A Short History of Byzantium.

To a mother of young children, the phrase "summer reading" is at odds with itself. How to immerse oneself in a book on the beach when one's two-year-old is immersing himself in the waves? Still, with persistence and flexibility, books can be had by mothers and others pressed for time. Each of the books on my list, though long, has short chapters or frequent breaks, and is thus readable in the fits and starts that characterize life with children.

Sahara Unveiled, by Alan Langwiesche (Pantheon Books, $24, 302 pp.), chronicles the author's tortuous journey through the Sahara, from the Mediterranean city of Algiers through the African savanna of Niger and Mali. From his elegiac opening, "Do not regret the passing of the camel and the caravan," Langwiesche writes with a spareness and intensity that mirror the desert itself. He leavens the events of his trip - being abandoned by a gun-running Arab on the wrong side of the Libyan border, crossing the rebellion-torn central Sahara in a rusty old truck - with bits of natural history, current events, and scientific analysis (one chapter recounts in excruciating detail the physiology of dehydration). A major theme is the interplay between Europe and its former African colonies, the way that each continues to define itself in the other's reflection. He depicts the desert, rightly, as a spiritual force, dangerous, desolate, beautiful, and unsparing in its power. The reader senses the approach of the grasslands with reluctance; the journey has been enthralling.

Decades earlier, Patrick Leigh Fermor chronicled his travels through the Southern Peloponnese. Mani (Penguin Books, $8.95, 310 pp. [currently out of stock]) is a magical book about an unusual region of Greece. A haunting, arid land south of Sparta, the Mani peninsula is known for its dramatic towers, from which aristocratic families once bombarded one another with cannon balls in endless vendettas. Fermor has the rare gift of observing without detaching; he writes with real affection of Maniot hospitality, resourcefulness, and tenacity. He frequently sprints off his path to dwell in digression, considering such subjects as Byzantine iconography, Eastern European cats, obscure supernatural deities, and my favorite, an extended discussion of Phanariot Greek headgear. All the while, the reader is carried along on a current of remarkable prose. Mani is gorgeously written, with sinuous and alluring syntax, evocative descriptions, and the stylistic inventiveness of a virtuoso. At the end of a superb chapter on icons, Fermor conjures a world in which Byzantium had not fallen: "This sudden shining mist of impossible surmise is one that floats again and again before the eyes both of Greeks and of strangers who look for more in these seas and islands and mountains than the dispersed and beautiful skeleton of the ancient world."

In A Short History of Byzantium (Knopf, $35, 373 pp.), John Julius Norwich puts flesh and blood on that skeleton. An abridgment of his three-volume history, the shorter version feels rushed, but is nonetheless a gripping chronicle of the first and longest-lived Christian empire. There is something here to captivate everyone theological controversy, palace intrigue, gruesome murder, political strategy, cultural and intellectual accomplishment, military conflict, and a cast of characters unequaled in its collective genius and folly. Writing with as much irreverence as intelligence ('The only good thing that can be said of the reign of the Emperor Alexander is that it was short"), Norwich follows the empire's trajectory upward from the founding of the city by Constantine the Great to its apogee in the tenth century under Basil II, the Bulgar-Slayer. And he follows it downward, from the defeat by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert in 1071 through the depredations of the Fourth Crusade, concluding with a moving account of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Norwich makes an excellent case for the debt - largely unacknowledged, he believes - that Western civilization owes the "strange, savage, yet endlessly fascinating world of Byzantium" and along the way, writes an engaging history.

Finally, a selection for the frequently mobile: Trollope on Tape. Bless the librarians for shelving the adult "Books on Tape" next to the children's videos. Happening one day upon The Warden, read by the marvelous British actor, Nigel Hawthorne, I popped it into my car's cassette player and was immediately hooked on the doings of the denizens of Barchester, Trollope's fictional cathedral town. I'm now exactly eleven-fifteenths of the way through the Books on Tape edition of Barchester Towers, read by David Case. An ironic observer of his own time, Trollope paints a panoramic yet microscopic portrait of power used and misused in Barchester - by ambitious clergy, by an arrogant press, by misguided reformers, by meddlesome wives - thus illuminating the power struggles that characterize all human societies. He also makes waiting in the carpool line a delight! For those who prefer their Trollope in print, The Warden ($8.95) and Barchester Towers ($8.95) are both available from Penguin. Otherwise, treat yourself to a renewable resource at your library and crank up your cassette player this summer as you head down the turnpike, squeeze on the subway, or, dare I imagine it, laze on the beach....

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill, co-author of Shakespeare Alive!, lives in Greenwich, Connecticut.