Although it may be hard to believe, summer is right around the corner. It's time to start compiling a list of your must-reads for the summer, and we've got eight that you'll want to add. As we wrap up another month of MashableReads, we talked with author Molly Antopol about her top eight favorite books of all-time.

In addition to giving us a list of her favorites, Antopol gave us a brief summary of why each pick made her list. Check out the books below, and be sure to look out for the next MashableReads selection.

1. All Aunt Hagar’s Children
Author: Edward P. Jones
"Every one of these stories blows me away; Jones writes with precision, heart, and such a deep sense of history and politics. I must have read this book a dozen times, trying to figure out how he managed to give every one of these stories the heft and scope of a novel."

2. Going to Meet the Man
Author: James Baldwin
"It was only when I first read Baldwin that I saw how emotionally direct stories can be without seeming sappy. It’s as if every one of his stories is something Baldwin felt he needed to write, that he was more interested in being honest than wowing the reader with his cleverness."

3. Transactions in a Foreign Currency
Author: Deborah Eisenberg
"I once bonded with someone over our love for Eisenberg, and he articulated perfectly what I admire most in her writing: It’s as if, in each story, she takes us on a tour of a house, showing us every room, every photo on the walls, every item in the drawers — only for us to discover that all along, there’s been a secret attic no one knew about."

4. Second Person Singular
Author: Sayed Kashua
"Kashua writes movingly and hilariously about the intersecting lives of two Arab-Israeli men, a social worker and a wildly ambitious criminal lawyer. A truly beautiful and heartbreaking book."

5. Vaquita and Other Stories
Author: Edith Pearlman
"I imagine many of us can remember exactly where we were when we encountered a favorite book. I had just graduated college and was living in Jerusalem when I came upon Edith Pearlman’s stories, and I immediately fell in love with her characters: passionate and courageous, self-aware and sometimes solitary. The stories bring us into the lives of people in settings as disparate as Jerusalem, Boston and Central America."

6. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
Author: Grace Paley
"What I love about Paley is that she writes such voice-driven stories, while still giving us a sense of the larger events happening around her characters. The politics of her fiction extends so naturally from her characters that I never feel she’s spoon-feeding me any opinions."

7. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Author: Alice Munro
"It’s hard to choose just one Munro collection — every one of her books has been hugely influential to me. I love Munro for her brilliant psychological acuity, emotional generosity and deceptively simple sentences that are gorgeous but never showy."

8. The Anastasia Krupnick series
Author: Lois Lowry
"These were my favorite books when I was little. I used to pretend that Anastasia had a sister named Molly with whom she did everything. I imagined that I, too, had a tower bedroom, a younger brother to harass, a pipe-smoking poet father who watched Nova every night. A couple of weeks ago, I reread the series, wondering if my niece would be old enough to appreciate them, and I found them just as wonderful as I had as a kid."

What's on your summer reading list? Tell us in the comments.