As spring takes hold, the days arrive with a freshness that makes people want to linger outside; the balmy days almost feel wasted indoors. While you’re taking in the warm air, you might as well also be reading. Enjoying a book at a park, a beach, or an open-air café encourages a particular leisurely frame of mind. It allows a reader to let their thoughts wander, reflecting on matters that for once aren’t workaday or practical.

Reading outside also takes the particular pleasures of literature and heightens them. The proximity of trees or of other human beings, or the sight of a page illuminated by the sun, can make a character’s search for connection, or a writer’s emotion recollected in tranquility, feel more visceral and alive. And whether you’re reading on a front stoop or on a train station’s bench, being alone yet somehow with others creates a kind of openness to the world.

The books below will suit a variety of outdoor readers, including those who get distracted easily by the hustle and bustle around them and those who want meaty works to dive into. Each one, however, asks us to think about our place in the world or invites us to appreciate beauty, or sometimes both at once—the same sort of perspective we happen to gain outdoors.

Penguin Books

The Art of the Wasted Day, by Patricia Hampl

To fully appreciate this book’s defense of luxuriant time-wasting, might I suggest reading it while sprawled on a beach towel or suspended in a hammock? “Lolling,” Hampl argues, is “tending to life’s real business.” She stumps against a particularly American obsession with striving and accomplishment in favor of leisure—a word that comes, by the end of the book, to encompass reading, writing, talking, eating, walking, gardening, boating, contemplative withdrawal, and … lying in hammocks. Fittingly, her case is constructed as an associative meander through literature, her own memories, and the musings they kick up. An anecdote about daydreaming while practicing the piano at her Catholic girls’ school shifts seamlessly into a riff on the true meaning of keeping a diary; she takes trips to Wales, Czechia, and France to see the homes of historical figures who sought lives of repose, particularly Montaigne, whose “sluggish, lax, drowsy” spirit haunts the book. There’s nothing practical about the scraps of experience, passing thoughts, or remembered sensations that make up a life. And yet, Hampl writes, these idle moments we carry with us are “the only thing of value we possess.”

Random House

An Immense World, by Ed Yong

The natural world is thrumming with signals—most of which we humans miss completely, as Yong’s fascinating book on animal senses makes clear. Birds can discriminate among hundreds of millions of colors; bees pick out different flowers by sensing their electrical field; elephants communicate over long distances with infrasound rumbles; cows can perceive the entire horizon around them without moving their head. Yong, a former Atlantic staff writer, brings the complexity of animal perception and communication to life with an unmistakable giddiness, because evolution is wild. Catfish, which are covered with external taste buds, are in effect “swimming tongues”: “If you lick one of them, you’ll both simultaneously taste each other,” he explains. But beyond its trove of genuinely fun facts, the book has a bigger project. “When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens,” Yong writes. Even parks and backyards become rich, fantastic worlds when we imagine, with the help of scientific research, what it’s like to inhabit the body of a different creature. Take this book outside—its insights will make you see the animals whose world we share with a new precision and wonder.

[Read: Please don’t read at the beach]

Vintage

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, by Sappho, translated by Anne Carson

Hardly any of Sappho’s work survives, and the fragments scholars have salvaged from tattered papyrus and other ancient texts can be collected in thin volumes easily tossed into tote bags. Still, Carson’s translation immediately makes clear why those scholars went to so much effort. Sappho famously describes the devastation of seeing one’s beloved, when “tongue breaks and thin / fire is racing under skin”; the god Eros, in another poem, is a “sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in.” Other poems provide crisp images from the sixth century B.C.E.—one fragment reads, in its entirety: “the feet / by spangled straps covered / beautiful Lydian work.” Taken together, the fragments are sensual and floral, reminiscent of springtime; they evoke soft pillows and sleepless nights, violets in women’s laps, wedding celebrations—and desire, always desire. Because the poems are so brief, they’re perfect for outdoor reading and its many distractions. Even the white space on the pages is thought-provoking. Carson includes brackets throughout to indicate destroyed papyrus or illegible letters in the original source, and the gaps they create allow space for rumination or moments of inattention while one lies on a blanket on a warm day.

Samarkand, by Amin Maalouf

No matter where you’re sitting—a hard bench, a crowded park lawn—great historical fiction can whisk you away to a lush, utterly different place and time. Maalouf’s novel tells two stories linked by a priceless book of poetry. The first follows the 11th-century astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyam as he travels to the cities of Samarkand and Isfahan and records stray verses that will one day become his famous Rubaiyat. In the second, set in the late 19th century, an American named Benjamin Omar Lesage narrates his pursuit of this “Samarkand manuscript,” a quest that takes him to Constantinople, Tehran, and Tabriz. Both men remain devoted to art and love despite the violent political turmoil around them—Omar must deal with power struggles in the imperial Seljuk court and the rise of a terrifying Order of the Assassins; Benjamin lives through Iran’s Constitutional Revolution. Interwoven with this fascinating history are glimpses of bustling market squares and palace gardens, plus legends of conquerors and half-mad kings, all of which make Samarkand vivid enough to compete with the distractions of the world around you.

[Read: To get out of your head, get out of your house]

Vintage

The Power Broker, by Robert Caro

Maybe you’re feeling particularly motivated: You’ve found a prime spot on an underappreciated patio or a secluded beach, and you’re ready to spend the summer there, immersed in a single monumental work sturdy enough for multiple outings. Why not tackle this classic biography of Robert Moses, the 20th-century urban planner and New York City political insider, whose more than 1,000 pages will last you the entire season? The Power Broker charts Moses’s rise from an idealistic reformer of municipal government to a vindictive public official who was personally responsible for building hundreds of green spaces, roads, bridges, and housing projects that utterly changed New York’s landscape—often to the detriment of its citizens. Caro organizes his book around a careful account of Moses’s power: how he got it, kept it, and accumulated such stores of it that he became unanswerable even to the mayors and governors he ostensibly served. The book manages to make the dry business of an endless array of park councils and bridge authorities riveting, and it offers sobering lessons on how a single unelected official—particularly one as racist, classist, and arrogant as Moses—can wreak havoc on those without power.

Adèle, by Leila Slimani

Adèle, a story about a woman’s insatiable appetites, is easy to devour. It’s twisty, a little dark, and very absorbing, told in cool, inexorable prose stripped of ornament but full of psychological depth. It is, in other words, the perfect literary beach read—a book riveting enough to keep you turning pages when your brain is in vacation mode, and written with a care that adds to the story’s pleasure. The novel’s title character seems bent on destroying the trappings of her perfect life: Adèle has sex with her boss at the newspaper where she performs her work half-heartedly, starts an affair with a friend of her solid but sexless gastroenterologist husband, and invites men to her large apartment in Paris’s 18th arrondissement. But her dalliances are oddly unsatisfying. She recoils, during one episode, from “the banality of a zipper, the prosaic vulgarity of a pair of socks.” The book’s dramatic tension comes in part from the increasing untenability of her hidden life. Below the level of plot lurks the question of what Adèle is really after, and one can’t help but race through the book, mining each page for tantalizing clues. Is it “idleness or decadence” she wants? Or is her compulsion “the very thing that she thinks defines her, her true self”?

[Read: Eight books that will take you somewhere new]

Penguin Classics

O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather

This novel, set in the closing decades of the 19th century and suffused with the wide-open lushness of the Nebraska prairie, practically demands to be read in the open air. When her father dies, Alexandra Bergson is entrusted with the family farm and soon becomes prosperous, thanks to some canny risk-taking and her near-mystical identification with the land. Her happiest days, Cather writes, come when she’s “close to the flat, fallow world about her” and feels “in her own body the joyous germination in the soil.” That’s a joy that pervades the book, despite a subplot involving an illicit romance that ends in tragedy. We’re treated to intoxicating descriptions of cherry trees, their branches “glittering” after a night of rain, and the air “so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.” The book’s short length is perfect for whiling away an afternoon, perhaps under a tree on a sun-drenched day—the better to appreciate a pivotal scene set in an orchard “riddled and shot with gold.”

In late June of 2022, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump-administration aide, provided testimony to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. This testimony was unnerving, even compared with previous revelations concerning Donald Trump’s malignant behavior that day. Hutchinson testified that the president, when told that some of his supporters were carrying weapons, said, “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away.” He was referring to the metal detectors meant to screen protesters joining his rally on the Ellipse, near the White House.

Hutchinson also testified that Trump became so frantic in his desire to join the march to the Capitol that at one point he tried to grab the steering wheel of his SUV. This assertion has subsequently been disputed by Secret Service agents, but what has not been disputed is an exchange, reported by Hutchinson, between White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff. In this conversation, which took place as Trump supporters were breaching the Capitol, Cipollone told Meadows, “We need to do something more—they’re literally calling for [Vice President Mike Pence] to be fucking hung.” Hutchinson reported that Meadows answered: “You heard [Trump], Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”

[David A. Graham: The most damning January 6 testimony yet]

Hutchinson seemed like a credible witness, and she was obviously quite brave for testifying. This very young person—she was 25 at the time of her testimony—went against the interests of her political tribe, and her own career advancement, to make a stand for truth and for the norms of democratic behavior. Washington is not overpopulated with such people, and so the discovery of a new one is always reassuring.

As it happened, I watched the hearing while waiting to interview then-Senator Rob Portman, a grandee of the pre-Trump Republican establishment, before an audience of 2,000 or so at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The session would also feature Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, who was serving at the time as President Joe Biden’s infrastructure coordinator. Portman’s appearance was considered to be a coup for the festival (for which The Atlantic was once, but was by this time no longer, a sponsor).

Republican elected officials in the age of Trump don’t often show up at these sorts of events, and I found out later that the leaders of the Aspen Institute, the convener of this festival, hoped that I would give Portman, a two-term senator from Ohio, a stress-free ride. The declared subject of our discussion was national infrastructure spending, so the chance of comity-disturbing outbursts was low. But I did believe it to be my professional responsibility to ask Portman about Hutchinson’s testimony, and, more broadly, about his current views of Donald Trump. In 2016, during Trump’s first campaign for president, Portman withdrew his support for him after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. But Portman endorsed Trump in 2020 and voted to acquit him in the second impeachment trial, and I wanted to ask him if Hutchinson’s testimony, or anything else he had heard in the 18 months since the violent attack on the Capitol, had made him regret his decision.

Portman was one of 43 Republican senators who voted against conviction. Sixty-seven votes were required to convict. If 10 additional Republican senators had joined the 50 Democrats and seven Republicans who voted for conviction, Trump would not today be the party’s presumptive nominee for president, and the country would not be one election away from a constitutional crisis and a possibly irreversible slide into authoritarianism. (Technically, a second vote after conviction would have been required to ban Trump from holding public office, but presumably this second vote would have followed naturally from the first.)

[Adam Serwer: Don’t forget that 43 Senate Republicans let Trump get away with it]

It would be unfair to blame Portman disproportionately for the devastating reality that Donald Trump, who is currently free on bail but could be a convicted felon by November, is once again a candidate for president. The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, denounced Trump for his actions on January 6, and yet still voted to acquit him. Trump’s continued political viability is as much McConnell’s fault as anyone’s.

But I was interested in pressing Portman because, unlike some of his dimmer colleagues, he clearly understood the threat Trump posed to constitutional order, and he was clearly, by virtue of his sterling reputation, in a position to influence his colleagues. Some senators in the group of 43 are true believers, men like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who, in the words of Mitt Romney (as reported by the Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins), never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t believe. But Portman wasn’t a know-nothing. He was one of the most accomplished and respected members of the Senate. He had been a high-ranking official in the White House of George H. W. Bush, then a hardworking member of the House of Representatives. In George W. Bush’s administration, he served as the U.S. trade representative and later as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. He was well known for his cerebral qualities and his mastery of the federal budget. He was also known to loathe Donald Trump. In other words, Portman knew better.

[From the November 2023 issue: McKay Coppins on what Mitt Romney saw in the Senate]

“I do want to ask you directly,” I said, when we sat onstage, “given what you know now about what happened on January 6, do you regret your vote to acquit in impeachment?”

Portman immediately expressed his unhappiness with what he took to be an outré question. “You have just surprised me,” he said, complaining that I hadn’t told him beforehand that I would ask him about Trump. (American journalists generally do not warn government officials of their questions ahead of time.) He went on to say, “You know that I spoke out in the strongest possible terms on January 6.”

Indeed he had. This is what Portman said on the Senate floor once the Capitol had been secured: “I want the American people, particularly my constituents in Ohio, to see that we will not be intimidated, that we will not be disrupted from our work, that here in the citadel of democracy, we will continue to do the work of the people. Mob rule is not going to prevail here.”

Onstage, Portman reminded me of his comments. “On the night it happened, I took to the Senate floor and gave an impassioned speech about democracy and the need to protect it. So that’s who I am.”

But this is incorrect. This is not who he is. Portman showed the people of Ohio who he is five weeks later, on February 13, when he voted to acquit Trump, the man he knew to have fomented a violent, antidemocratic insurrection meant to overturn the results of a fair election.

His argument during impeachment, and later, onstage with me, was that voting to convict an ex-president would have violated constitutional norms, and would have further politicized the impeachment process. “Do you think it would be a good idea for President Obama to be impeached by the new Republican Congress?” he asked. He went on, “Well, he’s a former president, and I think he should be out of reach. And Donald Trump was a former president. If you start that precedent, trust me, Republicans will do the same thing. They will.”

It was an interesting, and also pathetic, point to make: Portman was arguing that his Republican colleagues are so corrupt that they would impeach a president who had committed no impeachable offenses simply out of spite.

I eventually pivoted the discussion to the topic of bridges in Ohio, but Portman remained upset, rushing offstage at the end of the conversation to confront the leaders of the festival, who tried to placate him.

Initially, I found his defensive behavior odd. A senator should not be so flustered by a straightforward question about one of his most consequential and historic votes. But I surmised, from subsequent conversations with members of the Republican Senate caucus, that he, like others, felt a certain degree of shame about his continued excuse-making for the authoritarian hijacker of his beloved party.

The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, one of the world’s leading experts on authoritarianism, wrote in 2020 that complicity, rather than dissent, is the norm for humans, and especially for status-and-relevance-seeking politicians. There are many explanations for complicity, Applebaum argued. A potent one is fear. Many Republican elected officials, she wrote, “don’t know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships.”

[From the July/August 2020 issue: Anne Applebaum on why Republican leaders continue to enable Trump]

None of the 43 senators who allowed Donald Trump to escape conviction made fear their argument, of course. Not publicly anyway. The excuses ranged widely. Here are the stirring and angry words of Dan Sullivan, the junior senator from Alaska, explaining his vote to acquit: “Make no mistake: I condemn the horrific violence that engulfed the Capitol on January 6. I also condemn former President Trump’s poor judgment in calling a rally on that day, and his actions and inactions when it turned into a riot. His blatant disregard for his own vice president, Mike Pence, who was fulfilling his constitutional duty at the Capitol, infuriates me.”

Sullivan voted to acquit, he said, because he didn’t think it right to impeach a former president. Kevin Cramer, of North Dakota, argued that “the January 6 attacks on the Capitol were appalling, and President Trump’s remarks were reckless.” But Cramer went on to say that, “based on the evidence presented in the trial, he did not commit an impeachable offense.” Chuck Grassley of Iowa said, in explaining his vote, “Undoubtedly, then-President Trump displayed poor leadership in his words and actions. I do not defend those actions, and my vote should not be read as a defense of those actions.” He continued, “Just because President Trump did not meet the definition of inciting insurrection does not mean that I think he behaved well.”

[From the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]

Now contrast this run of greasy and sad excuse-making with Mitt Romney’s explanation for his vote to convict: “The president’s conduct represented an unprecedented violation of his oath of office and of the public trust. There is a thin line that separates our democratic republic from an autocracy: It is a free and fair election and the peaceful transfer of power that follows it. President Trump attempted to breach that line, again. What he attempted is what was most feared by the Founders. It is the reason they invested Congress with the power to impeach. Accordingly, I voted to convict President Trump.”

On February 13, 2021, Romney was joined by six other Republicans—North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey—in voting to convict. If the United States and its Constitution survive the coming challenge from Trump and Trumpism, statues will one day be raised to these seven. As for Rob Portman and his colleagues, they should hope that they will merely be forgotten.

*Lead image sources: (left to right from top) Douglas Christian / ZUMA Press / Alamy; MediaPunch / Alamy; Tasos Katopodis / Getty; Hum Images / Alamy; Danita Delimont / Alamy; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Study in Senate Cowardice.”