Books to take to the beach

Beach books are not always read on the beach. They're read in sunny backyards, crowded airport waiting rooms, in the bleachers at rain-delayed baseball games, even inside an air-conditioned house. But what they have in common is a certain sunniness that could only go with summer.

Beach books can be well-written, they can even be somewhat substantial, but they still need light subject matter (more serious works are covered in our Top Titles roundup). Some of the irresistible summery topics covered in our chosen books include chocolate, television, romance, and rock and roll. May a little bit of all of them be a part of your summer.

How sweet it is

Algonquin

Do not, under any circumstances, read Steve Almond's "Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America" (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $22) if you're on a diet, if you're diabetic, or if you're living, perhaps, on a tropical island, with no access to a relatively large metro area. Maybe two chapters into the book, you will want to put it down, get your car keys, and hie thee to a 7-Eleven, where you will stand in the candy section and reach down to the bottom shelf, the shelf with all the goofy regional candy bars you've never tried before. You will load up on them, and it will be all Almond's fault.

Almond is the perfect person to write this book, as evidenced by both his name and the back-cover photo of him as a kid, mouth and lips smeared with chocolate (he says he has eaten a piece of candy every single day of his life — I wonder how that worked when he was an infant, but no matter). All that combines to create Almond's friendly, slangy tone throughout this slim book, which is as addictive as peanut M&Ms.

Maybe two chapters into the book, you will want to put it down, get your car keys, and hie thee to a 7-Eleven, where you will load up on goofy regional candy bars.

He spends the book traveling to candy factories, playing Charlie Bucket in a Willy Wonka world. Rather than tour the huge factories of Hershey's and Mars, he travels to the Boise factory that produces the Idaho Spud, a potato-shaped candy bar, and the Nashville home of that Southern delight, the Goo Goo Cluster. He meets the people of family-run companies who seem to be in business less for a profit than for the sheer joy of it.

Almond's descriptions of their products are both drool-inducing and hilarious. He describes — and names — the numerous ways he attempts to eat the gooey, sticky Valomilk chocolate cups ("The Flip Top: I broke off the top lid in its entirety, and lapped at the filling directly.") His writing even gets a bit wistful and Kerouac-like, as when his fears rattle up around him on a lonely bus ride through Nebraska, and he thinks "You are unworthy of love. Candy will not save you."

It's an (Almond?) joy to spend time with Almond, and any calories consumed as a result are well worth it.    —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

All about chemistry
Mil Millington’s second novel, “A Certain Chemistry,” (Villard, $14), is a classic love-triangle tale—so classic that the narrator frequently feels duty-bound to apologize to the reader for its triteness.  The plotline superficially resembles that of the Hugh Grant vehicle “Notting Hill:”  charming,  easily-flustered Englishman falls for a quirky famous actress.  However, this Englishman—author Tom Cartwright, who’s signed on to ghostwrite the autobiography of soap star Georgina Nye—has a beloved girlfriend, Sara, at home.

Villard

The real treat here is Millington’s chronicling of hapless Tom’s ongoing social mortification.  Tom undergoes many humiliations that are the stuff of nightmares, from being literally caught with his pants down to being forced to evacuate a barbershop halfway through a haircut (still wearing his plastic apron, he frantically traverses the streets of Edinburgh in search of a stylist who can finish the cut before his date with Georgina, mere minutes away: “Imagine Batman with bed hair and his cape on backwards.”)

Many subsequent awkward moments are a result of Tom’s clumsy attempts to deceive Sara, which gradually transmogrify into outrageous cover stories he has no hope she will swallow.  When explaining a bruise, for example, he can’t decide between two stories: one, that he fell down (which he knows rings false, being the standard excuse) and the other, that he was punched by a tramp.  On the spot, he blurts out, “I fell over a tramp.”

By no means is it all zany hilarity, though; Millington knows exactly when to cease the bon mots and mobile-phone mishaps and show us how torn Tom is by his irresolvable, irresistible desire for two very different women.  This is a novel that could have been a fluffy summer confection, but in the end is a four-course meal.    —Kim Rollins

Get some Airtime
You may not remember Jay Mohr from “Saturday Night Live.” Though he was a cast member and writer for two years, his actual appearances were rare. In his new book, “Gasping for Airtime,” (Hyperion, $24) Mohr relates what it’s like to be a bit player on a hit show.

Hyperion

The book provides a great look at the backstage interworkings of “SNL.” After we learn that most of the sketches are written during all-night sessions on Wednesdays, the show's up-and-down quality makes more sense. Mohr does a great job of showing how much pressure he felt as he tried to find sanity, trapped in an office that was formerly an elevator shaft (he could touch both walls with his arms outstretched). He paints loving pictures of Chris Farley and Phil Hartman; shows respect for Mike Myers; and not so much love for Rob Schneider. While working on the show, Mohr discovered that he suffered from a panic disorder — not especially easy for someone who makes a living doing stand-up comedy.

There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments — Mohr wrestling with Chris Farley,  accidentally insulting Kim Basinger in front of her husband Alec Baldwin, Mohr’s anger at Marisa Tomei when she gets one of his sketches cut. Fortunately, the book doesn't turn into a pity party. Mohr is always hardest on himself, revealing what it’s like to have a sketch bomb or what it’s like to have to think of an excuse when he has nothing to pitch. It’s hard not to appreciate how hard the guy tried.   —Paige Newman

Off to see the Wizard
Scarlett Thomas's "Going Out" (Vintage, $13) chronicles the lives of young people who have grown up in suffocating suburbia, within cul-de-sac houses where every piece of furniture points towards the television. Luke, afflicted with a lifelong "sun allergy," is trapped in his own home, stimulus-starved, believing wholeheartedly in the reality of TV and the internet, as it's all he's ever known.

Anchor

His best friend Julie, suffused with an overwhelming sense of her own mortality, envies Luke's life of perfect order, routine, and safety. After a childhood of being ostracized, she has retreated into an agoraphobic rut. The life Julie has chosen for herself is almost indistinguishable from Luke's — at one point she wistfully envies, through a pet-store window, a mouse in a glass tank.

The two and their assorted misfit, similarly-broken companions eventually embark on a nigh-inevitable generation-X road-trip (the book is set in England, but apparently the highways of not only America but the world over are running thick and slow with disaffected youth.) At the end of their journey is the Taoist healer Wei, who is akin to the Wizard of Oz, had Dorothy originally contacted the Wizard via e-mail.

Julie, an overcautious driver, insists they take the lesser-travelled B-roads — "the yellow roads," and Luke absconds from his mother's home in a light-tight suit fashioned of tin foil. The meandering, philosophical conversations en route regarding, for example, the multiplication of negative numbers, remind you that the road to the Wizard was never straight.

Although Thomas's Oz parallels are sometimes strained, her characters are solid and convincing, and she gracefully reveals how simultaneously awful and alluring the idea of normalcy can be.    —K.R.

Ready for rush

Hyperion

It's hard to imagine a juicier beach book than Alexandra Robbins' best-selling "Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities" (Hyperion, $24).

Robbins spent a year undercover with four sorority girls at a school she doesn't identify. While it's understandable that she can't identify the school or the actual sororities, but it also hurts the book. Early on, Robbins lost a bit of my trust when she reports as fact the long-repeated urban legend that plumbers have to clean out sorority-house pipes at least once a month due to all the bulimic sisters throwing up. If this is factual, it's pretty shocking — but Robbins doesn't appear to have spoken to a plumber or actually seen this work done, she just reports it as fact and moves on. (If she did witness this, it's not made clear.)

One unlucky girl who chooses a less-elite sorority is told by her mother that she has ruined her life.

But there's plenty of other good dish. In "Circle the Fat," sisters or fraternity brothers use permanent markers to indicate not-so-perfect parts of pledges' bodies. In another, a girl finds a size-medium sweatshirt in a sorority house and is practically horrified that one of her sisters owns clothing that isn't size small. One sister has a fling with a professor, another tries to cope with being date-raped by a fraternity brother. One unlucky girl who chooses a less-elite sorority is told by her mother that she has ruined her life. If MTV hadn't already produced three seasons of "Sorority Life," you just know they'd be snapping up the rights to Robbins' book.

It's hard to imagine anyone not already in a sorority reading this book and deciding to go Greek. Only the traditionally black sororities, who are presented as being more concerned with true sisterhood than drunkenness and hazing, come off as people you'd like to know.

"Pledged" has something for everyone: Those who were in sororities can read it with barely contained furor, then call up their sisters and rage against Robbins' perceived inaccuracies, and how the sororities she portrays are nothing like the sisterhood of their memories. Those who didn't go Greek (GDI, or God Damn Independents, as they're called), can read it to reassure themselves that they were incredibly smart to stay away.    —G.F.C.

Hooray for Hollywood
“The Second Assistant,” by Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare (Viking, $22) spins the tale of young Lizzie Miller, who’s just gone from the moral frying pan of a congressional internship in D.C. to the fire of a major Hollywood agent’s office, where she’s a second assistant: a polite industry euphemism for “secretary.”

Viking

The story offers few surprises: it’s rife with the expected gags about cocaine and Botox and how the guy who foams your latte may have just penned the greatest screenplay you’ve ever read. The prose reads like the committee effort it was; there are precocious adjectives such as “etiolated” and “oleaginous,” thrown in among such heinous mixed metaphors as “Hollywood is a jungle, so I suppose the only way to survive is to throw yourself in at the deep end.” (Jungles have deep ends? Hurling yourself headlong into something is the sole method to ensure survival?)

It’s breezy, cheesy, and sleazy, the fishbowl-sized margarita of fiction: slightly regrettable, but still tasty.

In a not-at-all hackneyed plot twist, an adorable hunk that literally knocks Lizzie out on Venice Beach turns out to be a studio exec. He promptly disappears for a few hundred pages, but reenters the picture when, in an equally plausible coincidence, he and Lizzie share a private jet to Sundance.

Back at the Agency, Lizzie’s co-workers are so two-dimensional that the authors may as well have cut to the chase and simply labeled them The Airhead, The Gossip, The Neurotic, and The Weasel; other players are largely characterized by which designer’s dresses they prefer. Her boss, Scott, actually has a bit of depth to him,  even when he’s snorting his Ritalin prescription and spending three days straight playing online poker.

The book picks up when Lizzie agrees to start pitching her barista’s script around town — she’s finally taking an interest in the industry that goes beyond fantasizing about what she’s going to wear to the Oscars. She starts to grow on the reader as soon as she stops falling into things, both literally and figuratively, and happens into something she believes in. But overall, it’s breezy, cheesy, and sleazy, the fishbowl-sized margarita of fiction: slightly regrettable, but still tasty.    —K.R.

Daddy dearest
In John Scott Shepherd’s “The Dead Father’s Guide to Sex and Marriage” (Downtown Press, $13), Joseph Way, Jr., discovers his father’s long-term extramarital affair on the eve of Joseph, Sr.’s death. Furthermore, as Joe and his brother Nathan begin rooting in their father’s past, they find that the man’s personal history is comprised almost entirely of myth. Joe must simultaneously accept the loss of of his father and reluctantly abandon the carefully-constructed fiction that his dad — mayor of Cleveland and supposed self-made millionaire — has built around himself.

Downtown Press

After modeling himself after a dishonest philanderer his whole life, even carrying the same name, is it inevitable that he will become what he now despises? The question becomes more pressing as Joe is pushed to run for mayor in his late father’s stead — all forces seem to be conspiring to make Joe, Jr. nothing more than an “eagerly-anticipated sequel.”

The entire book is a confessional soliloquy Joe dictates into a handheld recorder, as he struggles to compose a eulogy his unresolved anger will not let him write until it has run its course. The effect is like being cornered by a half-drunk stranger intent on telling you his life story — you’re not sure how much you believe but the outpouring is fascinating. Joe’s tone is, at first, self-aggrandizing and jocular; his speech is initially packed with sports analogies and regular updates on the state of his genitals, but over the course of the book his character completely breaks down and must be rebuilt. An apparition of his father makes regular appearances, demanding Joe’s absolution before he can be put to rest.

"Dead Father's Guide" is a black comedy about a grieving, dysfunctional family, featuring star-crossed lovers, a ghost story, and finally, an unexpected murder mystery. It doesn’t seem possible to haphazardly combine these disparate elements to any good end, but remarkably, outrageously, it all works. Shepherd performs a master balancing act of laughter, intrigue, and lament.   —K.R.

Confessions of a drummer

Broadway

You may not recognize the name Jacob Slichter, but if you owned a radio in 1998 you doubtless heard him drumming on Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” a tune that sticks in the listener’s head like a blowdart to the skull.

“So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star” (Broadway, $22) is the autobiographical tale of how Slichter went from an amateur plagued by anxiety about dropping his sticks, or worse, getting the Pete Best kiss-off, to a pop icon of bleached hair and practiced indifference.  At the pinnacle of his success, he’s tossing wet sponges at bikini models on MTV’s “Beach House,” and opening for Matchbox 20.

A

He finds himself wondering at an photo shoot if his role is the weird-looking guy brought in to make the guitarist look sexier.

long the way, Slichter provides an excellent primer to the machinations of the music industry.  He explains the concept of “recoupable debt”: the label’s expenditures in creating and promoting music are taken out of the band’s earnings, meaning that aspiring rockers start their careers at the bottom line of a long column of subtraction, deeply beholden to their label.  The way Semisonic’s sound resists pigeonholing — rather than being seen as a credit to their innovation — is instead a drawback in a business that compulsively needs to package: Slichter and mates are deemed too gentle for alternative, too edgy for adult contemporary.

The book isn’t a petulant, bitter screed against the inequities built into the system, though, and neither is it a gushing recounting of the spoils of fame.  Slichter’s memoir is funny and self-effacing; he finds himself wondering at an photo shoot if his role is the weird-looking guy brought in to make the guitarist look sexier — and more importantly, is he allowed to keep the shoes the stylist dressed him in?  How cool is it that Semisonic can shut down an entire block of downtown L.A. to shoot a video?  Why do A&R types always take you out for sushi ... even in Nashville?  Regardless of whether you’re a Semisonic fan, Slichter’s droll internal monologue makes for a great summer read.    —K.R.

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper is MSNBC.com's Books Editor. Paige Newman is MSNBC.com's Movies Editor. Kim Rollins is a writer living in Seattle.

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