The best (and worst) from list of best summer reads

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I don’t often write about best-sellers. For most critics it’s just superfluous: If you like the best-seller in question, you’re piling on. If you dislike it, so what? People are buying it anyway.

But the New York Times best-seller list, which appears each Sunday on the Books pages, lately has featured an unusually wide-ranging selection of titles.

So with summer reading in mind, here’s my take on the top five books in each category on the Times’ hardcover best-seller list. I found some of them worthy, a few of them lacking, a couple absolutely annoying.

Fiction

1. “Nothing to Lose,” by Lee Child. With this, his 12th novel, suspense writer Child still has made no impression on me. Maybe it’s my fault; many mystery readers find him compelling or at least dependable. Maybe his erstwhile hero, ex-military cop Jack Reacher, doesn’t resonate partly because the publishers keep describing him as a man with “nothing to fear.” Nothing to fear? Nothing to lose? For this reader, that means nothing of interest.

2. “The Host,” by Stephenie Meyer. This is blowing against the wind, but the author of the Twilight vampire series doesn’t thrill me the way she thrills teen girls. (Maybe this is inevitable.) Meyer confessed in an interview that she has not read widely in either the horror or science fiction genres. Yet she writes in both, evoking in me a literary harrumph along the lines of George Santayana’s observation that those who do not recall the past are condemned to repeat it.

The premise of “The Host” is that aliens come to Earth and inhabit the minds of humans. One woman resists, and she and her alien form a kind of truce, a shared identity. This hybrid then goes in search of a man, another resister. Amazon.com named “The Host” a “best of the month” book for May, opining that the novel is “likely the first love triangle involving just two bodies.”

Well, no. Robert A. Heinlein did the same thing in “I Will Fear No Evil” - published in 1970.

3. “Plague Ship,” by Clive Cussler with Jack Du Brul. While a cruise ship full of dead people does sound interesting, this book is anything but. My belief: Pop-novelists who run out of ideas should be banned from signing on a co-author and churning out books anyway.

4. “Love the One You’re With,” by Emily Giffin. Giffin’s fourth novel demonstrates much more depth than most of her “chick lit” peers can muster. Specifically, she explores conflicts that arise between passion and common sense. The man or woman you marry may have far different attributes than the bad boy or bad girl who made you feel ... ah! And there we must stop.

5. “Blood Noir,” by Laurell K. Hamilton. This is the latest in the author’s supernatural series featuring vampire hunter Anita Blake. In fact it’s the 16th book, and by the time most authors reach this stage, the whole enterprise has grown tedious. Somehow Hamilton has found a way to keep things fairly fresh. A little steam never hurts: “I came home to find two men sitting at my kitchen table. One of them was my live-in sweetie. The other was one of our best friends. One of them was a wereleopard; the other was a werewolf, both of them were strippers.”

In places here, Hamilton’s writing veers close to romance-novel cliche. The plot involves power struggles among a master vampire, a vampire queen and so on ... and if you’re at all familiar with the Bloodsucker Genre, you know that Anne Rice covered this sort of ground in “The Queen of the Damned,” as did Lucius Shepard in “The Golden.”

Hamilton’s strength, though, is her creation of sexual tension and atmosphere. As The Times of London once said of her work: “A hardcore guilty pleasure.”

Nonfiction

1. “When You Are Engulfed in Flames,” by David Sedaris. Ask yourself: Would you ever buy a pair of used pants from a thrift store? I myself would not. David Sedaris did and regretted it. I really can’t tell you, in this newspaper, why he regretted it. But I will say that the essay in question from the author’s latest book of 22 essays is classic Sedaris - twisted, funny, disturbing.

Humor, or at least really good humor, tends to make us not only laugh but also flinch just a little bit. It’s no wonder this book hit No. 1 on the Times nonfiction list; Sedaris has a legion of fans out there. This book won’t disappoint them.

2. “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” by Scott McClellan. The former press secretary for the Bush administration is the latest insider to write an “I’m telling” book (others include Richard A. Clarke’s “Your Government Failed You” and Valerie Plame Wilson’s “Fair Game").

There really isn’t a lot of new information here; McClellan isn’t doing much at this point but confirming, for example, that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were deeply involved in “Spygate.” But What Happened is a compelling read thanks largely to McClellan’s clear, direct prose and his keen observations about why things continue to go wrong inside the Beltway:

“Too many politicians and their followers have become passionately committed to a preconceived, partisan view of reality that allows little room for compromise or cooperation with the other side,” he writes. “The gray nuances of truth are lost in the black-and-white ideologies both parties embrace.”

Read “What Happened” not as the latest “Bush-bashing” book but as a broader indictment of what McClellan calls the “culture of deception” he believes American politics has become.

3. “The Post-American World,” by Fareed Zakaria. With its observations about the growing economic might of India, China and other countries, this book might seem destined to raise American hackles. But Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and host of a new foreign affairs show Sundays on CNN, deserves a closer read than that.

In fact, the author is rather buoyant about the idea that these developing economies will help further develop our own - but only if we are careful. A fascinating, and, thankfully in these troubled times, surprisingly energizing read.

4. “Audition,” by Barbara Walters. Walters is a pro. Sure, she has asked a lot of goofy, softball questions in her TV career, but she has also asked quite a few good ones, and her interviews with film stars like Katharine Hepburn, world leaders such as Boris Yeltsin and Fidel Castro, and just about every other mildly famous person on the planet always engaged me. So does her book, though I could have done with fewer than 624 pages.

5. “Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea,” by Chelsea Handler. I have no real objection to funny people writing funny stories about booze, promiscuity, other forms of bad behavior and general weirdness. Sedaris certainly does that sort of thing. I just don’t think Handler is that funny. (Hint: For a little less slapstick and a little more wit, try Sloane Crosley’s “I Was Told There’d Be Cake.")

Advice, how-to and miscellaneous

1. “The Last Lecture,” by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow. I’ll be right upfront with you: I am far, far too close to this book, emotionally speaking. As many of my readers know from a recent column, my wife, Sherri, is fighting metastatic breast cancer. Randy Pausch, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, is fighting pancreatic cancer - and recent scans show his disease is progressing.

His book, as you might imagine, just tears me to pieces. But it’s a shot to the heart, pointing out something Sherri and I have been learning firsthand, as Pausch has: You must decide what’s really important to you. And having mortality as an unwelcome guest in your life changes ... absolutely ... everything.

2. “The Secret,” by Rhonda Byrne. I don’t care how many people have bought it. I think this book’s assertion that there is a “law of attraction” one can harness to achieve one’s goals is a load of hooey.

What really riles me about this book, though: It suggests that people who experience illness or other misfortunes have somehow “attracted” these things to themselves. Do I think such an idea is vile? My wife (see above) is the most positive human being I have ever met. No way did she bring cancer on herself.

3. “Quantum Wellness,” by Kathy Freston. This book goes down easy, although I don’t see myself becoming a vegan anytime soon. If I never got to eat ribs at L.C.’s again, I’m not sure I’d be all that interested in living. But Freston writes convincingly that meditation, exercise and service to one’s fellows go far to bettering body and soul.

Her message that taking even small steps can bring significant benefits is freeing. Too many self-help gurus and authors demand vast changes that leave people more frustrated than they were as couch-potato sloths. Can’t run five miles? Hey, walk two. I might even have to catch Freston the next time she’s on Oprah ... nah, probably not.

4. “Just Who Will You Be?” by Maria Shriver. This is a book admirable for its brevity (not much more than a hundred pages) and it’s rather sage advice: Personal identity should not depend too much on achievement. We live in an age in which people have defined themselves more and more by how much prestige, notoriety and money they have acquired.

In many ways, the culture of acquisition is a dead end. It was for Shriver, who had to give up her position with NBC News when hubby Ah-nold became California’s Governator. How Shriver realized her problem and rebuilt her life makes for worthy reading.

5. “Letters to a Young Sister,” by Hill Harper. A star of “CSI: NY,” Harper had a best-seller two years ago with “Letters to a Young Brother,” which offered advice to young men. This is a follow-up for the other gender. Just get it, read it and share it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wins Harper another NAACP award.