Summer reading

Fun books don't have to be dumb. Our editors recommend a tote-bag-full of smart beach reads.

Jun 14, 2000 | Even the most serious reader needs an occasional break, something suitable for whiling away hot, humid afternoons on the porch or offering distraction from the terror and tedium of an airplane flight. But just because we want our summer books to go down easy -- the pages ruffling through our hands almost as quickly as if they were being blown by a sea breeze -- doesn't mean we want junk reads, the kind of book that makes your brain feel the way your stomach does after you've scarfed down a whole bag of potato chips.

Here is Salon's list of recommended summer books, books with engaging stories that are also believable, funny characters who are also human and a few chills thrown in for good measure.

Raveling
By Peter Moore Smith
Little Brown, 390 pages

One brother is a handsome neurosurgeon, the other is a drifter recovering from a psychotic episode. The loser says that the winner is a covert sadist, responsible for the disappearance of their 7-year-old sister many years ago. Will his pretty psychologist believe him or is the truth more complicated? Though the premise of this absorbing psychological thriller may sound a bit mechanical, Scott writes so convincingly, with such vivid eloquence, that even the most jaded reader will be kept perpetually off-balance. In particular, his depictions of the scary mental mutations of schizophrenia and the creepy dread of suburban angst feel so real you never think of looking for the backstage machinery.

--Laura Miller

Welcome to My Planet*
*Where English Is Sometimes Spoken
By Shannon Olson
Viking, 286 pages

In a wildly original marketing ploy, they're billing this book as "the next 'Bridget Jones'" and "the next 'Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing.'" The setup of "Welcome to My Planet" does fit the general outline of the genre: a 30-year-old narrator, named Shannon (like the author), has a dead-end job, a big credit-card debt, a relationship that's going nowhere fast and a general sense of dread about the future. What's interesting -- and what sets this book apart from the rest of the Bridget clones -- is that Shannon is refreshingly free of the expectation that her life should be fabulous. (The fact that she lives in Minnesota, rather than a place like New York or London that holds out the promise of glamour, helps on that score.)

There's nothing riveting in here, but there's no whining, either. She relates the mundane details of her life in a deadpan, practically affectless voice that's not quirky and not trying to be literary -- she's just trying to figure out a couple of things about how life works. The book is tuned in to the banalities of trying to make an adult life in a way that's smart and touching. It's the opposite of a thriller -- it's basically a chronicle of non-events -- but it has a no-nonsense, artless, Midwestern appeal that made me keep turning the pages even after I realized that nothing earth-shattering was going to happen.

-- Maria Russo

A&R
By Bill Flanagan
Random House, 368 pages

The characters in Bill Flanagan's rock 'n' roll potboiler "A&R" are Prada-wearing music industry archetypes -- or, less flatteringly, music industry clichis. Jimmy Cantone is the idealistic young A&R guy who thinks he's in the business for the music; Wild Bill DeGaul is the wild-man world traveler who built Tropic Records from the ground up; Booth is the Machiavellian money man with a scheme to take control of WorldWide Records, a major label that swallowed Tropic and in turn was bought out by a monolithic international media conglomerate. All three are weasels.

The novel cruises so fast -- from smudgy nightclubs to stretch limos, from boardrooms to hotel suites, from a Brazilian street riot to an island paradise -- that it really doesn't matter if it never really soars beyond parody or jarring deus ex machina device. Still, first-time novelist Flanagan is the real-life senior vice president and editorial director of the VH1 cable music channel, and music industry insiders and media types can amuse themselves by sniffing out the real-world inspirations for the maverick label chief and the multiplatinum diva whose sales have been slipping ever since she started sucking on a crack pipe. The music industry might be a complete farce, Flanagan seems to be saying, but thank God it's outrageous.

-- Jeff Stark

The Man Who Wrote the Book
By Erik Tarloff
Crown Books, 288 pages

Ezra Gordon, a 35-year-old, pathologically passive English professor at a Baptist college in central California, has very little to show for his years of hard work and self-abnegation. A charge of sexual harassment by an unstable undergraduate has tainted his already unlikely bid for tenure, he hasn't written a poem in years and he can barely make rent on his scholarly serf's income. Then Ezra escapes to visit an old college friend who has made it big in pornography in Southern California. His friend, a benign guru of carpe diem So-Cal-style, suggest Ezra write a book for his publishing house. Ezra agrees on one condition: that his identity remain a secret. And whaddayaknow, becoming a pornographer is just what Ezra's sense of self-esteem needed all along.

Soon he's living a nebbish's fantasia: large-breasted yet intelligent women compete for his attentions, leaving him emotionally reeling and physically spent. Then something unexpected happens: His book takes on a life of its own and carries Ezra's into utter chaos. Tarloff juggles his cast of appealingly cartoonish characters with ample panache, pulling off his tale of male fantasy with just enough wit and self-awareness to quell my exasperation more than once. But in the end it's the topsy-turvy plot that keeps you turning the pages even after the summer moon has set in the early morning. You can't help but root for the Ezra that lives in all of us: a sorry-assed superego who finds redemption in his id.

-- Carol Lloyd

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