SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT BOOKS IN THE UNIVERSE

There's more than fool's gold out there -- just check our annual guide, the cure for the summertime blues

By Arthur Salm
June 16, 2002

Picking something light and mindless to read is easy. Any fool can do it.

Airports, and most bookstores, make it convenient: Just grab from the rack up front. Look for covers that have either a crazy-legged fence winding its way along some sand dunes, with a beach house in the background, or, at the other end of this washed-out spectrum, a dagger being plunged into a swastika or a hammer & sickle.

Best-seller lists are good guides, too -- guides to what books are being sold. As for guides to what you might actually want to read ...

Try this one right here: There are some offbeat entries, to be sure, but you just might be in the mood to try something different, to take a chance, to immerse yourself in the unknown. After all, it's summer, when you've got time to devote to reading. Spend it -- and your money -- wisely.

My first suggestions will be anthologies, because 1) you can sort of stick your toe in and get a feel for the water before executing a full-body cannonball; and 2) they might lead you to other books by the selected authors.

"Esquire's Big Book of Fiction," edited by Adrienne Miller (Context Books, $21.95), includes stories and excerpts from the likes of Ernest Hemingway ("The Snows of Kilimanjaro"), Philip Roth ("A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis," from "Portnoy's Complaint"), Richard Yates ("The B.A.R. Man"), Antonya Nelson ("Downstream"), Arthur Miller ("The Misfits"), Louise Erdrich ("Fleur") and so many more. One of the beauties of this collection is that it automatically avoids the why-this-story? gripes that dog anthologies of great writers: These stories were chosen because they first appeared in Esquire. Tip: Be sure not to give up on David Foster Wallace after reading "Adult World (I)"; it seems ordinary and pointless, until you read "Adult World (II)," the hilarious explication that follows.

No doubt you could find something to complain about with "Baseball: A Literary Anthology" (edited by Nicholas Dawidoff; The Library of America, $35). The indefinite article makes for a good defense, though; it's a literary anthology, not the literary anthology. There has been too much great writing about baseball for there ever to be a definitive volume.

The first thing to catch my eye was another selection from "Portnoy's Complaint"; here, Alexander Portnoy waxes ecstatic on the sheer joy that comes from playing centerfield. Many of the standards are here, too: "Casey at the Bat," James Thurber's "You Could Look It Up," W.C. Heinz's "The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete," John Updike's "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," selections from "The Natural" (Bernard Malamud), "Ball Four" (Jim Bouton) and "The Long Season" (Jim Brosnan).

Dawidoff surprised me, pleasantly, by excerpting from "It Looked Like For Ever," Mark Harris' fine, overlooked novel, instead of from the better-known of Henry Wiggen books "The Southpaw" and "Bang the Drum Slowly." And although I've read a lot of Damon Runyan's fiction, I'd never come across his sportswriting -- if that's what you call it; it's more like a preposterous, delightful flight of fanciful leg-pulling, purple-posied prose with a wink and a soft elbow to the ribs. "Hail! Roger Merkle, Favorite of Toledo," which appeared in the New York American in 1911, is a report of a game between the Giants and the Reds. Sort of:

"In a game of baseball at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon, your Mr. Merkle, Oh, City of Toledo, hit himself three large, and, as Harry Stevens would say, lovely, hits, two of which strung up a brace of runs for our boys, and were sadly needed ere the show closed. ...

"One was a ringing ka-knock which wound up all out of shape in the left field bleachers, 'one of the longest home runs of the season'; one was a resounding two-bagger, which crowded in a run, and the other was a common, or garden, single, which Merkle tried to stretch into a two-bagger. He did not do it."

The expression "consciousness-raising" has always annoyed me; it implies that heretofore my consciousness has been hanging out with a bad crowd, loitering in a disreputable part of town on the wrong side of the karma tracks. So: If you want to experiment with shifting your consciousness, pick up "Surviving Through the Days: A California Indian Reader," edited by Herbert W. Luthin (University of California Press, $60; $29.95 paperback). These translations of oral literature will transport you, to borrow from Carlos Castaneda, into a separate reality. Take the book to the beach. Sample some of the tales, poems, and songs:

The spirit, the dove / This spirit [cried] over me / This dove [cried] over me / And so it cried over our future death / Over my future death / Over my future disappearance / Over my future disappearance / The fox [cried] over me ...

Then inhale the sky. Dissolve into the sand. Go home changed.

Got yourself a room by the beach? By the pool? In the mountains? Before you go flinging those wet towels so cavalierly around the bathroom, remember that someone has to pick them up -- someone who works hard for the money, so you'd better treat her right. Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" is out in paperback (Owl Books, $13); it's a fine companion to Robert Reich's new "I'll Be Short: Essentials for a Decent Working Society" (Beacon, $20).

The British luxury liner Lusitania was sunk by a U-boat on May 7, 1915; 1,200 people died. Dianna Preston, a historian with the lucid, hypnotic style of a first-rate novelist, tells what may be the definitive version of the story in "Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy" (Walker, $28).

On the off-off-offbeat, there's James W. Moseley and Karl T. Pflock's "Shockingly Close to the Truth!: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist" (Prometheus Books, $25). Who better to write about this wacked-out universe than a couple of wacked-out insiders? If you have any interest at all in the UFO phenomenon; if you know an alien; if you, yourself are a practicing alien; or you just like reading about the very, very strange belief systems and adventures of very, very strange humans, you'll find this book a non-preachy, nonjudgmental hoot.

No trashy fiction allowed: good stuff only.

Just a small sampling of the good stuff, actually. A couple of weeks ago I raved immoderately about Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" (Harcourt, $25), and I take this opportunity to do it again. The pitch: A boy finds himself adrift in a lifeboat with a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

I just started "Big If" by Mark Costello (Norton, $24.95), a spooky, semi-goofball romp that seems to be about the strange, disorienting life of a Secret Service agent. So far, so very good.

"Very good" includes certain mysteries. After a couple of well-received non-Elvis mysteries, in August Robert Crais brings back his wise-guy P.I., Elvis Cole, in "The Last Detective" (Random House, $25.95). I haven't seen this one yet, but you can't go wrong with Elvis and his silent partner Joe Pike, who lives a life of perfect Zen violence. Fallbrook's T. Jefferson Parker won the Edgar Award (from the Mystery Writers of America) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller of 2001, and has been nominated for the Hammett Award for Best Novel for "Silent Joe" (Hyperion, $7.99). His latest is "Black Water" (Hyperion, $23.95).

Short stories? Sure: Ellen Gilchrist's "I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting With My Daddy" (Little, Brown, $23.95); "The Whore's Child and Other Stories," by Richard Russo (Knopf, $24); and "The Hermit's Story," by Rick Bass (Houghton Mifflin, $22).

Finally, if you just have to read what everyone else is reading -- you can't: Most people aren't reading anything at all. But if you want to read what at least some other people are reading, yet you don't want to descend to the literary sub-basement of, say, James Patterson ("The Beach House," with Peter de Jonge; Little, Brown, $26.95), the California Council for the Humanities' statewide reading initiative is urging Californians to read and discuss John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" (Penguin, $13; centennial edition, $15).The Joads will be with us always.

Arthur Salm is editor of Books