Marietta Pritchard. (Summer reading).

The phrase summer reading evokes a retreat into ease that seems to require trashy romances, undemanding mysteries, and long naps. Though I endorse long naps, my summertime reading often follows a more strenuous route. In the absence of my usual obligations and with my feet up on a railing facing a tidal river, I find I'm able to take on large, serious books. After all, it's someone else's house, my computer stays at home, there's no TV, and the phone rarely rings. In recent summers I have finally finished The Brothers Karamazov and The Wings of the Dove, and reread Middlemarch. Not exactly trashy, but quite pleasurable.

Some summers--probably not this anxiety-ridden one--I have also gone traveling, which, with the heightened consciousness of waiting in airports and similar places, seems to expand the time available for reading. For travel, I prefer smaller, pocketable books. Let me recommend here several intensely rewarding volumes for the summer traveler--or summer stay-at-home. All of them concern themselves in one way or another with memory--its construction, its pleasures and pains, its loss, both willful and pathological. Of course, hardly any literature since Proust can avoid a concern, even an obsession with memory, but perhaps summer is a season that, more than others, tends to encapsulate our memories, photographed, postcarded, journaled, stuck like flies in amber. (Remember the golden summer of '64? Our disastrous trip of '72?)

Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel (Pantheon, $23, 255 pp.) may be the place to start. Having enjoyed this author's sometimes sloggy journey through Proust (How Proust Can Change Your Life, Pantheon, $12, 160 pp.), I found him just as congenial here. In a wide-ranging ramble in short, diaristic chapters, he conjures up in equal measure the traveler's pains and pleasures, moving from London to Cairo to the Sinai Desert, looking through the eyes of such disparate figures as Edward Hopper, John Ruskin, and Friedrich Nietzsche. De Botton is a man who, when feeling blue, heads out to Heathrow Airport to watch the planes come and go. In the airport, even the monitors listing arrivals and departures speak to him: "The screens bear all the poetic resonance of the last line of James Joyce's Ulysses, which is at once a record of where the novel was written and, no less important, a symbol of the cosmopolitan spirit behind its composition: 'Trieste, Zurich, Paris.'... How pleasant to hold in mind through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon, when lassitude and despair threaten, that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere, for Baudelaire's 'anywhere! anywhere!': Trieste, Zurich, Paris."

Sue Miller's clear-eyed memoir, The Story of My Father (Knopf, $22.50, 173 pp.), brings fresh perceptions to a widely shared experience--the decline and death of a loved one. This finely wrought account joins what has become a recognizable genre: see Philip Roth's Patrimony and John Bailey's Iris. Miller recalls her father as he was before Alzheimer's and during the course of it. In her first foray into autobiographical nonfiction, Miller demonstrates all the skill that marks her novels (The Good Mother, While I Was Gone). The portrait of her father balances loving sympathy with credible rage. At the start of his troubles, her father is picked up by the police after abandoning his rented van miles from his destination. Trying to approach this gentle and mannerly retired professor about what seems to be going wrong, Miller encounters the deep stubbornness at the core of his being. She suggests that perhaps he is depressed and might be helped by medication: "He was characteristically vague in response (he could be more effectively nonresponsive than anyone I've ever known), and I felt he might be telling me, in essence, that it was none of my damned business." Later, in scenes both poignant and comic, she describes a frantic effort to take him for a walk in the woods and his delusion that he'd married one of his caregivers.

Miller notes how cruelly we judge each other's dying: "What we approve of, what we like in a death, is the dignified old person, still relatively intact physically and all there mentally, who carefully puts his clothes away one night, goes to bed, and never wakes up.... 'That's the way to do it,' we say, as though praising a canny decision."

The German-born W. G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction (Random House, $23.95, 202 pp.) deplores what he sees as a collective loss of memory by his compatriots over the Allied destruction of their cities in World War II. He adduces several wartime and postwar writers who veer away from addressing the German civilians' dreadful suffering. Meanwhile, his own description of "Operation Gomorrah," the Allies' destruction of Hamburg in the summer of 1943, is unforgettable: "A now familiar sequence of events occurred: first all the doors and windows were torn from their frames and smashed by high-explosive bombs weighing four thousand pounds, then the attic floors of the buildings were ignited by lightweight incendiary mixtures, and at the same time firebombs weighing up to fifteen kilograms fell into the lower stories.... Another five minutes later ... a firestorm of an intensity that no one would ever before have thought possible arose. The fire, now rising two thousand meters into the sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force.... [T]he storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire advertising billboards through the air, tore trees from the ground, and drove human beings before it like living torches." Sebald is not your typical vacation reading, but in its urging that we confront historical memory, it may be just the right book for the summer of 2003.

Marietta Pritchard is a freelance writer who lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.