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Soft Labor (the publication, not the consultancy) will take a break during the month of August for some summer R & R. Meanwhile, we're enjoying five more weeks of reading from the depths of pure personal pleasure and curiosity. We hope you're doing the same. Don't worry: that syllabus will write itself in the back of your mind, meanwhile. Trust!

We're calling 2026 "Paper Summer" as Soft Labor HQ is filled with stacks of books and other printed ephemera that we have yet to read. A total pileup. When one's back issues of N+1, NYRB, Harper's, and all other flotsam and jetsam are still encased in plastic, one has some some serious catching up to do.

We'd call Mary H.K. Choi's Pool House our 2026 beach read if we were the sort of person who lazed around on a beach more than twice a summer. We picked up a signed copy at Yu & Me a while back and have been slowly working our way through its complicated tale of mother-daughter malcontent in between the non-fiction we normally read. The "slow" part (on our part) is interesting here: Choi is a veritable master of pacing—and the woman can write a sex scene, too, which also speeds things along. Choi has been a writer of young adult literature (a genre that frankly confuses us a bit as we were reading Stephen King's Carrie at age twelve). Nevertheless, hearing about Choi's talent, we read Yolk, her story about the antics of two diametrically opposed sisters, some years ago. Japanese Breakfast front woman and Crying in H Mart author Michelle Zauner has called for Choi's recognition as an auteur. We'll simply throw out a "hard recommend" for both Yolk and now, Pool House.

Otherwise, we're digging into a small trove of fashion books that we've been slowly accumulating from obscure corners of the Internet.

"Color Theorist" is on the short list of career paths we might have pursued in another lifetime. Our grubby little hands have touched an original, silk-screened edition of Josef Albers's Interaction of Color and we still own our box of Color-aid—the full color range introduced in 1990—from our freshman year of art school. As equally-serious Benetton/ Toscani fans, we were bowled over by this gem of a book recently found on Etsy of all places. What a time capsule of endless color inspiration.

On a more serious academic note, we tracked down the out-of-print Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo from Ebay. Australian academic Bonnie English's essays travel well beyond Japan to discuss the region's influence on generations of designers including Margiela, Demeulemeester, Van Noten, McQueen, Chalayan, and Lang. Excellent illustrations throughout, if in black and white only.

We're teaching at the Fashion Institute of Technology in the fall and hope to meet Valerie Steele, the school's director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Steele wrote Dress, Dreams, and Desire: A History of Fashion and Psychoanalysis, which we're excited to read as the seeming academic counterpart to fashion designer Bella Freud's podcast, Fashion Neurosis, which we mostly love.

Finally, we haven't made it to Kinokuniya yet to get a hold of Popeye's Whole City Boy Catalog, but we will, and we guarantee that it will be lovingly thumbed through before being abandoned for months to a yellow HAY crate devoted to foreign magazines. We try.