We'll Make Book On A Summer Reading Spectacular

Library Suggests You 'Pack A Paperback'

We'll Make Book On A Summer Reading Spectacular

By Adaline Huszczo

(News Staff Reporter)

If the advent of summer is promising you a temporarily less pressured existence, if there are vacation days or weekends stretched out at the lakeside or poolside in your immediate future, and if the heat leaves you with a lethargic resistance to physical exertion — well, what better time than summer to do some reading?

It occurred to us that former city administrator Guy C. Larcom Jr. or immediate past-Mayor Robert J. Harris, having had the burden of running the city lifted from their shoulders, might be taking the opportunity to catch up on some reading and might have suggestions to offer, but we sort of struck out.

“I’m afraid not,” said Harris, a U-M law professor. “I’ve been doing some research and some fishing.” Larcom, now executive director of Ann Arbor Tomorrow, was also “catching up on some long needed recreation — tennis, and starting to play golf again.

“About the only thing I’ve read,” he said, “is a series of detective stories someone happened to leave at the house.”

But from the Ann Arbor Public Library comes the advice, “Pack A Paperback.”

“In the summer,” says librarian Ruth Haldeman, “people tuck a book into their suitcase when they go on vacation or into a beach bag on their way to the shore.” Paperbacks, she suggested, are the ideal mode for summer reading — lighter and less bulky than hardcover volumes. And there’s less damage done if they’re inadvertently left in the motel room or at the campsite, spotted with sun tan lotion, buried in the sand or dunked in the lake.

When The News asked for some ideas for summer reading fare, Mrs. Haldeman followed through on her own suggestion, spent a morning scouting the local bookstores for recent titles available in paperback.

She returned not just with the list, but with a sack of some 30 books, which Lael Cappaert, also of the library staff, quickly worked up into a “Pack Up A Paperback” display. The selections will remain on display through this week before going into the library’s circulating paperback collection.

Here is a breakdown of Mrs. Haldeman’s list of recommended and available paperbacks. All, we note, are of recent vintage — some just now making it into paperback following hardcover editions, others new and available only in paper.

Novels are always leisure time favorites. Mrs. Haldeman found Herman Wouk’s “The Winds of War,” Anthony ("Clockwork Orange”) Burgess’s “One Hand Clapping,” and “The Optimist’s Daughter,” a recent Pulitzer winner by highly-regarded Southern author Eudora Welty.

The late R. F. Delderfield wrote a long list of very popular historical romances, but his fans may not know about ‘‘Farewell the Tranquil Mind,” a new novel released (in paper only) since his death.

“The Gods Themselves” by Isaac Asimov may be the top choice for science fiction buffs.

Donald E. Westlake’s “Bank Shot” heads the list of new thrillers, but Frederick Forsyth’s best-selling “The Day of the Jackal” (recently made into a movie) has now been released in paperback.

You’re one of those who thinks truth is stranger than fiction? Biographies and autobiographies follow close behind fiction in summertime popularity, according to Mrs. Haldeman.

Her suggestions in this category: “Eleanor and Franklin,” Joseph P. Lash's much-talked-about story about the FDRs; an “excellent” biography of "Napoleon Bonaparte” by Vincent Cronin; and the diaries and letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, “Bring Me a Unicorn.”

Sports? ‘‘End Zone,” a “hilarious” but also pointed, football novel by Don DeLillo. For baseball fans Roger Angell’s “The Summer Game,” Mrs. Haldeman says, is better written and of more interest to other than Brooklyn Dodger loyalists than Robert Kahn’s more talked about “Boys of Summer,” which appears not to have arrived yet in local stores.

In the non-fiction category, the range is wide enough to suit almost any interest. “0 Jerusalem!” is an intensive history of the travails of the holy city in 1948 by Larry Collins and Dominique La-pierre, who collaborated a few years back on “Is Paris Burning?”

In a contemporary muckraking vein: “The Superlawyers,” Joseph C. Goulden’s revelations of thei intricacies of Washington law firms; "0 Congress,” by Flint’s maverick, party-switching young delegate to the U.S House of Representatives, Donald Riegle.

Alert to Norman Mailer fans: a new collection of essays and miscellaneous commentaries, “Existential Errands.”

“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,” by Hunter S. Thompson, in which a wild weekend in the neon city turns into an epitaph of the dope decade, is good, tough, even funny, but won’t appeal to everyone, Mrs. Haldeman says.

Rollo May’s philosophical treatise on “Love and Will” is out in paperback this summer, as is the surprise 1972 National Book Award winner, George L. Small’s exhaustive and moving examination of the plight of "The Blue Whale.”

For people looking for summer projects or outdoor skills, the library staff is really psyched on a book they think not enough people know about. The subtitle on "The Foxfire Book,” edited by Eliot Wiggington, addresses itself to “hog dressing, log cabin building, mountain crafts and foods, planting by the signs, snake lore, hunting tales, faith healing, moonshining and other affairs of plain living.”

And “The Foxfire Book II,” Mrs. Haldeman notes, is due in paper later in the summer.

In the same vein is one of the surprise finds of Mrs. Haldeman’s bookstore excursion, “The Mother Earth News Almanac: A Guide Thru the Seasons.” She hadn’t seen it before, but says she trusts from the source that it’s good.

Or how about “The Hiker’s and Backpacker’s Handbook,” by Bill Merrill?

Closer to home? “The Bicycle Book,” edited by Bob Boethling, or just plain “Bikes,” by Stephen C. Henkel. Stay at home completely? Jerry Baker’s “Plants Are Like People”; or an up and coming new hobby, “Bottle Gardens,” by Jack Kramer has hundreds of photos and illustrations, discusses over 350 plants.

If you prefer to take your adventure vicariously, a local connection may make “The High Adventure of Eric Ryback, Canada to Mexico on Foot” particularly appealing. Ryback, a Belleville teenager, repeated the odyssey he wrote about in this book a second time last summer.

If you haven’t yet seen anything that strikes your fancy, or if you get through them fast, there’s more to look forward to before the summer is over, Mrs. Haldeman says.

The following books are due to come out in paperback in July: “Rolling Stone Interviews (of rock stars): Vol. 2”; “Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year,” edited by Lester del Rey; “How to Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man,” a collection of humorous essays on such things as how to eat an ice cream cone by Enquire Editor L. Rust Hills; and — get to the bookstore fast because it won’t last — Thomas A. Harris’s popularized exposition on transactional analysis, “I’m OK; You’re OK.”

And coming in paper in August for those who think it’s wrong to pull out and forget, reporter Frances FitzGerald’s “Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam."

If you plan to stretch out with a book in the air-conditioned comfort of your own home, there is an unusually impressive collection of new hardcover releases.

A saleswoman at Centicore bookstore told us that it’s an absolutely “spectacular” summer for new fiction. “Nobody can remember a year when so many famous authors have come out with new books at the same time,” she said.

Included among the stellar offerings: Philip Roth, “The Great American Novel”; Kurt Vonnegut, “Breakfast of Champions”; Peter DeVries, “Forever Painting”; Iris Murdock, “The Black Prince”; Muriel Spark, “The Hothouse by the East River”; Erwin Shaw, "Evening in Byzantium”; Michael Crichton, “The Terminal Man”; Heinrich Boll (1972 Nobel Prize winner), “Group Portrait With Lady”; and, if you like that sort of thing, Jacqueline Susann is back with “Once Is Not Enough.” (Bookstore people and librarians tended to disagree.)

Strongly recommended for someone seeking a prose companion for the entire summer is Thomas Pynehon’s new novel (in paperback, even) “Gravity’s Rainbow” — long and involved, described by the New York Book Review as “a great, ambitious phantasmogoria about ex-Nazis, World War II, V-2 rockets, lovelessness and death.”

For those who like to take things in shorter doses, unusual quality is also in evidence in new short story collections: Vladimir Nabokov,“A Russian Beauty and Other Stories”; Bernard Malamud, “Rembrandt’s Hat”; John Cheever, “World of Miracles”; Donald Barthelme, “Sadness.”

There are an unusual number of new books by and about women, both fiction and non-fiction. Doris Lessing’s relentless examination of a middle-aged woman’s confrontation with the threat of annihilation, the terrors of death and old age in “Summer Before the Dark” may be fiction. But it isn’t escape. The same may be said of “Surfacing,” Canadian Margaret Atwood’s critically-acclaimed journey into and up from madness.

Alix Kates Shulman (she’s the one who wrote the “new marriage contract”) has a new lib novel (in paper), “Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.”

In "Bitching,” Marian Meade reveals what the "real” women as apposed to the spokeswomen have been saying in their kaffeeklatsches, consciousness-raising groups and therapists’ offices. Those who thought Phyllis Schafly was telling it like it really was around the homefires are in for a shock.

In “Coming of Age,” Simone de Beauvoir applies her clear and unimfeebled mind to the shameful plight of the aged in modern societies.

A miscellaneous sampling of promising new non-fiction: Carlos Castaneda’s controversial delving into mysticism, “Journey to Ixtlan”; Anne Morrow Lindbergh, “Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead,” in which she talks of the famous kidnapping; “Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind,” by Stephen R. Graubard; “The Mad World of William M. Gains,” by Frank Jacobs, about the Mad Magazine publisher.

For the detective and mystery fans, the great Dame Agatha Christie has a new one, “Elephants Can Remember.” Ross MacDonald’s latest Lew Archer novel is “Sleeping Beauty.”

And you wierdos who love to have the creepy-crawlies, conjured up for you will be overjoyed to hear about what Ballantine books has just done. Brought out a whole new paperback edition of the works of that ultimate horror story writer H. P. Lovecraft.

(A new horror novel, “The Late Great Creature,” by Brock Brower, is being touted as proof that the master didn’t take the genre to the grave with him.)

Now, is there still nothing here that makes you want to stretch out and read? Sorry. We’re out of space. How about going fishing, or a game of tennis?