FOR THE THIRD YEAR, we’ve gathered a veritable barrage of quality tomeage for your edification and enjoyment at the beach, the airport, the RV waste-disposal station, or wherever else you might find yourself wanting or needing to kill some quality time, and assembled it as the Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.

(Some of these titles may be subjected to longer reviews in the coming weeks.)

• Oulipo Compendium, Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, eds. Show yourself off as the most erudite person on the beach with this long, way-detailed account of experimental techniques in forming new structures for prose and poetry, by a mostly-French group of deep-thinkers, mathematicians, and game-theorists. If you like alternately-scaled music or

  intermediate-to-advanced word puzzles, you’ll like this.

• Great Plains, Ian Frazier. Histories, travelogues, and memoirs of one of America’s most fascinating, least documented places.
• The New Life, Orham Pamuk. A fascinating travelogue (mostly by bus) across modern-day Turkey, wrapped around a young man’s obsessive quest for his dream woman and for a mysterious Utopian land described in an old children’s adventure story.
• Truck Stop Rainbows, Iva Pekarkova. Social-realist novel of quiet desperation, set in Prague during the socialist regime’s dying years. Our young heroine takes clandestine photos of environmental catastrophes, in between sessions sleeping with truck drivers to buy a black-market wheelchair for a dying friend. A poignant, erotic, account of a not-long-ago social-engineering mistake.
• Within the Context of No Context, George W.S. Trow. Reprint of a years-old rant against the usual things a New Yorker essayist might be expected to rant against, particularly every intellectual-type’s favorite all-purpose bogeyman TV. As you may know, I’m just as skeptical of paeans to a supposed golden age of live before TV as I am of paeans to a supposed golden age of life before desegregation. I disagree with Trow’s videophobia as much as I disagree with the videophobia of Mark Crispin Miller or Jerry Mander; but at least Trow writes well and tries to support his statements instead of simply throwing out a bunch of a priori arguments like most TV-haters.
• In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction, Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones, eds. The back-cover blurb and the introduction claim “the Short” or “creative nonfiction” to be some whole new writing genre. It’s not, of course; newspaper columns, radio spot-commentaries, single-page magazine articles, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul inspirational books have been making (factual) long stories short for a long, long time. But the ones compiled in this volume are still damned cool. There’s also a sequel collection, In Brief, specializing in authors’ personal reminiscences; but I prefer this one, wherein the contributors observe the world beyond themselves.
• Why I Am Not A Christian, Bertrand Russell. A good sampling of the great freedom-thinker’s thinking. Only beef: The volume’s religion emphasis means it doesn’t include some of Russell’s best pieces, such as the account of his falling-out with D.H. Lawrence (whom, Russell claimed, saw women “only as something soft and fat to rest the hero when he returns from his labors”).
• Why We Buy, Paco Underhill. As if North Americans aren’t already being systemattically marketed to at darn near every opportunity, here comes a corporate consultant who (as part of a whole treatise on “branding” and retail/advertising psychology) thinks there are remaining spaces of human existence which haven’t, and ought to be, turned into spots for sales pitches. I could try to think up some really exaggerated example (product placements in operas; Pampers ads tacked onto delivery-room ceilings) going beyond Underhill’s own suggestions, but I’m afraid they’d come true.
• The Geography of Nowhere, James H. Kunstler. From 1993, an attempt “to consider in some detail why the automobile suburb is such a terrible pattern for human ecology,” resulting in “the loss of community.” Too bad its lessons (and those of its sequel, Home From Nowhere) hadn’t been widely learned a few years before. We might not be stuck with so much excess paved-over countryside turned into lookalike Sprawlsvilles–or with so many bored, affluent children of the Sprawlsvilles taking over the cities in upscaled “downtown revival” schemes, driving all the longtime residents out.
• Nonconformity, Nelson Algren. A posthumously-discovered long essay written in the ’50s by the Man With the Golden Arm novelist; subtitled “Writing On Writing” but really about the need for outspoken free-thinkers in an America subsumed by Cold War paranoia, McCarthyism, and the start of suburban numbness. “Do American faces so often look so lost because they are the most tragically trapped between a very real dread of coming alive to something more than merely existing, and an equal dread of going down to the grave without having done more than merely be comfortable?”

AND SOME OF YOUR SUGGESTIONS:

• Anne Silberman: “Don’t know if this book was mentioned last year or not: Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger. I’ve passed this one along to so many friends I’ve lost track of it. It’s a small book, written in correspondence form. The story takes place in the early to mid 1940’s. A fatherless boy from Brooklyn starts writing fan letters to a big league baseball player. These two are real, salty characters who are cut from the same cloth. The baseball player becomes the boy’s surrogate dad. It’s all about baseball and being Jewish and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is one of my favorites… and I hate baseball!”
• Bruce Long: “The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. Reflections on impermanence by a German on a walking tour of East Anglia, accompanied by the likes of Conrad and Borges.”
• Ed Harper: “I’d recommend anything by Carl Hiaasen for warm weather reading (I couldn’t imagine reading any of his stuff in the winter), but my favorites are Native Tongue and Tourist Season.”
• Nick Bauroth: “How about the Bible?”

MONDAY: I try to get a DSL line.