Master and Commander.

I've always wondered what's meant by "summer reading." Must it consist of books too lightweight to admit to reading during the rest of the year? Do we really want to spend a season leafing through books of ponderous humor, memoirs about pets, accounts of the foibles of the royal family? Certainly one doesn't want to lug the complete Remembrance of Things Past to the beach, where it has to compete with the sun beating down, saltwater sticky hands, sand between the pages. But to read it volume by volume, on a grassy terrace in late afternoon or for an hour, with coffee, on a fragrant summer morning...well, why not?

For my kind of summer reading you have to have unaccustomed leisure (enough time to read for sheer pleasure at least several hours at a stretch), physical comfort (relief from oppressive heat, bugs, and other distractions of the season), and most important, you have to choose a congenial spot. Here's my daydream of summer reading: A shady screened porch, a slight breeze wafting in the scent of new-mown grass, a little vase of jewel-like nasturtiums catching a ray of afternoon sun. I am reclining in exquisite comfort in my lounge chair, reading from beginning to end the (so far) eighteen Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian. These books make ideal summer reading for many reasons; perhaps the mood in which they were written provides the first: "I was quite happy in my writing room, with golden orioles outside the window or nightingales, those overrated birds, and once to utter astonishment a wryneck within a hand's reach, intent upon its breakfast. Quite happy so long as the current book was going well, pen hurrying over the sheets and they piling up...."

By now I guess almost everybody knows that the subject of the novels in this series is life at sea during the Napoleonic Wars early in the nineteenth century. That is the reason I resisted my friends' insistent recommendations that I read them. It was inconceivable that they could hold my interest. Indeed, plowing my way through the first volume, Master and Commander (Norton, $12.95, 412 pp.), almost discouraged me from continuing. Only the enchanting opening scene, the prospect of getting to know the two main characters better, and loyalty to the advice of my friends kept me going. If this is your experience, I urge you to keep going and assure you that you need not absorb the mind-numbing technical descriptions that fill so many pages. At the risk of being read out of the Patrick O'Brian fan club, I will go so far as to say you don't even have to follow closely the extremely detailed accounts of naval battles that recur throughout the series...unless you like that sort of thing.

The two principal characters, Jack Aubrey and Steven Maturin, who make music together, bicker, banter, amuse, and exasperate each other and are a model of loving friends, provide the real fascination of this remarkable enterprise. One can try to account for their magnetic appeal by analyzing their characters: Aubrey, the energetic, gifted, enterprising man of the sea, so at home in the ship that "the sound of the creaking blocks, the gently straining cordage and sailcloth, the angle of the living deck and the curved line of guns in front of him sent such a jet of happiness through his heart that he almost skipped where he stood," becomes a complete klutz on land. Steven, refined intellect and sensibility, skilled physician, and daring intelligence agent, becomes a complete klutz at sea, constantly needing to be fished back when he has fallen overboard. O'Brian's genius is that he so rapidly fleshes out these characters that before the first hundred pages have gone by the reader cares about them and is eager to find out what happens to them next. This feeling intensifies steadily throughout the entire series, leaving us with the conviction that we have made two friends for life. Along the way we absorb as much as we can of O'Brian's encyclopedic knowledge of geography, navigation, astronomy, weather, wildlife on sea and land, as well as the science, music, literature, religion, and philosophy of the era. Set in the vastness and mysteriousness of the sea and describing events of mythic proportions, this series reflects the mind of a true humanist. Oh - I forgot to mention - lots of it is so funny you laugh aloud.

For something completely different, get and keep a copy of Marie Ponsot's new book of poems. The Bird Catcher (Knopf, $22, 91 pp.), by your best reading chair, and dip into it all summer long.

Molly Finn, a frequent Commonweal contributor, lives in New York City.