Summer Reading.

I do not subscribe to the view that hot weather and long days sanction the reading of the slight or the dubious. The books that can be finished in a year are too few, and the number that prove worth the effort, disheartening. So no searching of "codes" will be recommended here, nor any travelogues or memoirs that offer the tired pairing of sex with food--be it chocolate or guava or mint chutney. No "Diaries of--" or "Confessions of--" either, and certainly no "Sisterhood/Brotherhood of--" books, which seek to animate some repressed self that would be better left bound and gagged in the psyche's basement. The following are books that require a chair with a back on it, and a share in the guilty hope, expressed by Logan Pearsall Smith, that the sun will go in, so that we won't have to go outside and enjoy it.

First, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23, 256 pp.), the recent Pulitzer Prize winner, is one of the best-wrought works of fiction in many a year, a further burgeoning by the author of 1980s Housekeeping (Picador, $14, 224 pp.). While the latter work's smooth prose immerses the reader in an oddly mystical world, the former is the plainsong of a good and holy man, an aging preacher in 1950s Iowa, who selflessly renders his history in an epistle to the young son who will soon outlive him. John Ames's life is complex, but not in the facile way we use that word today--a dissatisfying synonym for "confused," "ambiguous," and/or "indecisive." Rather, his is a life composed of things coordinated with difficulty--a challenging, intricate passage in service of a faith he has sought to live and teach. The grandson of a man who rode with the stormy abolitionist John Brown, he is also the son of a confirmed pacifist, and Ames recounts the glory in each of these ways of living that serves the truth in both. Ames also relates the friction between the three of them, and is met with a strange new trial concerning his own namesake. In the twilight of his days, he instills the mystery of all days.

Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter (Shoemaker & Hoard, $25, 208 pp.) is in some ways a counterpart to Robinson's John Ames. Hannah, an old farm wife from Kentucky, speaks of her life in the matter-of-fact way that unromantic, unprepossessing people of a harder generation do. She has had her tragedies and joys--early marriage, widowhood, remarriage, and children--but what comes through strongest is her attachment to a communal life. Hannah conceives of herself as not only married to the two men she has loved, but also to their families and to the rural society of which she is a member. The largeness of this body is an unstated comfort, and one she feels obligated towards and mourns losing. The intimate relationship between an individual and the corporate body to which she belongs is rarely attempted, let alone portrayed with such dignity. Both Berry and Robinson write about aged people who can only be characterized as supremely adult, people so grown it is hard to imagine them otherwise, but in a way that the splendor of mature love puts to shame its youthful counterpart. After all, other than beauty and innocence, youth has little to claim for itself, and the latter barely makes it out of the crib.

An altogether different tale is that of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 288 pp.). His dystopia is set in contemporary England, and is told from the viewpoint of an unassuming young woman, Kathy, who comes to learn the dark purpose of the life that has been planned for her. Having grown up in a sheltered boarding school called Hailsham, she and her classmates have been prepared for a life of service. But when we learn of her destiny, something happens in our act of understanding; without revealing too much, it is sufficient to say that this young woman's tale both confronts readers with her dilemma and affronts them with what created it.

The outstripping of ethics by practice is an increasingly common theme in our world, and the sheer reach of our technical powers threatens to expel ethics from our conversation altogether. Still, the new is sometimes a process of transgress and regress, not progress, and Ishiguro offers a cautionary tale for the twenty-first century in the tradition of William Golding and Aldous Huxley.

A nonfiction offering that satisfies interests on many levels--biography, history, cultural commentary, theology, and criticism--is Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $15, 555 pp.). Elie sets out to write the history of a movement, the Catholic moment of the twentieth century in which Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor flourished. With serious attention to both their art and their faith, and with a consummate style that is eminently readable, Elie manages to capture a confluence of belief and a pilgrimage of talent, their unique varieties and shared consistencies. Finally, similar in spirit to Elie's work is Christopher Merrill's Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain (Random House, $24.95, 304 pp.), which chronicles the author's reallife pilgrimages to the monastery at Mount Athos. Merrill somehow avoids the pitfalls in journey literature--hollow epiphanies that seem subjective and remote--by thinking and praying his way through genuine obstacles, all in search of a satisfying restoration. And in the end, that is all we want, by the last of our summer days.

A. G. Harmon is author of A House All Stilled (UT Press), winner of The Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel. He is also the author of Eternal Bonds, True Contracts: Law and Nature in Shakespeare's Problem Plays (SUNY). He teaches at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.