The Long And Short Of It -- Best Bets When You Reach For A Paperback This Summer

Say "SUMMER" TO book lovers, and happy visions of summer reading come to mind.

Everyone knows what is needed - a hammock or deck chair, but not too sleep-inducive a hammock or deck chair; an enticing view, but not too distracting a view; an endless expanse of time, or at least a convincing facsimile of an endless expanse of time.

And a book, of course. The right book.

But that's where the problems begin. How to devise a satisfying summer-reading strategy? There are innumerable volumes to choose from, and a number of approaches to take, including:

1) Light Reading. Not everyone wants to spend his leisure time perusing artfully crafted accounts of marital misery and social injustice. On the other hand, a surprising number of readers seem to find escape in shapely tales of mayhem and murder.

2) Heavy Reading. All year you've been wanting to get your teeth into authors as meaty and challenging as William Gaddis, Simon Schama or Gertrude Himmelfarb. But every time you settle in for some serious bedtime reading, something awful happens - you lose consciousness. Now, with a whole day at your command you have your chance to do the impossible: stay awake while you read.

3) Bite-size Reading. OK. You have only two weeks. You want to read as many books as possible! So isn't it convenient that so many novels are actually novellas, clocking in at just over 100 pages, and so many story collections are actually slim assemblages of

vignettes? Back at the office you can rattle off a dozen titles you whipped through, and impress all your colleagues.

4) Marathon Reading. Tolstoy's "War and Peace." Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind." Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy." What do these books have in common? They're all over 1,000 pages long - in their paperback editions at least - and they all offer amply furnished, alternative worlds in which readers can lose themselves entirely.

Here's a list of recommendations culled from a busy year of reading, and fleshed out with a few golden oldies and an I-keep-meaning-to-get-to-it wish list.

Novels

"The Birthday Boys" by Beryl Bainbridge (Carroll & Graf, $9.95). Should we experience a sweltering summer, this British writer's latest novel can serve as a climatic corrective. Inspired by Robert Falcon Scott's doomed South Pole expedition of 1900-1912, the book is an adventure story and an examination of prideful delusion rolled into one. Bainbridge's descriptive powers are superb, and her sympathy with her protagonists is palpable.

"The Soloist" by Mark Salzman (Vintage, $11). This second novel by the California writer - whose memoir, "Iron and Silk," detailed his adventures as an English teacher and martial-arts enthusiast in China - is nimble and unpredictable. Its protagonist is a 36-year-old virgin whose life is complicated by jury duty, a chance at romance, and regret over the untimely ending of his career as a professional cellist.

"Starcarbon" by Ellen Gilchrist (Back Bay Books, $11.95). The feisty Southern novelist and short-story writer ("Drunk with Love") crams a welter of characters and incidents into this busy soap opera about the scandals and psychiatric consultations of the Hand family. Gilchrist's scattershot prose offers flashes of lyricism, snippets of wisdom, a ready humor, and an even readier eroticism.

"Divine Days" by Leon Forrest (Norton, $18). This year's paperback doorstop isn't quite as lengthy as Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy" - a mere 1,135 pages to Seth's 1,474 - but it weighs just as much and it looks as inviting. The Chicago-born African-American writer chronicles seven days in the life of an aspiring playwright who tends bar at Aunt Louise's Night Light Lounge and encounters all sorts of characters in the process. Critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls it "the `War and Peace' of the African-American novel."

"The Loves of Faustyna" by Nina FitzPatrick (Penguin, $9.95). A tall tale with a sharp political sting, this antic novel is a hilarious follow-up to the Polish-Irish writer's first book, "Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia." After opening with the appearance of "a cloud in the shape of human buttocks" in the skies of Krakow in 1967, FitzPatrick proceeds to offer readers 16 adventures (and five "intermissions") in the life of narrator Faustyna Falk, whose headstrong nature leads her into every sort of erotic and political quandary.

"The Fermata" by Nicholson Baker (Vintage, $11). The author of "The Mezzanine" and "U and I" got himself into hot water with this novel about an office-temp narrator whose time-stopping powers allow him to roam Boston and undress immobilized females at will. Baker's protagonist, like his creator, knows exactly what sort of outrage he's courting, and his qualms and rationalizations about what he's doing are a key ingredient of the book's comedy. Throw in enchanting descriptions of a universe on pause and some brightly playful handling of language and imagery (both chaste and salacious), and you have Baker at his best.

Short Stories

"Strange Pilgrims" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Penguin, $10.95). Twelve tales, each one a gem, from the Nobel laureate and author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Many have a European setting unusual for this Latin American writer, and Edith Grossman's English rendering is so agile and musical that you often forget the book is a translation.

"Heart Songs and Other Stories" by E. Annie Proulx (Scribner, $10). First published in 1988, this story collection is a wry, flinty affair set in rural New England. More densely written than the award-winning novels, "The Shipping News" and "Postcards," it nonetheless is vintage Proulx, marked by a tough humor and an astonishingly keen eye for the hardscrabble landscape it depicts.

"The Magic of Blood" by Dagoberto Gilb (Grove, $12). Twenty-six tales that shuffle the details of life in the Southwest in such a way that they take on wry, luminous meanings. The milieu is Mexican-American (mostly El Paso and Los Angeles), the language is tastily colloquial, and the protagonists' convivial spirits are spiced with just enough sorrow and rage to make each tale spring off the page.

"Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque" by Joyce Carol Oates (Plume/Penguin, $10.95). The prolific author, drawing on her shadow side, gleefully entwines the homespun with the horrific in these 16 tales that explore the tricky juncture between a tattered social fabric and various shaky psyches. The choice macabre flavor of the collection's strongest entries should please both devotees of Oates' early stories and fans of her pseudonymous Rosamond Smith novels.

Cult Items And Back-in-print Classics

"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison (Vintage, $11). The late African-American writer's only novel, narrated by a nameless protagonist who confronts a racist America on his journey from the Deep South to the streets of Harlem, is newly reissued in a uniform paperback edition with his two essay collections, "Shadow and Act" and "Going to the Territory" (both $13). First published in 1952, "Invisible Man" now includes Ellison's 1981 introduction to the book.

"Cry to Heaven" by Anne Rice (Ballantine, $6.99). Before she became so fixated on bloodsuckers and witches in her fiction, Anne Rice ("Interview with the Vampire") showed great promise as a writer of historical fiction. This 1982 book, about the tribulations of an 18th-century Italian castrato, offers a memorably ominous atmosphere and magnificent period detail of a fog-enshrouded Venice.

"Old New York" by Edith Wharton (Scribner, $11). Four novellas by the author of "The Age of Innocence," originally published in 1924 and long out of print. Minor Wharton can be as delectable as major Wharton - as such recent reissues as "The Children" and "Roman Fever" attest - and this new addition to the available oeuvre looks as inviting as its predecessors.

"The Gay Place" by Billy Lee Brammer (University of Texas Press, $17.95). First published in 1961 (probably the last year one could use "gay" in a title and not have it refer to sexual persuasion), this trio of novellas focuses on Governor Arthur Fenstemaker of Texas as he rampages through an inner circle of aides, lobbyists, journalists and the occasional Hollywood starlet. Brammer - who served on Lyndon Johnson's staff - paints an indelible picture of a flamboyant American politician's power hunger and whimsical ruthlessness. Praised by Gore Vidal and David Halberstam as a political novel to rival Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," this is a true cult classic.

General Nonfiction

"Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family" by Lauren Kessler (Plume/Penguin, $12.95). With supple clarity, the Oregon writer tells the story of Japanese immigrant Masuo Yasui, who settled in Hood River in 1908. Yasui - a merchant, orchardist, travel agent and even "assistant midwife" - liked to think he was living the American dream. But that changed within weeks of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when he and his family were placed in internment camps. Kessler handles this troubling story with great sympathy and insight.

"On Fire" by Larry Brown (Warner, $11.99). The Southern writer ("Joe," "Dirty Work") draws on his 17 years as a firefighter in Oxford, Miss., in a book which, in the author's words, looks at "the way two totally different careers had to mesh and make room for each other, until one of them finished first."

"Domesticity: A Gastronomic Interpretation of Love" by Bob Shacochis (Penguin, $12.95). The fiction writer ("Easy in the Islands," "Swimming in the Volcano") collects his "Dining In" columns for GQ magazine, and the result is a kind of accidental love story about himself and "Miss F.," his longtime companion, that makes you feel hungry when memorable episodes conclude with tasty recipes at the end of each chapter. Freewheeling, sensual and thoroughly irreverent.

"Wildlife in America" and "The Tree Where Man Was Born" by Peter Matthiessen (both Penguin, $12.95). Two new titles in Edward Hoagland's "Nature Classics" series, by the author of "The Snow Leopard" and "At Play in the Fields of the Lord." "Wildlife in America," first published in 1959 and revised in 1987, studies the plight of North American wildlife from the time of early European exploration to the present. "The Tree Where Man Was Born" is Matthiessen's 1972 examination of natural, political and social history in East Africa.

Biography And Memoir

"Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived" by Penelope Lively (HarperPerennial, $10). This splendid meditation on the nature of childhood memory and the adult ability to give retrospective meaning to that memory is every bit as witty and intelligent as this British writer's best-known novels, "Moon Tiger" and "Cleopatra's Sister." Lively, whose childhood was spent in Cairo during World War II, is especially good on what a young mind accepts as normal - racial divisions, a parent's withdrawal, threats of German invasion - and how acceptance turns to inquiry with each broadening of experience.

"When We Were Colored" by Clifton L. Taulbert (Penguin, $8.95). An African-American entrepreneur looks back on his childhood in the segregated Mississippi of the 1950s. Taulbert, like Henry Louis Gates Jr. in "Colored People," sees some unexpected silver linings in racial oppression, especially in the coherence of community it engendered among blacks in the smalltown South. Still, his tales of injustice are powerful in this plain-spoken and affectionate memoir.

"Mark Morris" by Joan Acocella (Noonday, $17). An intimate and generously illustrated look at the life and work of the Seattle-born choreographer. Acocella's readable account is equally appreciative of Morris' pranksterish nature and his remarkable accomplishments in dance.

"The Devil Soldier: The American Soldier of Fortune Who Became a God in China" by Caleb Carr (Random House, $15). Before Caleb Carr became a bestselling author with his novel, "The Alienist," he enjoyed a career as a military historian. This biography of Frederick Townsend Ward, a U.S. mercenary who fought for the emperor of China in the Taipeng rebellion, was widely praised upon publication in 1991.

"The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes" by Janet Malcolm (Vintage, $12). Not so much a biography as a study of the biographer's obligations, if any, to protect survivors' privacy while serving the truth. Malcolm takes as her example the much-studied and controversial life of Sylvia Plath (five biographies, and still counting), and examines the roles that Plath's husband, poet Ted Hughes, has played in parceling out Plath's legacy. It's a sticky business, and brilliantly handled by Malcolm in this essay, which first appeared in The New Yorker.

Travel

"A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts" by Andrew Chaikin (Penguin, $15.95). Perhaps the ultimate travel book! After all, locales don't come more remote than this, or ticket prices higher. This study, drawing on interviews with all the surviving astronauts involved, chronicles the six lunar landings of 1969-1972. Chaikin's account of the trouble-plagued Apollo 13 mission of 1970, which never made it to the moon, served as a basis for the upcoming Tom Hanks film, "Apollo 13."

"A Valley in Italy: The Many Seasons of a Villa in Umbria" by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran (HarperPerennial, $12). As zany an armchair excursion as one could wish. This British author - who married in her teens, managed a sugar plantation in Venezuela, then ditched both husband and plantation for years of wandering by train - finally decided to settle in a derelict Italian villa. Kept company by her 6-year-old son, third or fourth husband, and teenaged daughter (referred throughout to as "the child Iseult"), St. Aubin de Teran overcomes local villagers' distrust and her own complete lack of money sense to build a new life.

"Volleyball with Cuna Indians and Other Gay Travel Adventures" by Hanns Ebensten (Penguin, $11.95). Humor is the dominant note in this entertaining tome of essays by a pioneer of gay tourism. Ebensten, a German Jew who eventually made his way to Key West via Swaziland and London, has toured every corner of the globe and, as a travel agent, has dealt with every kind of oddball. He's a shameless name-dropper, but his hilarious accounts of encounters with Marlene Dietrich and Colonel Noriega (to name just two) make any snobbism on his part a moot point.

Seattle writer Michael Upchurch's new novel, "Passive Intruder," will be published by Norton in October. Harley Soltes is Pacific Magazine's photographer.