Torrid reading

>> >> Sex abroad, white trash and Burt Lancaster's acrobatics help spice up the summer

by JULIET WATERS

Some recommendations for summer reading, taken mostly from the better books reviewed so far this year...

Fiction

For some readers, House of Leaves (Pantheon) by Mark Z. Danielewski, may be the only book they need to read this summer. Then again, summer may not be long enough to navigate this 700-page cryptogram. Endlessly distracting, it's a screenplay within a book, within a documentary, within the legend surrounding the documentary, within a couple of murder mysteries all told in chapter-long footnotes and in different fonts depending on which narrator is talking.

For readers who prefer a somewhat more traditional epic, there's Zadie Smith's White Teeth (Hamish Hamilton). This one gets my vote for the Big British Beach book of the summer (past contenders: The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Captain Corelli's Mandolin). Smith has been compared to Salman Rushdie, who even makes an appearance as the target of a silly Muslim group, KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation). But for anyone who finds Rushdie's recent novels a tad arrogant and longwinded, Smith may be the answer.

Other promising young writers to emerge this spring were Mohsin Hamid with Moth Smoke (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), a sort of Pakistani Gen-X tale set during the summer Pakistan gets its own bomb. If anything, Hamid includes a great speech about the politics of air-conditioning. Elissa Schappel's Use Me (William Morrow) is the most page-turning collection of short stories I've read in a while. "Hot Type" columnist for Vanity Fair, Schappel's inter-connected stories about two 30-something friends are well-written, sexy and fun to read. And Montreal novelist Jeffrey Moore's Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain (Thiseldown) deserves another look, especially after he nabbed a Commonwealth Prize this year. Set when the Plateau still had some grunge, it's part Umberto Eco, part Seinfeld.

As for plane, train or automobile thrillers, Colin Harrison's Afterburn (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) is now out in paperback. It's an elegantly written, though extremely violent, tale of torture, conspiracy and fatherhood--worth it just for a great female character with a tough criminal mind. And Mo Hayder's Birdman (Knopf), though definitely not for bird lovers, is a tightly-plotted serial killer mystery that's pretty difficult to put down.

Non-fiction

Trashy biographies are always my favourite bets for summer reading. Last season saw two of the more complex figures in Hollywood get their lives put under the microscope. Judy Garland's tragic, pill-popping youth was explored in Get Happy by Gerald Clarke (Random House). Burt Lancaster: An American Life, by Kate Buford (Knopf), follows the magnetic, often crass man's man from his early years as an acrobat to his later years as a socialist.

In the world of literature, Martin Amis wrote his own trashy autobiography Experience (Talk/Miramax) to very mixed reviews, either rants or raves. But my favourite autobiographer these days is Jim Knipfel, who follows up his dark, cynical but quite funny chronicle of going blind, Slackjaw, with a cynical dark, funny chronicle of going mad in Quitting the Nairobi Trio (Tarcher/Putnam).

The buzz word for the spring was Bobo, as coined in Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Simon & Schuster) by David Brooks. This analysis/satire of sell-out liberals should make left-leaning types as happy as right-leaning ones. For those who still want to retain some optimism over the summer months, Naomi Klein's No Logo (Knopf) is a thorough and interesting examination of the forces and political trends leading up to the recent protests against globalization. Those who prefer the world of science should pick up Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (HarperCollins) by Matt Ridley, a fascinating gene-by-gene tale of the Human Genome project.

If you're heading a bit south of the border, you might want to take along a copy of Dr. Verne's Northern White Trash Etiquette (toExcel) by Dr. Verne Edstrom, Esq., if only to have him confirm why Canadian white trash is superior to American white trash. And finally, for those who won't be getting out of the city, or who need some inspiration to get their asses moving, there's Erogenous zones: An Anthology of Sex Abroad (Modern Library) edited by Lucretia Stewart. The title pretty much speaks for itself. :