This summer, more than 1,000 books will be published; you’ll be lucky if you read a half-dozen. After all, there’s a lot competing for your attention during these few temperate months: jogging along the lake, leisurely dinners on the terrace that stretch out well past sunset, ferrying the kids to Little League, day camp, summer school, swim lessons.
So with time in short supply, your choice of summer reading becomes even more important. A good summer book doesn’t have to be trashy (though it can be) or mindless (though it’s OK if it is) or full of sex (though that’s always nice). What a good summer book should be, however, is absorbing enough to keep your interest but not so demanding that you can’t afford to look up from it every 20 to 30 seconds as people walk by you at the beach or pool or outdoor cafe.
In other words, a good summer book should be one that can be read in two-to-three-paragraph increments. Memoirs and biographies are good. So are mysteries and thrillers. Adventure stories work well, as do some novels and travel books. In fact, first novels or debut story collections are particularly good summer reading; there’s nothing quite as satisfying as discovering a wonderful new author and getting a tan simultaneously.
So put off reading that new Napoleon bio until fall. It’s summer after all. Read a summery book.
Mystery, mayhem and intrigue
If Looks Could Kill
By Kate White
Warner, $22.95
If anyone can tell you where all the bodies lie (as well as what designer clothes they were buried in), it’s Cosmopolitan magazine Editor in Chief Kate White.
Her debut novel, “If Looks Could Kill,” is the story of magazine writer Bailey Weggins, dragged into a murder investigation instigated by her editor, Cat Jones, whose son’s nanny drops dead after eating poisoned chocolates. Jones fears the goodies were meant for her and wants answers before the coppers start to nose around. Weggins does the nosing–in haute New York, preppy Connecticut, swank Bucks County, and wherever the chic and duplicitous gather. What Cosmo girl (or boy) could resist?
Best American Crime Writing 2002
Edited by Otto Penzler and Thomas Cook
Pantheon, $29.50 (August)
A year’s worth of the best crime reporting, from a New York Times story on cock fighting, to a Spin piece on a small town ravaged by murder, rape and suicide, to a Vanity Fair investigation of a grifter with an attraction to sado-masochistic sex and serial killing, among other lighthearted romps. Weirdly entertaining, definitely mesmerizing.
Harlem Redux
By Persia Walker
Simon & Schuster, $23 (June)
Former Radio Free Europe and AP journalist Persia Walker tells the tale of a haunted civil rights lawyer seeking the truth behind his sister’s tragic death, set against the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
As much a story of lies, deceit and murder as it is a commentary on race and class, “Harlem Redux,” Walker’s first novel, is filled with colorful characters, including the murder victim’s glamorous Parisian emigre twin sister, her charismatic but untrustworthy husband, and the lawyer himself, young, ambitious and more than anything else, curious.
The Tutor
By Peter Abrahams
Ballantine, $25.95 (June)
Stephen King calls Peter Abrahams “my favorite American suspense novelist,” and in “The Tutor” Abrahams once again gets to strut his creepy stuff.
The Gardners are a typical family, happier than some, less happy than others. A couple of kids, one of whom just happens to be “troubled.” Enter Julian Sawyer, the tutor of the title, who ingratiates himself into the family until each member reveals his or her deep, dark secret (coincidentally, they each have one). But Sawyer has an agenda of his own, and it’s not just a raise in his hourly rate. Fortunately, the Gardners’ 11-year-old daughter, Ruby, is more clever than she at first appears. . . .
The Importance of Being Ernestine
By Dorothy Cannell
Viking, $23.95 (June)
No, “The Importance of Being Ernestine” isn’t a feminist version of the Oscar Wilde play, but instead the story of matron Ellie Haskell and her housekeeper, Mrs. Molloy, as unlikely a detective duo as there ever was, hot on the trail of a long-dead parlor maid, a long-forgotten deathbed curse and a getting-longer list of fatal “accidents” in the aristocratic Krumley family. It probably doesn’t help that the victims all live in a ramshackle old Gothic pile of bricks called Moulty Towers.
Author Dorothy Cannell was born in England; the big mystery now is how she ended up in real life living in Peoria.
Bad Boy Brawly Brown
By Walter Mosley
Little Brown, $24.95 (July)
In this new Easy Rawlins mystery from acclaimed novelist Walter Mosley, Rawlins starts out thinking he’s finally out of the crime game. Oops–that is until the mother of a buddy in Los Angeles asks him to investigate whether her son, a gang member who rejects white leadership and laws, is OK (despite the obvious). Soon enough, Rawlins himself is a murder suspect and the subject of a police raid. Betrayals abound. Predators are around every corner. Yikes!
Red Rabbit
By Tom Clancy
Putnam, 28.95 (August)
At 896 pages, “Red Rabbit,” Tom Clancy’s newest thriller about the go-go life of CIA analyst Jack Ryan and a plot to assassinate the pope (not to mention destabilize the entire Western world), will keep you busy reading straight through fall.
Told with typical Clancy verve and energy, “Red Rabbit” is a lethal game of cat-and-mouse, a tale of global derring-do that brings back to life some characters (like Yuri Andropov) and even some countries (like the Soviet Union) you thought were long dead. Not surprisingly, in Clancy’s hands they still have a bit of life left in them.
On the road, again
High Season: How One French Riviera Town Has Seduced Travelers for Two Thousand Years
By Robert Kanigel
Viking, $25.95 (June)
Ah, the south of France, the beautiful people’s playground. In “High Season,” Robert Kanigel follows the ups and downs of Nice, from its founding by seafaring Greeks through its days as a pit stop for idle Europeans on the Grand Tour, holiday home to Russian royalty (czars and such), Hollywood spoilty (stars and such), and land of libertinism, booze, sun, sex and, well, you get the idea. Though the international glitterati have moved on, Nice remains a Mediterranean beauty. Tres bon!
The Art of Travel
By Alain de Botton
Pantheon, $23 (July)
As if “How Proust Can Change Your Life” wasn’t enough to secure his reputation as one of the most erudite and witty thinkers working today, Alain de Botton returns with “The Art of Travel,” an inquiry into our desire to travel and how the experience is altered by anticipation and memory. Sounds heavy. In de Botton’s hands, it’s not. Instead it’s lyrical, clever, thought-provoking. He delves into airports, holiday trysts, hotel mini-bars and more, mixing in his own thoughts on travel with those of Baudelaire, Wordsworth, van Gogh and others. Sounds heavy still. It’s not.
Tales of survival
Lusitania: Saga and Myth
By David Ramsay
Norton, $29.95
Forget the Titanic, it was the sinking of the Lusitania, the liner that restored British supremacy to the seas, by a German U-boat in 1915 that really hurt. After all, it wasn’t just a bunch of rich people who sank due to selfishness and ambition, but an act of war that involved potentates and presidents, ambassadors and bankers and shipping magnates and a spy or two. David Ramsay’s “Lusitania” digs deep into the myth and the mystery of the tragedy, separating fact from fiction, legend from lurid detail–and there’s plenty of each to go around.
The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Golf
By Joshua Piven, David Borgenicht and James Grace
Chronicle, $14.95 (June)
In the latest installment of the “Worst-Case” series, you’ll learn how to survive being hit in the “goolies” (your privates), how to stop a runaway golf cart, how to put out a cigar brush fire, and more. Hands-on, illustrated, with step-by-step instructions. And don’t forget to read the glossary. How else will you learn the meaning of the phrase, “What a goat farm!”
The Maharajah’s Box: An Exotic Tale of Espionage, Intrigue, and Illicit Love in the Days of the Raj
By Christy Campbell
Overlook, $29.95 (July)
Imagine inheriting the title King of the Punjab at age 5, only to have to give it all up as an adult when the British invade. You might do what Maharajah Duleep Singh did in the mid-19th Century: hide away some of your favorite things in a safe-deposit box (like the world famous Koh-I-Nor diamond).
In “The Maharajah’s Box,” a true and truly exotic tale of mystery, intrigue and illicit love, British journalist Christy Campbell travels the globe to discover the truth of not only the contents of the box, but what happened to it. Shifty characters, duplicitous diplomats, misguided ministers and even Queen Victoria all played a part in the story.
Love (and sex) conquers all
The Summer They Came
By William Storandt
Villard, $12.95 paper
If you thought novels set in Rhode Island beach communities were passe, think again.
In “The Summer They Came,” Yale University writing teacher William Storandt tells what happens when a slightly shabby seaside summer enclave known only to the rich and secretive gets discovered by a developer of gay resorts hoping to turn it into the next Provincetown and Fire Island, but only more fabulous than both of them combined. Musclemen invade the beaches, gay bars open in town and the old-guard summer weekenders are, to put it mildly, rather put out. Fortunately, some of them are titillated as well. Much fun ensues.
Girl From the South
By Joanna Trollope
Viking, $24.95 (June)
In “Girl From the South,” British writer Joanna Trollope crosses the Atlantic, from London to Charleston, S.C., to tell the story of Gillon Stokes, a Southern belle who proudly flaunts her disregard for the traditions of Southern belleness, especially after she returns home from a summer in London, where she meets an irrepressible photographer named Henry who follows her back to Charleston.
Written with typical Trollopian frankness and insight (like the novels of her long-gone ancestor, Anthony Trollope), “Girl From the South” is the story of one woman’s testing the limits of family, friendship and love.
My Legendary Girlfriend
By Mike Gayle
Broadway, $21.95 (June)
OK, so it has been three years since lovestruck Will Kelly’s girlfriend, Agnes, dumped him. But he misses her, whining and pining like a schoolgirl. Kelly, the namby-pamby protagonist of former advice-for-the-lovelorn columnist, Benetton model and British journalist Mike Gayle’s first novel, “My Legendary Girlfriend,” still makes lists of every present she ever gave him, fantasizes about sexual marathons and dwells over the first words she ever said to him. Her last words: ” ‘If you love somebody, set them free.’ ” You wouldn’t think he’d miss her after a sendoff like that, but he does. A book for anyone who has ever been dumped, dumped on, or just needs a good laugh.
Must Love Dogs
By Claire Cook
Viking, $23.95 (July)
In “Must Love Dogs,” Claire Cook gives us 40-year-old Sarah Herlihy, a divorced preschool teacher and member of a big Boston Irish family, about to go on her first date in 10 years. It was “Loves Dogs” that hooked her in the guy’s personal ad, but the guy turns out to be the last person on Earth she expects.
Written with a funny and pitch-perfect voice, “Must Love Dogs” isn’t just a tale of a contemporary Everywoman but one of sharpei-Labrador crossbreeds, transgenerational body piercings and a St. Bernard named Mother Teresa.
Life as we know it
Citizen McCain
By Elizabeth Drew
Simon & Schuster, $23
Leave it to political journalist Elizabeth Drew to consider one of the most intriguing, and sometimes exasperating, rogue politicians of the day. In “Citizen McCain,” she not only rehashes U.S. Sen. John McCain’s prepolitics life, including his imprisonment during the Vietnam War, but how his life has influenced his politics. Is he an outsider playing an insider’s game, or just the opposite? A savior or a fool? Principled or just ambitious? The next presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket or merely a thorn in George Bush’s side? Read on.
The Sexiest Man Alive: A Biography of Warren Beatty
By Ellis Amburn
HarperEntertainment, $25.95 (July)
It’s an unauthorized page-turner all right: Warren Beatty’s affairs with Natalie Wood, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton; his many friendships with Hollywood royalty: Roman Polanski, Robert Altman, Jack Nicholson; and his own ascent to royal status as well. In “The Sexiest Man Alive” we get the story behind Beatty’s smoldering good looks, swoon-inducing sexuality and piercing intelligence, at least as defined by author Ellis Amburn, whose credits include ghostwriting autobiographies of Shelley Winters and Priscilla Presley.
A Big Life in Advertising
By Mary Wells Lawrence
Knopf, $26
“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz . . . ” Somebody had to write that (as well as “Flick your Bic”), and that somebody was Mary Wells Lawrence, whose career in advertising spanned the industry’s golden years, roughly the 1950s through the 1980s.
Rising from mere copywriter-in-training for the bargain-basement merchandise sold by McKelvey’s department store in Youngstown, Ohio, to co-founder of her own stupendously successful agency, she became the first female chief executive officer with a company on the New York Stock Exchange. Along the way she married the head of Braniff Airways, rehabbed a magnificent villa on Cap Ferrat and jet-setted around the globe with everyone you’ve ever heard of. Chicken hash at midnight, anyone?
Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography
By Jimmy McDonough
Random House, $29.95
Back in the Day: My Life and Times With Tupac Shakur
By Darrin Keith Bastfield
One World/Ballantine, $21.95
Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters
By Robert Gordon
Little, Brown, $25.95
A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead
By Dennis McNally
Broadway, $30 (August)
Like good musical compositions, each of these four books has its own rhythm.
Jimmy McDonough’s “Shakey” (one of Neil Young’s nicknames) is a detailed chronicle of the rock era told through the life of one of its greatest legends, with few details of the artist’s life–including sex, drugs, births, deaths and despairs–left uncovered. In addition to being a great musician, Young, it turns out, is a model-train aficionado.
Gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur had a softer side, too, according to Darrin Keith Bastfield, a friend from their days at the Baltimore School of Fine Arts, when Shakur would practice his music in his garage, write poetry and study Shakespeare. More than just Bastfield’s reminiscences, though, “Back in the Day” is about overcoming poverty and overtaking the music world, and a man who became a cultural icon tamped out by the very culture he glorified.
In “Can’t Be Satisfied,” Robert Gordon takes on Muddy Waters, the man who (in Chicago) shaped the electric blues and created a foundation for rock ‘n’ roll. This is Waters’ epic, rollicking, up-and-down life like you’ve never read it, a form of music archeology. And Keith Richards wrote the foreword.
In “A Long Strange Trip,” which purports to be a “kaleidoscopic narrative,” Dennis McNally, who has been the Grateful Dead’s “official historian” since 1980, vividly shows the group at its most raw and powerful, carrying the Dead saga from its inception in 1965 to its demise three decades later. It’s worth it just to read various Deadheads referred to as “psychonauts.”
The Black Veil: A Memoir With Digressions
By Rick Moody
Little, Brown, $24.95
It turns out Rick Moody’s surname is more than apt. In his 20s, Moody, author of “Demonology” and “The Ice Storm,” found himself so depressed he felt suicidal. In “The Black Veil” he chronicles not only his collapse and recovery but traces his family’s paternal line looking for clues to his own melancholy. One ancestor he discovers was the focus of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of shame “The Minister’s Black Veil.”
Tying the past to the present to the future, Moody explores the weight of family history and finds it can sometimes be pretty heavy going.
The Day I Turned Uncool: Confessions of a Reluctant Grown-up
By Dan Zevin
Villard, $12.95 paper (June)
It should come as no surprise that the same man who wrote “Entry-Level Life: A Complete Guide to Masquerading As a Member of the Real World” should also write “The Day I Turned Uncool,” a book about transitioning from being twentysomething to being thirtysomething. It’s filled with essays spun from personal confessions such as “I take pride in my lawn,” “I went to a wine tasting” and “My recreational drug of choice has become ginkgo biloba.”
Dan Zevin, a contributor to Maxim, Details and Us, as well as an NPR correspondent, is almost embarrassingly funny.
Storytelling
The Star Wars Trilogy
By George Lukas, Donald Glut and James Kahn
Del Rey/Lucasbooks, $25.95 (June)
For the first time in hardcover, the original, complete stories of the first three “Star Wars” movies: “A New Hope,” “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.” It has been a quarter century since the first classic movie debuted, and in this 25th anniversary collector’s edition, you can read where it all began–Luke Skywalker, a farm boy looking for adventure in a galaxy far, far away . . . –and where it went.
Transplanted Man
By Sanjay Nigam
Morrow, $24.95 (August)
Can Sanjay Nigam’s second novel, “Transplanted Man,” live up to the hype that it combines the hilarity of “Catch-22” with the urgency of “ER” and the poignancy of “The World According to Garp”? For anyone who loves the cinematic adventures of Indian director Mira Nair (“Monsoon Wedding”) or the upbeat atmosphere of Moti Mahal restaurant on Devon Avenue on a Saturday night, the answer just might be yes.
The story of Sonny Seth, a brilliant physician (like the author himself, who was director of kidney research at Harvard University) caught up with eccentric expatriates, high-level Indian diplomats, snarky assassins and even a Bollywood star or two, “Transplanted Man” is a comic tribute to the rich subculture where India and America intersect.
Greetings From Hellville
By Thomas Ott
Fantagraphics, $13.95 (July)
Some days even words on a page are just too much to handle. It’s times like that when a book like “Greetings From Hellville,” by Thomas Ott, comes in handy.
A collection of four bleak, suspenseful, creepy horror stories, they’re all told in Ott’s meticulous black-and-white scratchboard style with nary a word in sight. He lives in Switzerland and has a huge following in Europe. This is his first American book. See what all the hoopla is about.
I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting With My Daddy
By Ellen Gilchrist
Little Brown, $25.95 (August)
Ellen Gilchrist fans will welcome the return of Rhoda Manning, who narrates some of the stories in this new volume as a child, a divorced mother of three sons and an elderly woman recalling her life.
Though filled with much sorrow and pain, these stories also mix in–in a way Southern writers seem to have a knack for–a rich vein of humor, acceptance of life’s folly and the saving grace that love, in the end, can offer us.
The Portable Promised Land
By Toure
Little, Brown, $23.95 (July)
A contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, Toure introduces us to Soul City–a wholly imagined utopia where magic happens and black is beautiful–in his debut short-story collection. Political correctness is challenged in stories with such titles as “Afrolexicology: Today’s Bi-Annual List of the Top 50 Words in African America” and “The Sad, Sweet Story of Sugar Lips Shinhot.” Another Langston Hughes in the making?
Sin Killer
By Larry McMurtry
Simon & Schuster, $25
If you don’t find the thought of reading the first of what’s proposed to a be a four-volume Western epic novel daunting (or depressing), Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtry’s “Sin Killer” is for you.
Picture it: 1830, just as America is starting to expand west, American Indians, pioneers, mountain men and explorers (not to mention wild beasts and a part-time preacher known as the Sin Killer) all duking it out for their own little piece of land, seeking a new life, trying to preserve old ways.
It isn’t pretty, but in McMurtry’s gifted hands it all comes together in a story as big as the West itself.
Men: They’re loud and they like to drive fast
Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free: Hell-Raising Motorcycle Stories
By Ralph “Sonny” Barger, with Keith and Kent Zimmerman
Morrow, $24.95
“Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free” is Hell’s Angels member Ralph “Sonny” Barger’s follow-up to his best-selling autobiography, “Hell’s Angel,” with tales of high-speed highway cruises, scrapes and battles intermingled with enough brawls, close calls and accidents to earn him a bachelor’s degree from Traffic School.
Still, you gotta love a guy who says “freedom ain’t cheap, and there’s nothing quite like an open road, a tuned-up Harley, and an old lady hanging on for dear life!”
Men and Speed: A Wild Ride Through NASCAR’s Breakout Season
By G. Wayne Miller
PublicAffairs, $26
True Speed: My Racing Life
By Tony Stewart, with Bones Bourcier
HarperEntertainment, $24.95
If you’ve ever been curious about what makes a man strap himself into a car and drive in loops at 200 m.p.h., then journalist G. Wayne Miller’s “Men and Speed” is for you. He spent a year following the NASCAR circuit, from the race where Dale Earnhardt fatally slammed himself into a wall on a final turn, through great races at Las Vegas, Talladega, and more.
You’ll get a different perspective from NASCAR champion Tony Stewart, famous for his foul language and bad behavior, in his autobiography “True Speed.” In it, he talks about his rise from go-karting champion to 1999 Winston Cup rookie of the year and explains all those nasty penalties he has received, the public shouting matches, the brawls with other drivers and even his clashes with reporters, while he climbed the ladder of success. Hey, he’s just being honest and, as he says, “that’s not going to change.”
Confessions of a Street Addict
By James J. Cramer
Simon & Schuster, $26
While other kids pored over the sports pages, Philadelphia’s little Jimmy Cramer was reading the financial pages instead. Eventually he grew up, becoming James J. Cramer, one of Wall Street’s most successful and brashest traders, hedge-fund managers and journalists, among other things.
In “Confessions of a Street Addict,” the rich guy himself explains how it all happened and includes the insights and revelations he experienced along the way that made him not only a much-feared, often-hated, never-boring figure on The Street but one of the most high-octane financial journalists working today.
You Cannot Be Serious
By John McEnroe, with James Kaplan
Putnam, $25.95 (June)
At 18, John McEnroe made it to the Wimbledon semifinals, and he hasn’t really stopped since, nor has he lost the brashness of youth. “People ask, ‘Do you feel your behavior was abominable?’ ” the tennis champion says in “You Cannot Be Serious,” his long-awaited memoir. His answer, “I don’t think about [it].”
What he does think–and write–about is tennis, first wife Tatum O’Neal, tennis, his role as a dad and as a controversial TV commentator, and tennis. Colorful and biting, McEnroe hasn’t lost his edge, even if he is playing on the senior tour these days.
