What To read this summer

From an appreciation of literature to strange happenings in Botswana to the yet more 8216;strange loop8217; that tells you who you are, here8217;s a list to start you off on the season8217;s books

The Curtain, Milan Kundera
The Franco-Czech novelist picks up the conversation from The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed. In what appears to be a freewheeling meditation, he looks at the novelist8217;s task, and thereby also at the reader8217;s. Sample this: 8220;The perpetual activity of forgetting gives our every act a ghostly, unreal, hazy quality. What did we have for lunch the day before yesterday? What did my friend tell me yesterday? And even: What was I thinking about, three seconds ago? All of that is forgotten and what8217;s a thousand times worse! it deserves no better. Against our real world, which, by its very nature, is fleeting and worthy of forgetting, works of art stand as a different world, a world that is ideal, solid, where every detail has its importance, its meaning, where everything in it 8212; every word, every phrase 8212; deserves to be unforgettable and was conceived to be such.8221; How does forgetting work in such a world?

On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan
McEwan8217;s readers know that it is impossible to anticipate what his next book would be about. So it is with On Chesil Beach. After the current immediacy of Saturday, his new book is set in the early 8217;60s Britain, on the eve of the sexual revolution. Florence and Edward are in a Dorset hotel on their wedding night, and this skilful novel investigates their tendency for miscommunication. The stories of ordinary middle class in a lesser novelist8217;s hands would bear a sociological feel. With McEwan they carry menace.

Two Caravans, Marina Lewycka
Lewycka brings to her new book the wit that made A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian such a delight. Strawberry pickers in a Kent field are preparing for a celebration, and the participants in this very English activity are a motley group of immigrants, from among other places Ukraine, China and Malawi.

The Pesthouse, Jim Crace
The landscape and story are so familiar from Cormac McCarthy8217;s recent Pulitzer Prize winning The Road, yet the sense of the familiar only enhances a reading of The Pesthouse. In a post-apocalyptic America, a great migration is taking place eastward in the last desperate attempt at survival.

Ishq and Mushq, Priya Basil
A sprawling narrative about a woman of Indian origin relocating from Uganda to London, with dark intimations of a secret she is harbouring about something that happened in India. In another book just out, From Jhelum to Tana, Neera Kapur-Dromsom considers the migration of her family more than a century ago from the Salt Ranges in Punjab to Kenya.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
Expected any week now, the next book by the author of The Kite Runner.

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, Alexander McCall Smith
In the eighth book in the No. 1 Ladies8217; Detective Agency series, Mma Ramotswe wonders whether men can be good investigators when Mr J.L.B. Matekoni gets involved in a case. Life in her Botswana, be assured, will never be boring. For those who travel the world through detective fiction, Donna Leon too has a new book out this summer, Suffer the Little Children, in which Brunetti looks into the sale of babies around Venice. Also scheduled for a summer release is Andrea Camilleri8217;s The Patience of the Spider.

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Men in White: A Book of Cricket, Mukul Kesavan
In India8217;s summer of desolation, Kesavan8217;s compilation of cricket writings provides consolation from the past. Among the writings: playing cricket at Pandara Park and, that impossible task, 8220;learning to love Ganguly8221;.

The Penguin 1857 Reader, Edited by Pramod K. Nayar
This is a compilation from an assortment of sources8212;British and Indian chronicles, intelligence reports, newspaper dispatches, etc8212;of the events of that summer 150 years ago. Interestingly, this is how Nayar begins his introduction: 8220;Dum Dum, near Calcutta. It is the January of 1857. A 8216;low-caste8217; Lascar approaches a Brahmin sepoy and requests a drink of water. The Brahmin refuses to share his supplies on the grounds that the lower caste8217;s touch would pollute his receptacle. The lower-caste Lascar, furious at the refusal and the insult, retorts: 8220;There is no reason for you to be so uppity about your caste. The new cartridges, prepared with cow8217;s and pig8217;s fat, will ruin your caste soon anyway.8217; The Brahmin sepoy, appalled at both Lascar8217;s cheek and the story, rushes back to the barracks8212;and the wheel begins to turn inexorably.8221;

The City in Action: Bombay Struggles for Power, Jim Masselos
Bombay8217;s history, considered from its struggles during the freedom movement and the sectarian conflicts of the 1990s.

The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin
Lee Smolin, one of the leading physicists today, dares to state the horrifying fact that the last three decades have been the least fruitful for pure physics. Could it, he asks, have anything to do with physics8217; current obsession with gaining a unified theory? Could it be that physicists have got far too entangled in the byways of string theory? And this should cause introspection: is part of the problem that it is difficult for a physicist to be taken seriously by her peers if she is not pursuing string theory?

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Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson
There was no such drought of breakthroughs in Albert Einstein8217;s time. Isaacson, in this already bestselling biography, places Einstein8217;s science in the context of his rather unusual life8212; though, interestingly, Isaacson reportedly was assisted in the science by Brian Greene, a string theorist!

Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter
Cognitive scientist Hofstadter returns to the work of his majesterial Godel, Escher and Bach8212;that8217;s the strange loop referred to in the title. He once again deliberates on Godel8217;s Incompleteness Theorem to try to understand how the mind works. It8217;s difficult reading, but could understanding the self be anything but?

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, Robert Dallek
It was one of the strangest relationships in the White House, that between American President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Dallek uses a wealth of material to show how foreign policy was made in the momentous early 8217;70s. Besides Vietnam and the Middle East, one highlight of the book is the story of how the US masterminded the coup against Chilean president Salvador Allende.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
You8217;ll have to find a really extraordinary hiding place this summer if you are to have any hope of avoiding, first, anticipation of what will transpire in this finally Potter book and, then, news of the great lengths the faithful will be going to to obtain and quickly read it.