Salon's Summer Hardcover Picks

Salon's Summer Paperback Picks

________Our editors and critics pick the best books
________to hang out in a hammock with.

BY DWIGHT GARNER | Like a lot of people who grew up in Florida (or California, or wherever there's an endless summer), I've learned to fear the beach. Sunburn, sandcrabs, tourists in tight clothing -- you know the litany. What's more, the beach is generally a sorry place to dip into a good book. Even if there isn't a 200-pound bruiser kicking sand up your nostrils, the multiple distractions -- including, sometimes, tourists in tight clothing -- make it difficult to submit to whatever spell an author may be trying to cast. The term "hammock reading" isn't very evocative of summer, but when I think of the books I plan to take away with me this July, that's where I imagine myself reading them.

No matter where you plan to lug your pile of beach books this summer, there's an unusually good supply of lively, literate, engrossing titles. Below are recommendations, culled from a handful of Salon's editors and regular critics, of some of the best hardcovers published thus far in 1998. Before we get to that, however, here's an (admittedly personal) look at some of the most interesting paperbacks that have recently landed in stores.

In the nonfiction category, it's hard to ignore Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" and Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm" -- they're tightly wound, and surprisingly humane, narratives about how men and women react in the face of nature's extremes. Both writers had remarkable stories to tell, and it's genuine praise to say that both books are better than they had to be. Another fine book, Steven Biel's "Down With the Old Canoe," takes a broader and more distanced view of another tragedy -- the sinking of the Titanic. Biel's book came out well before James Cameron's film, and it will appeal even to those who'd rather drink sea water than hear another word about Leonardo DiCaprio. It's a nuanced look at the Titanic disaster's multiple meanings -- how the sinking affected its era's art, politics and culture.

Three other worthwhile (and deeply idiosyncratic) nonfiction books are Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine," David Sedaris' "Naked" and Alain de Botton's "How Proust Can Change Your Life." Ullman is a San Francisco computer programmer (and NPR commentator) who writes with luminous, streaming ease about the ways that humans and machines interact. Her memoir is one of last year's best. Sedaris is also well-known to NPR listeners; his elfin monologues have a bristly, cerebral charm that translates perfectly to paper. (The title, by the way, comes from his misadventures at a nudist colony.) Alain de Botton's book is a charmingly erudite tour of Proust's world, a tour that distills the great author's work into an unusually provocative self-help book.

The fiction list is even stronger. Here are seven recommendations: Diane Johnson's "Le Divorce," a novel about what happens when American families bump into French social mores, is as sparkling as a bottle of Veuve-Clicquot; Victor Pelevin's "Omon Ra," translated from the Russian, is a satire about the Soviet space program that's as funny as "Catch-22" and as moving as J.D. Salinger's best work; Allegra Goodman's "The Family Markowitz" is a series of linked stories, from a precocious young writer, about an intellectual (and squabbling) Jewish family.

Denis Johnson's "Already Dead" is a Northern California noir that has a perfect ratio of brawn to brains; Alex Garland's "The Beach" is a highly literate page-turner, about thrill-seeking Westerners adrift in Thailand, that reads like an updated version of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"; Donald Antrim's "The Hundred Brothers" is -- quite literally -- about a gathering of 100 brothers, and it has wit and style to burn; and Robert Stone's "Bear and His Daughter" is a collection of stories, from a master of the form, about men and women who move at the margins of society.

Take them to the beach, if you must. I'll be that guy in the shade, swinging between a couple of sturdy palm trees.

Here are some recommendations, from Salon's editors and critics, about 1998's best hardcovers:

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ILLUSTRATION BY TIM BOWER