover two federal agents who went missing in the bucolic town one month earlier. But within minutes of his arrival, Ethan is involved in a violent accident. He comes to in a hospital, with no ID, no cell phone, and no briefcase. The medical staff seems friendly enough, but something feels…off. [GET IT NOW]

Long And Faraway Gone — In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were killed in an armed robbery, while one inexplicably survived. Then, a teenage girl vanished from the annual State Fair. Neither crime was ever solved. Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases quietly echo through survivors’ lives. [GET IT NOW]

The Martian — Before it becomes a blockbuster summer flick with Matt Damon, check out the incredible book from Andy Weir. Astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. [GET IT NOW]

SPORTS & RECREATION

The United States Of Craft Beer — Beer expert and homebrewer Jess Lebow invites you along on his state-by-state exploration of America’s greatest breweries. From Jack’s Abby Brewing in Massachusetts to the Maui Brewing Company in Hawaii, this guide teaches you everything you need to know about the people who make the nation’s best-tasting beers and the innovative brewing methods that help create the perfect batch. [GET IT NOW]

Slaying the Tiger: A Year Inside the Ropes on the New PGA Tour — For more than a decade, golf was dominated by one galvanizing figure: Eldrick “Tiger” Woods. But as his star has fallen, a new, ambitious generation has stepped up to claim the crown. Once the domain of veterans, golf saw a youth revolution in 2014. In Slaying the Tiger, Shane Ryan introduces us to the volatile, colorful crop of heirs apparent who are storming the barricades of this traditionally old-fashioned sport. [GET IT NOW]

Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship— Finding and identifying a pirate ship is the hardest thing to do under the sea. But two men—John Chatterton and John Mattera—are willing to risk everything to find the Golden Fleece, the ship of the infamous pirate Joseph Bannister. [GET IT NOW]

Molina — A baseball rules book. A tape measure. A lottery ticket. These were in the pocket of Bengie Molina’s father when he died of a heart attack on the rutted Little League field in his Puerto Rican barrio. The items serve as thematic guideposts in Molina’s beautiful memoir about his father, who through baseball taught his three sons about loyalty, humility, courage, and the true meaning of success. [GET IT NOW]

HUMOR

Sick In The Head — From the writer and director of Knocked Up and the producer of Freaks and Geeks, Judd Apatow, comes a collection of intimate, hilarious conversations with the biggest names in comedy from the past thirty years—including Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Roseanne Barr, Harold Ramis, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Lena Dunham. [GET IT NOW]

Gumption — Nick Offerman, star of Parks and Recreation and author of the New York Times bestseller Paddle Your Own Canoe, returns with a second book that humorously highlights twenty-one figures from our nation’s history, from her inception to present day—Nick’s personal pantheon of “great Americans.” His mustache knows more than you, trust us. [GET IT NOW]

What If? — Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, complemented by signature xkcd comics. [GET IT NOW]

The Coloring Book — Comedian Colin Quinn has noticed a trend during his decades on the road-that Americans’ increasing political correctness and sensitivity have forced us to tiptoe around the subjects of race and ethnicity altogether. Colin wants to know: What are we all so afraid of? Every ethnic group has differences, everyone brings something different to the table, and this diversity should be celebrated, not denied. So why has acknowledging these cultural differences become so taboo? [GET IT NOW]

BIOGRAPHY / MEMOIR

Down The Rabbit Hole — Remember Holly Madison, the former #1 bunny at the Playboy mansion and Hef’s right hand woman? Well she’s got a tell-all book about her time living in the mansion that’s got every “bunny’s” ears up at attention. The shocking, never-before-told story of the bizarre world inside the legendary Playboy Mansion—and, finally, the secret truth about the man who holds the key—from one of the few people who truly knows the whole story. [GET IT NOW]

Brain On Fire: My Month Of Madness —When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened? [GET IT NOW]

It’s A Long Story: My Life — Here’s the description of the book from the mouth, or pen, of Willie Nelson himself. “This is the story of my life, told as clear as a Texas sky and in the same rhythm that I lived it.  It’s a story of restlessness and the purity of the moment and living right. Of my childhood in Abbott, Texas, to the Pacific Northwest, from Nashville to Hawaii and all the way back again. Of selling vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias while hosting radio shows and writing song after song, hoping to strike gold. It’s a story of true love, wild times, best friends, and barrooms, with a musical sound track ripping right through it. My life gets lived on the road, at home, and on the road again, tried and true, and I’ve written it all down from my heart to yours. [GET IT NOW]

HONORABLE MENTION: Did you know two BroBible editors are also published authors? Assistant editor Rebecca Martinson was a contributor to the best seller Dirty Rush and senior editor Chris Illuminati has written five books.