Hot Books For Summer Reading

Sometimes, a good book is the only companion you need on a lazy summer afternoon. CBS News Sunday Morning contributor Janet Maslin of the New York Times has a few suggestions for you.

It's a hot book, but you might find yourself dozing off to "The Historian," the best-selling and weighty-looking Dracula novel by Elizabeth Kostova.

Here's a book that certainly looks substantial, not to mention lurid, what with all its talk of Vlad the Impaler. But it could have just as well been named "The Librarian," because it's so full of research and letter-writing and stalling. In the words of one disappointed Dracula fan: "I'd rather dig a ditch than read that book again."

But the good, exciting books can be just as hard to spot as the duds are.

Take "The Traveler," a mysterious sci-fi adventure with a famously mysterious author who uses the pseudonym John Twelve Hawks. That gimmick alone is enough to make the whole thing suspect, and so are any comparisons to "The Matrix" or "Star Wars" or "The Lord of the Rings." But this writer has come up with the summer's real hit: a book with enough new ideas to stage a fresh cosmic battle between good and evil. Get hooked on this first installment, and you'll sign on for the rest of a projected trilogy.

The so-called "beach book" genre also makes its winners hard to spot. Partly, that's because there are so many of them: glossy-looking escapist stories of the rich, famous and wicked. Among these, the season's sharpest stiletto would appear to be Tilly Bagshawe's "Adored," a book as decorative as its characters. It's a great-looking throwback to the Hollywood of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann.
But it's the rare author who can keep up with real-life Hollywood shenanigans and make up anything as interesting. So Gigi Levangie Grazer's "The Starter Wife" has a big edge over the competition. For one thing, the author actually is a Hollywood wife. For another, she's got a sense of humor. Without that, these books aren't any fun at all.

A newly popular type of nonfiction, perfect for today's quick-as-a-blink attention spans, is devoted to weird science. Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling "Blink" is the most visible of them.

But these books are a lot more engaging when they tell you things you don't already know. And the post-hippie, paramilitary mind-control experiments described in Jon Ronson's "The Men Who Stare at Goats" are nothing if not novel. They're the missing link in explaining how the military went from traditional tactics to using terrible rock music as a form of torture.

Another winning conversation piece in the weird science world is "The Genius Factory" by David Plotz. It's the true story of the so-called Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, an experiment in eugenics that was supposed to produce superbabies. The realization that the babies might resemble little bald professors was the least of the problems here. The book tells some sad stories about the offspring of the experiment. Yet it's a very amusing account of how much went wrong.

Not every enjoyable book needs recommending. Sometimes, straightforward ones have the style and subject matter to sell themselves. The swashbuckling of Arturo Perez-Reverte's "Captain Alatriste" introduces an adventure serial with a dashing hero and a nostalgic edge. This Spanish series is bound to be popular as its further installments are published in English translations.

And the charming small-town novel "The Greatest Man in Cedar Hole" comes from a former young adult writer, Stephanie Doyon, who knows how to make a place likable. This novel's little world is as inviting as it is quaint.

But when it comes to recommending summer reading, nobody makes it easier than Lee Child. His book jackets look like bulls-eyes, so they're hard to miss. His dialogue is flinty: lean and mean. His main character, Jack Reacher, is as smart as he is swaggering. The Reacher books are watertight deductive mysteries wrapped in irresistible tough-guy charisma. Read them now before Reacher goes Hollywood. It was inevitable. It's in the works. As the fans who call themselves Reacher Creatures already know, he's going to leap off the page and show up on the big screen.