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This summer's line-up makes for plenty of good reading between ball games

by John Freeman

Whether you're cooling your heels at the Providence Athenaeum or sunning your back on a Block Island beach, chances are you'll have a book nearby. But before you dig into the pile that built up over the winter, consider this summer's offerings, which feature the biggest names in fiction and nonfiction, as well as a host of happy revivals. Here's a quick guide to steer you clear of the dreck and help you amass another bedside stack by Labor Day.

BOOK TO READ ON A SUNNY DAY AT THE BEACH
The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Sky, by Richard Hamblyn (July; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24). Today, scientists earn prizes for research on genetics and black holes. But back in 1802, when a shy Quaker named Luke Howard was inventing the science of meteorology, scientific lectures were hardscrabble tavern affairs, where attendees cheered, argued, and fought over the findings. With this fascinating study, a British geologist brings to life those heady days, when a dreamy young man gave Goethe, Keats, and Shelley a new vocabulary for the heavens.

BOOK THAT WILL SCARE YOU AWAY FROM THE BEACH
Close to Shore: A True Story of Terror In an Age of Innocence, by Michael Capuzzo (June; Broadway Books, $24.95). In this gripping and occasionally grisly read, journalist Capuzzo re-creates the first known great-white-shark attacks on swimmers off the Jersey Shore during the summer of 1916 -- the eve of America's entry into the Great War. More than a literary Jaws, Close to Shore captures the decline of Victorian-era innocence as the 20th century brutally bared its teeth.

BOOKS TO READ TO YOUR CHUMS ON A CROSS-COUNTRY ROAD TRIP
Glue, by Irvine Welsh (May; Norton, $14.95). Set in Edinburgh's housing projects, the latest novel from the author of Trainspotting chronicles the tangled relationships between four blokes: Juice Terry, Billy the Boxer, Carl the Milky Way Kid, and Gally. Charting their ups and downs over 30 years as they grow from boys to men, Welsh beautifully evokes the sticky adhesive that's eluded his earlier fiction: friendship.

Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña, by David Hajdu (June; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25). In this stimulating mix of music history and biography, a celebrated jazz journalist delves into the lives of four musical icons who helped shape an era of cultural ferment, and paints a picture of how folk music emerged from the streets of Greenwich Village. Based on hundreds of new interviews, Hajdu's book resurrects a world from its clichés.

BOOK TO BE READ BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON
The Other Statue, by Edward Gorey (July; Harcourt, $12). Originally published in 1968, this macabre classic revolves around the theft of a statue fragment called the Lisping Elbow. At Backwater Hall in Mortshire, a coterie of oddballs and freaks embark on a search, and Gorey (who died last year) skips from one frame to the next with devilish glee.

BOOK TO BE READ BY THE LIGHT OF AN AMTRAK CLUB CAR
Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith (July; Norton, $11). Following Anthony Minghella's cinematic rendering of The Talented Mr. Ripley, readers are again discovering the whiskey-smooth pleasures of Highsmith's noirish tales. Originally published in 1953, and the basis for Hitchcock's famous film, Strangers on a Train may be one of her best. As two travelers -- a sociopath and a harmless victim -- strike up a conversation, Highsmith spins a sinister tale of evil's mordant charm.

BOOK MOST LIKELY TO GET ITS AUTHOR LAID
Dogwalker, by Arthur Bradford (August; Knopf, $20). Poignant, silly, and teeming with mutants of all kind -- including a giant slug who breaks up a marriage -- Arthur Bradford's new book will keep you chuckling until the leaves begin to fall. Keep an eye out for the tall, long-haired scribe on his book tour, where he will read, strum his guitar, and then smash it to smithereens. You'll see groupies more rabid than Dave Eggers's.

BOOK TO READ AFTER RENTING ERIN BROKOVICH
Body Toxic, by Susan Antonetta (June; Counterpoint, $26). Eager for a summer respite, Antonetta's family escaped to the bog lands of New Jersey, where they splashed in the tide pools, picked gooseberries, and drank the water, unaware that the nearby Oyster Creek nuclear power plant was releasing more radiation than Three Mile Island. One by one, they fell ill with a startling array of diseases; in this harrowing memoir, Antonetta describes her family's struggle to cope with the meltdown of their dreams.

BOOKS MOST LIKELY TO BE USED FOR ONANISTIC PURPOSES
The Dying Animal, by Philip Roth (June; Houghton Mifflin, $22). It's a testament to his literary prowess that Roth can pen another book about a man Sean Connery's age banging big-busted lovelies and not get publicly stoned by angry feminists. Knowing, ironic, and yet indulging himself all the same, he proves that an old white guy can still play in the arena of sexual politics.

My Grandmother's Erotic Folktales, by Robert Antoni (May; Grove Press, $24). In this Sheherezade-like collection, a young man listens to his 96-year-old grandmother relate the tales she spun for horny US servicemen passing through Corpus Christi in the '50s, when she ran a boarding house. The young listener comes to understand a piece of lost history preserved by her lyrical storytelling power.

AUTHOR MOST LIKELY TO BE SEDUCED BY HOLLYWOOD
Kissing in Manhattan, by David Schickler (June; Dial Press, $21.95). In this whip-smart, highly original debut, Schickler (a former Upstate New York schoolteacher) follows a coterie of endearingly lost souls as they search out love, enlightenment, and debauchery in Gotham. Soulful, funny, and keenly aware of how urban environments warp desire, Schickler has the goods to grow into a male Lorrie Moore, and dialogue skills that studio heads salivate over. Let's hope he sticks to fiction.

BOOK TO READ IF YOU'RE ON THE REBOUND
An Italian Affair, by Laura Fraser (May; Pantheon, $24).When Fraser's husband left her for another woman, she traded fog-enshrouded San Francisco for the Italian island of Ischia. There she met an elegant Parisian professor with a yen for good wine and sensual sex. Part travel writing, part erotica, An Italian Affair will transport you to the Amalfi Coast faster than a glass of pinot gris.

GIVE THIS WRITER A HAND
The Fourth Hand, by John Irving (July; Random House, $26.95). In the opening pages of John Irving's latest novel, a lion bites off the hand of a television journalist in India. Back in Beantown, a surgeon awaits both the hand and the man, to sew the two back together. Meanwhile in Wisconsin, a woman pledges her very much alive husband's hand to the cause. Somehow, Irving stitches the fingers of this plot together with humor and brio.

PROOF YOU CAN TEACH AN OLD DOG NEW TRICKS
The Song of the Earth, by Hugh Nissenson (May; Algonquin Books, $24.95). It's been more than 15 years since Nissenson won the PEN/Faulkner award for his bracing historical novel The Tree of Life. But nothing in the author's oeuvre could have prepared us for this: a futuristic, multimedia exploration of the imagination. In 2057 John Firth Baker, the first genetically engineered artist, is killed at the age of 19. Weaving poetry, prose, and pictures (Nissenson taught himself how to paint in order to describe Baker's body of work), The Song of the Earth offers a memorable allegory of a troubled artist at war with the 21st century.

Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany (May; Vintage, $18). Originally published in 1974, Delany's labyrinthine novel captured more than a million readers with his tale of Bellona, an American city devastated by a mysterious catastrophe. In this spellbinding odyssey, a young poet named Kid creeps through the ashes of civilization and attempts to forge a new life for himself, while exploring questions of racial and sexual identity in a post-apocalyptic world.

BOOK WHOSE PAGES YOU WILL KEEP TURNING
Fearless Jones, by Walter Mosley (June; Little, Brown, $24.95). In the 1950s in Los Angeles, black men had to lay low. And that's what Paris Minton does until a comely woman strolls into his bookstore and turns his life upside down. Soon he's been shot at, bedded, and robbed, and his store's been burned to the ground. His foibles will keep you reading long into the night.

BOOKS THAT WILL MAKE YOU WANT TO PACK YOUR BAGS FOR DIXIE
Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail: Stories, by Bobbie Ann Mason (August; Random House, $22.95). For over 30 years, Mason has crafted some of America's most original, clear-eyed stories about ordinary people living in trailers and apartments in the New South, grappling with a rapidly changing world. These 11 tales prove she can still pack an emotional wallop.

Towns Without Rivers, by Michael Parker (June; Morrow, $25). In this lyrical follow-up to his acclaimed debut, Hello Down There, Parker visits the life of a flinty North Carolina woman named Reka Speight, who has just been released from jail for the murder of her lover. The story of how she wrestles with conflicts between freedom and love, family and dreams, will elevate Parker to the front ranks of a new generation of Southern writers.