Book your summer

Some lightweight reading for the long dry season.

THE KING OF PAGE-TURNERS
Stephen King is one of the most prolific and best-selling writers in the world, and those two words aren't usually synonymous with high quality "" but in his best work King has plumbed the depths of the human soul in a way that's unmatched by most other popular writers.

His latest novel, Lisey's Story, is a revisitation of a motif that has run through his work: the dark world of the imagination that a writer lives in, and the effect this interior world can have on him and his family. Lisey is a famous author's widow, who wants to lock herself away with her memories after his death, but finds their shared past catching up with her. The result is a fine psychological horror story.

BELLY LAUGHS
"He is simply unique in the same way that Picasso or Stravinsky are, and I believe his outrageous unsentimental disregard for order will be equally funny a thousand years from now," said Woody Allen of Groucho Marx.

The middle child among a group of talented brothers who infiltrated the cinema with their subversive brand of madness, Julius Henry "Groucho" was a natural comic genius. The Marx Brothers' films invariably centred around his lunatic persona, complete with bizarre painted moustache, cigar firmly in mouth and a trademark machine-gun delivery of non-sequiturs.

Lines like "Why, my ancestors would rise out of their graves and I'd only have to bury them again" were made hysterically funny by his deadpan delivery and incongruously pensive expression. Stefan Kanfer's The Essential Groucho is a compilation of highlights from movie scripts, passages from Groucho's books, ad-libs and quips from his long-running game show You Bet Your Life, and letters including his classic correspondence with T S Eliot.

CRICKET
For cricket lovers disillusioned by India's early World Cup exit, the increasing mediocrity of the one-day game, and poor administration, Men in White, a collection of Mukul Kesavan's essays, is a reminder of what the game can be at its best. Like all impassioned cricket lovers, Kesavan is very opinionated, and he holds forth here on a variety of topics "" such as the culture of cricket in Chennai, the need to re-think the special rules created for one-dayers, and the implications of a racist remark by commentator Dean Jones.

Other highlights include his memories of listening to radio commentary as a child and playing the "Lutyens Variant" of cricket in a neighbourhood park. In a reading season that has seen a glut of soul-deadening, stats-heavy "cricket books" cynically cashing in on the WC craze, this one comes as a breath of fresh air.

MYSTERY
The sunny, non-threatening worlds created by Scottish writer Alexander McCall Smith are best appreciated during a lazy summer vacation. A law professor who turns out at least a couple of books each year, Smith has created a couple of popular series featuring such characters as Precious Ramotswe, the "Miss Marple of Botswana", proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.

In Blue Shoes and Happiness, Precious investigates a number of troublesome matters, including theft and blackmail at a catering college and sinister goings-on at a health clinic.

Meanwhile, she has philosophical questions to address too: is it right to find happiness in small things, such as a new pair of blue shoes? This is cosy, feel-good armchair (or deckchair) reading; just a look at the bright cover, with its colourful relief-print illustration, will set the mood.

NON-FICTION
Books on India and "Indianness" have been quite the rage in recent months, with notable entries by foreign correspondents Edward Luce (In Spite of the Gods) and Christopher Kremer (Inhaling the Mahatma), as well as Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi and Sudhir Kakar's The Indians: Portrait of a People.

New on the shelves is Mark Tully's India's Unending Journey, in which the author shares the formative experiences of his British Raj upbringing, his public school years and early vocation as a priest, his distinguished broadcasting career and his fascination for India's tradition, as well as its modern way of doing things.

Through interviews and anecdotes, he embarks on a journey that investigates the many faces of India, from the untouchables of Uttar Pradesh to the skyscrapers of Gurgaon. Pleasant and undemanding, despite its vast scope, and don't miss the chapter on Khajuraho, with the Christian Tully charily coming to terms with India's long tradition of sex in religion!

MYTHOLOGY
Speaking of sex in religion... You might not associate the Puranas with summer reading, but Ramesh Menon's beautifully written translations "" in a series of books published over the last two years "" have brought alive the stories we read in Amar Chitra Katha comics as children.

Even the deliberately archaic language isn't a serious barrier to enjoying these stories; start with Menon's Siva Purana and Krishna Purana before moving on to the more heavyweight translations of the Mahabharata and the Srimad Bhagvata. Be warned, though, that these are uncensored translations with lots of explicit violence and divine copulations, not the sterile, Colgate-toothpaste versions of gods that you see in TV serials.

SPECIAL MENTION
The collected edition of writer/artist Craig Thompson's elegiac "illustrated novel" Blankets is now available in India, and it's well worth investing your money and time into, even if you're not a graphic-novel convert. Thompson said in an interview that the book came out of his need "to describe how it feels to sleep next to someone for the first time".

This memoir moves between two phases of its narrator's life: his childhood days, sharing (and squabbling over) a single bed with his kid brother; and his years as a lonely, confused adolescent, a measure of comfort coming in the form of an unusual relationship with a girl named Raina. Through all this, he struggles with questions about religion, art, the importance of family and the difficulty of achieving genuine closeness with another person.

Don't be daunted by the size (580 pages) of this book "" it won't take you more than a couple of reading sessions to get through; after which we recommend you read it again, this time paying closer attention to the image details.

Also look out for: Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, a follow-up to the extremely popular The Kite Runner; and After Dark, a new novella by the celebrated Japanese author Haruki Murakami.