Beach Browsing : Summertime . . . and the Reading Is Easy

What kind of book should go with you to the beach? A cheap book, first of all, one you can afford to see sun-bleached, sand-scratched , grease-stained and maybe lost altogether. A lightweight book, second, and that in two senses: a book that won’t weigh the tote down and one that won’t turn pleasure into civic or intellectual duty. An unexpected book, finally: not one you’ve heard so much about that actual reading has become superfluous but one you’ve barely heard about at all -- a “Why not?” book, a spin at the wheel of literary fortune.

The books that follow fit this description. Only a few are by very well-known authors . Only a few have been reviewed in The Times during recent months . Most are priced under $5. Many are purest entertainment. Those that are on serious themes are not of such oppressive sobriety that they could spoil a holiday. They were selected by the staff of the Book Review and are reviewed below by Times staff, some of whom--just to guarantee the suitability of the selections--did their reading at oceanside.

SCIENCE FICTION:

Privateers, Ben Bova (Tor: $3.50). Dan Randolph, a former American astronaut living in 21st-Century Caracas, Venezuela, is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. He’s particularly angry with the Soviets, who dominate space exploration. The United States has become an isolationist nation and has abandoned its space program. Randolph’s adventures as a hard-loving, quick-tempered billionaire space industrialist are enough to keep the most action-oriented reader interested. Purists might call this Mickey Spillane-style science fiction, but it’s great fun.

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (Tor: $3.50). The Bugger War has begun and we are losing badly at the start of this Nebula Award-winning novel. Mankind encountered the Buggers--a race so alien that communication is impossible and battles are to the death--while taking its first halting steps to the stars. We follow Ender Wiggins, a gene-selected 5-year-old general-in-training, through a crushing preparatory program and into real battle. We also watch his hyper-bright brother and sister as they stabilize a politically explosive Earth. The plot line isn’t new, but Orson Scott Card has carried it off brilliantly, with careful attention to detail, believable characters and events, and a thought-provoking conclusion.

The Coming of the Quantum Cats, Frederick Pohl (Bantam Spectra: $3.50). Parallel universes are a time-worn science-fiction concern, and while Pohl honors the conventions, he does manage to infuse what is basically a “hard” science-fiction book (concerned more with hardware than perception) with a large measure of heart. The main problem is in the presentation of those universes: The subject is inherently disjunctive and Pohl doesn’t help much, even lapsing into binary (as opposed to the traditional decimal) dates by book’s end. Still, the notion presented throughout--that success and motivation are internal processes only slightly modified by place and events--is refreshing.

Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling (Ace: $2.95). Abelard Lindsay has more adventures in space than any one man should reasonably expect, but Lindsay is no ordinary man and his actions are often far from reasonable. It’s about 250 years in the future. The schism is between the “Shapers” and the “Mechanists.” Lindsay is an exiled Shaper, roaming the space colonies, surviving by his wits. Shapers have been genetically altered and conditioned to be superior beings; Mechanists have had their lives extended through advanced technology. Sterling’s cosmos is believable and Lindsay’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark”-style adventures keep the reader involved.

MYSTERY:

Major Enquiry, Laurence Henderson (Academy Mystery: $4.95). As far as the London police force is concerned a “major enquiry” translates as murder-or-worse (anything else is an “incident”), and the question here is whether the murder of 16-year-old Monica Henekey is the latest in a string of five rape-murders in northeast London (not likely), a “copycat” killing (more likely), or something else again. While it plods just a tad--like its protagonist Detective Sgt. Milton--this is still a bloody good police procedural with some intriguing plot twists and a denouement that really surprises.

When the Bough Breaks, Jonathan Kellerman (Signet Books: $3.95). Kellerman has a deft touch--particularly in setting scenes that are truly three-dimensional--in this study of a double murder, the key to which is locked in the subconscious of a traumatized 7-year-old girl. Called in to unlock it, Dr. Alex Delaware, a child psychologist, finds himself embroiled in a messy conspiracy of murder and child molestation--a subject, in less skilled hands, that could get, well, icky. While, at one point, Kellerman’s plot threatens, temporarily, to get away from him, all’s well that ends well. An engrossing novel played out in the barrios of near-downtown Los Angeles and the plush hills of Malibu.

Mr. Majestyk, Elmore Leonard (Mysterious Press: $3.95). Isn’t this the same “Mr. Majestyk” of several years ago? Yes, indeed, as a reissue. Just as one can’t hear the song, “On the Good Ship Lollypop,” from the lips of anyone but Shirley Temple, neither can one read this character study of a beleaguered Arizona melon grower without casting Charles Bronson as the laconic, and deadly, Vincent Majestyk. Which is exactly what Hollywood did. Confronted by a crooked cop and the mob who wants to tell him who to hire for his fields, what’s a peace-loving man supposed to do? You got it--blow everyone away in one unrelieved blood bath. Brain tired? Plot complexities a bore? Have we got a book for you!

Stillwatch, Mary Higgins Clark (Dell: $4.50). “Stay Tuned” might have been a better title, for this tale of pseudo-intrigue in Washington’s hip and beautiful circles of power has all the depth of a failed TV pilot. TV characters do all sorts of TV things. The plot, as such, has to do with an idealist television reporter doing a profile of a senator from Virginia who is within a mascara’s brush stroke of the vice presidency. The senator is assisted by her own personal hit man. The reporter’s sidekick happens to be a hip, beautiful and available congressman from Pennsylvania who does more leg work than a Capitol page. Sure.

The Cat Who Saw Red, by Lilian Jackson Braun (Jove: $2.95). It helps . . . no, let’s amend that to say that it’s essential to like cats to appreciate, fully, this off-the-wall murder story featuring newspaper reporter Jim Qwilleran and his two Siamese cats, Koko and Yum Yum. If you can accept the premise that we have two cats here with an instinct for solving crimes then you’re more than halfway home. Most of the action centers in a weird, Gothic boardinghouse in the Midwest run by a lawyer-gourmet cook who tests his recipes on his pliant tenants--two of whom turn up missing. Which does not give the plot away. All of this is very much tongue-in-cheek-bordering-on-arch.

Help the Poor Struggler, Martha Grimes (Dell: $3.50). Grimes’ low-key ace, Scotland Yard detective Richard Jury, returns to solve a series of horrible child murders in Dartmoor, where Sherlock Holmes’ Hound of the Baskervilles once roamed. This time, Jury teams with a fiery and well-drawn local cop named Brian Macalvie. Macalvie is haunted by an unsolved murder of 20 years before--the only case he’s never solved--and approaches the heinous murders of three local school kids with a hunch that there’s a connection. The hunch pans out, of course, and the unlikely investigative duo winds up working two crimes two decades apart. The murder scenes are not for the squeamish, but the story holds together well despite the blood and gore.

Mr. Moto Is So Sorry, John P. Marquand (Little, Brown: $3.95). One of the most unlikely heroes in the annals of intrigue, Japanese super-agent I. A. Moto serves his emperor and the cause of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. One of three Moto books being reissued this summer by Little, Brown (the others are “Your Turn, Mr. Moto” and “Thank You, Mr. Moto”), this 1936 novel is full of all the nasty, deadbeat weasels you’d expect to find on a mysterious trek from Japan to Mongolia during the Japanese expansion. At the center of the action are Americans Calvin Gates, a card-carrying flop, and artist Sylvia Dillaway, a brash, tough cookie destined to break your heart if you don’t take a fall first. Keep your eye on that cigarette case. The Russian let it out of his sight, and he wound up with a bullet between his eyes.

NONFICTION:

To Get Rich Is Glorious: China in the ‘80s, Orville Schell (New American Library: $3.95). This is an unsettling stroll through Deng Xiaoping’s “open door,” dazzling with the disturbing symbolism of the new China. Pedicabs are back. Vanity is in. Superstition and executions are on the rise. Rodents are out of control because born-again entrepreneurs are trapping hawks for gourmet food. But few Chinese officials seem to see the link between the “evil wind” and the new economic policies. A longtime China watcher, Orville Schell has a wonderful, sharp eye. Among the garbled T-shirt slogans visible on Chinese city streets, “Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children, Beijing, China.”

The Tunnels of Cu Chi, Tom Mangold and John Penycate (Berkley: $3.95). The Vietnam War above ground was treacherous enough. Below ground, in a triple-decker warren of tunnels and chambers where the Viet Cong shrugged off surface offensive by shell and napalm, it was a blind battle in a subterranean slaughter house. They hid. We sought. Death was often by knife blade or bare hands and man’s greatest handicaps in this creepy, crawling combat were human emotions and a sense of fair play. British broadcast journalists Tom Mangold and John Penycate are masterful guides through an era of modern combat they were the first to fully chronicle.

Baron Philippe: The Very Candid Autobiography of Baron Philippe De Rothschild, Joan Littlewood (Ballantine: $8.95). Why bother with those lusty tattletale novels you see stacked up like cordwood at the supermarket checkout, when you could have the vanity (auto)biography of that randy philosophe and vintner extraordinaire , the Baron Philippe de Rothschild? After all, in “Baron Philippe” you’ll get more than your share of saucy young women, exotic locales, wartime heroics (the baron fought for the Free French in World War II) and moments of thoughtful repose. The baron (with no small help from Joan Littlewood, no doubt) spins a droll tale to boot. This book--chock-full of good eating, good drinking and free love--represents several bottles of exactly the right vintage.

The Men in Our Lives: Fathers, Lovers, Husbands, Mentors, Elizabeth Fishel (Quill: $7.95). Elizabeth Fishel has lit upon a tantalizing topic: how father-daughter relations shape a woman’s success or failure in work and love. Drawing on an abundance of case studies and a beefy bibliography, she parcels out fathers into tidy camps: “Patriarch Fathers” beget feminists; “Daughters of Absent Fathers” pursue the unattainable. Here is The Charmer, The Pal, The Bystander--and their legacies, the Super Macho and the Charismatic Lover. Sure, women will find the old man somewhere in here. Flesh-and-blood fathers, however, spill over Fishel’s neat subdivisions: Ultimately, the crazy chaos of father-daughter ties eludes the human-relations specialist’s method.

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing (Carroll & Graf: $8.95). Almost lost in the enshrinement of Amundsen and Scott is full recognition for the adventuring and courage of fellow polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. Yet this Irishman came within 97 miles of the South Pole four years before any other man dared. Two years after Amundsen and Scott finished 1-2 in their race to the pole and immortality on PBS, Shackleton was back in this world below zero and attempting an overland crossing of Antarctica. Although a vintage (1959) volume, Lansing’s account of Shackleton’s try, the crushing of his boat in Weddell Sea ice and many months spent as a castaway groping for survival on drifting ice pack, open boat and glacier trek, is a strong saga from the old literary school of logbook facts and plain dialogue.

The Water Beetle, Nancy Mitford (Atheneum: $6.95). Mitford claims to remember nothing about her early childhood, yet she accuses herself in this memoir of “great nastiness” to the siblings in her family of famous British writers and blames a babyhood nanny for flaws in her character. But she does it with great good humor, so that even if one can’t think of a single reason to go on reading, one keeps coming back for more. Here’s her commentary on tourists, for example: “Like ants they follow a trail and a few yards each side of that trail there are none.” Americans, she claims, travel to eat and drink, the English are messy, the Germans “clank about in imaginary armor, marching, shouting, occupying.” She’s so wickedly perceptive for a proper Englishwoman, and who can resist her sly wit?

FICTION:

A Rage to Live, John O’Hara (Carroll & Graf: $4.95). Grace Caldwell Tate is no ordinary early 20th-Century woman. She has wealth, good looks and standing in the community. She also has this propensity for being physically attracted to inappropriate men, men who are either scoundrels or married. How this irresistible urge affects her own marriage is the primary theme of this fascinating character study by one of America’s most underrated storytellers, but there are other rewards as well. O’Hara’s dialogue is unerringly authentic and his narrative passages as graphic as a photograph. “A Rage to Live” was first published in 1949 and became an instant best seller, but it raised many critical eyebrows. It’s tame by today’s tell-all standards, but you won’t be disappointed. O’Hara sees to that.

The Wind; the Grass, Claude Simon (George Braziller: $8.95 each). Sometimes 1985 Nobel-prize-winner Simon’s fiction is pure, dynamic poetry, in its endless convoluted sentences (like this one), moral judgments, as it were, on human nature itself, on social mores and neuroses, delving occasionally in outrageous misogyny--” . . . the eternal posture of the mountainous mother, the eternal prostitute . . . gaping at the center of themselves that snare, that greedy and shadowy mouth . . . “--and yet, despite these obstacles, rich verbal tapestries are woven in two novels: “The Wind,” in which a stranger imposes upon a town in the French Pyrenees his claim as heir to a vineyard, reaping a harvest of nightmares for his troubles, and “The Grass,” the saga of an unhappy young woman’s vigil at the end of a life, a marriage, a love affair--perhaps her own sanity, or at least her sense of self.

Do Lord Remember Me, Julius Lester (Pocket: $5.95). This moving story of faith and survival comes to us through the reveries of the Rev. Joshua Smith Sr., who, as he remembers it, was “saved” in a tiny Ouichitta, Miss., church when both he and the 20th Century were in their teens. His life unfolds naturally and vividly in a series of adroit flashbacks that weave harmoniously through the aging threads of the present. “Only now, when there was nothing but past, did it surface to be examined and lived truly for the first time,” he wisely observes in his 80th year. The journey we take with him is deep and rich. We rediscover virtue in the person of a compassionate black man whose trust in God is unfaltering, even in the face of injustice and suffering.

Linden Hills, Gloria Naylor (Penguin Books: $6.95). Sunbathers willing to plunge into a searing tale based on elements of Dante’s “Inferno” will be rewarded by this absorbing descent into a black bourgeois reality gone awry. To gain access to Linden Hills is to achieve the epitome of black success. Through the eyes of a young poet and his friend who spend a summer working as handymen in the homes of the elite residents of Linden Hills, a surreal and oppressive world is revealed behind the perfectly controlled facade. Naylor, who often writes with a gazelle’s grace, deftly manages to make the implausible real. “Reality is based on the senses,” one character says. This book heightens them all.

Other Fires: Short Fiction by Latin American Women, edited by Alberto Manguel (Clarkson Potter: $9.95). An ideal summer companion is one who matches our need for change of pace and reflection, who is stimulating, emotionally honest and generous, warm, funny, irreverent, necessarily furious at times; a soul mate and accomplice in adventure and discovery of strange places that sometimes seem familiar. Such completeness is embodied in this selection of short fiction by Brazilian, Argentine, Mexican, Colombian, Cuban and Uruguayan women writers. The writers are all women “because it struck the editor as curious that so many of the best untranslated books from Latin American countries had been written by women.”

The Swell Season, Josef Skvorecky (Ecco Press: $8.50). If you’re a girl-crazy teen-ager who’s almost equally addicted to jazz--especially dated numbers like “Sweet Georgia Brown”--you might relate to this funny series of six tales involving a Czech youth named Danny who finds himself in all sorts of outlandish and far-fetched skirt-chasing predicaments. Despite author Skvorecky’s standing as a master of contemporary Czech literature, this collection of stories seems fitting for only a select few, this reviewer not among them.

Vic Holyfield and the Class of 1957, William Heyen (Available Press/Ballantine Books: $4.95). Slip this slim, spare, poetically written novel into your beach bag of summer treats. Pure whimsy, it is based on the fulfillment of an elaborate high school reunion fantasy of billionaire Vic Holyfield, who came of age in the 1950s but longs for renewal in the 1980s. The former classmates play rock ‘n’ roll records and basketball and meet Vic’s famous friends who drop by. Despite predictable outcomes of old entanglements and unfinished fantasies, a balancing unease is achieved by what is only mysteriously evoked regarding Vietnam and drug-related tragedies. Its great charm is the way in which it penetrates our nonverbal memories embedded in lines from Elvis and the others who began the bridge from that strange, careful, unconscious time of the ‘50s to the no-holds-barred ‘60s tryst.

YOUNG ADULT BOOKS:

The Ghost Maker, Kathleen Kilgore (Avon: $2.50). Imagine a town whose residents make their livings as psychics. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Lee Connors couldn’t fathom that, either. But that’s what he deduced when he got kicked out of prep school and was sent to live with his grandmother in Florida. There, he found himself surrounded with all sorts of psychics. A hard-headed skeptic, he worried that his grandmother was being duped. But when he set out to prove himself correct, he became initiated into a startling world of trickery and magic. Still, even there he learned there is honor among the fakes, and when an outsider, the Rev. Sandor, comes to town, Lee feels a need to expose him in order to save his friends from financial ruin. Kilgore has constructed a taut narrative guaranteed to keep the reader riveted to the end.

The Very Last Virgin at Hoebeck High, Grace Williams (New American Library: $2.50). Sex--or the lack of it--has 16-year-old Annie Galvin over a barrel. The way she figures it, she’s the only virgin at Hoebeck High School. That prospect chills her to the bone. To lose her dubious status, she embarks on an odd quest that leads her through encounters with birth-control pills, sexy underwear, the school stud, jealousy, drugs, booze, parties, fights, love, pettiness and pain. While all this may sound like a questionable premise for a young-adult novel, rest assured that, in the end, Annie has her morals straight. But this is a novel in which the journey is far more important than the destination, so to merely state that everything ends happily would be to miss all the fun of Annie’s misadventures and the charm of her personality. Yes, virginity, there is still room for you in this world.

The Eyes of the Amaryllis, Natalie Babbitt (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $3.45). This skillfully written short novel requires an adult to introduce it to young people who do not ordinarily choose novels of its subject and theme. A 19th-Century seaside cottage is the setting for this fantasy about the supernatural. The complex plot pivots around a conflict of wills between a young girl’s grandmother, a ghost and the sea. Introduce a young person to this outstanding writer by first reading aloud together her classic “Tuck Everlasting.” If a child becomes enthralled with that more attractive novel, then suggest “Eyes of the Amaryllis,” recently reissued in paperback. The story makes pleasurable summer reading with memorable characters and theme.

Sirens and Spies, Janet Taylor Lisle (Berkley Pacer Books: $2.50). Life is a mystery. Unlocking the answers requires asking the right questions, not leaping to conclusions. Those are the lessons learned by Mary and Elsie Potter when their neighbor, Miss Fitch, is found in her house with a nasty head injury. Did someone attack her? Or did she fall and hit her head? Elsie thinks she knows what happened. She finds peace only after sharing her theories with Mary, who then confronts Miss Fitch with them. The girls are relieved to find that appearances can be deceiving. A thought-provoking novel of self-discovery fueled over and over by the realization that there are two sides to every story.