Here are some more things to consider for room in your beach bag or your knapsack, depending on your destination.
Short story collections are a tough sell, but nothing is better for the short-bite approach to reading than a good book of stories. I've always been fond of the Flannery O'Connor and John Cheever collections, but Alix Ohlin's new book, Signs and Wonders (Vintage, $15) is one of the best story collections I've read in a decade. These are some cracking-good tales — deep and rich as any novel, with twists and turns you don't expect. We encounter fascinating characters at just the moment their will and mettle are tested. How many story collections fall into that can't-put-it-down category? This one does. These are tough, original, funny and tragic, all at once. Cannot recommend this book highly enough. By the way, Ohlin published Signs and Wonders the same day she published her novel, Inside (Knopf, $25). Can't recall anyone being so logo-audacious since that day in 1968 when Tom Wolfe published The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Pump-House Gang. The New York Times raved: "The SAME Day: heeeeeewack!!!; Too Freakin' MUCH!!!" We might echo the Times' sentiment.
Honky Tonk (W.W. Norton, $50) is a glorious, big book of photographs, so it deserves its own beach towel. Henry Horenstein here collects 40 years of photographs of great country musicians — many of them while performing near his New England home, but many of them at the old Ryman Auditorium or Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. There are classic portraits of Mother Maybelle Carter, Speck Rhodes, Harmonica Frank Floyd, and other entertainers, but the book also turns the camera toward the audience for a loving and leering look at the Country Music Fan. Some of them have hair that defies all laws of nature. It's a fascinating look at that time and a celebration of the closeness between artist and audience in country music. Great to see some of those faces of the old, traditional country music and contrast them with today's bland, middle-of-the-road country singers. There are still great, authentic country singers today, but few of them reach the sort of audience that the manufactured ones do.
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2012.