Summer Reading.

Summer is a time for journeying. If you won't be making a trip to distant shores this season, here are three books that will satisfy your literary wanderlust.

The first, Swami and Friends (University of Chicago, $14, 190 pp.), is from R. K. Narayan, a writer beloved in his native India. His seemingly effortless prose beams you down to the teeming streets of the subcontinent.

Set in the imaginary town of Malgudi, Narayan's first novel (1980) is a valentine to the joys and travails of childhood. The book's protagonist is Swami, a ten-year-old boy with a decided distaste for school. He spends his days with four buddies, whose leader is the imperious Mani.

"Have a care for your limbs," Mani advises Swami after the latter has the audacity to talk to a newcomer who has challenged Mani's supremacy. Narayan provides a gentle exegesis of adolescent power: "Swaminathan admiringly asked whence Mani derived his power. Mani replied that he had a pair of wooden clubs at home with which he would break the back of those that dared to tamper with him ..." But these are empty threats: nearly every altercation ends in picnics by the river, the boys' pockets stuffed full of sweets from their mothers' kitchens.

Another writer known for presenting exotic locales in down-to-earth prose is Azar Nafisi. Her bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran (Random House, $13.95, 384 pp.), is an account of revolutionary Iran after the 1979 overthrow of the Shah. Nafisi, then a professor at the University of Tehran, was eventually expelled for refusing to wear the veil. The upheaval of those years is seen through the eyes of seven of Nafisi's female students who gathered weekly in her home to study forbidden classics of Western literature.

The lure of Nafisi's story is the window it opens into an exotic culture in the throes of tumultuous change, as well as the changes the author goes through as she leaves, returns, and leaves once again the chaotic conditions in her native land. But, the biggest gift Nafisi gives her Western readers is the opportunity to see themselves in new ways as they revisit these classics through the heart and mind of an "alien" other. This, she notes, can be an unsettling process.

"The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home," Nafisi says, quoting the philosopher Theodor Adorno. This is precisely what Iran's fundamentalist leaders couldn't achieve, and what she asks her Western readers--and particularly, I suspect, her American readers--to experience through Lolita.

I'll close with a passage to Africa by way of Barbara Kingsolver's wondrous epic The Poisonwood Bible (HarperPerennial, $15, 560 pp.). Kingsolver, who lived in the Congo as a child with her public-health-worker parents, follows an evangelical missionary, his wife, and four daughters through three decades of life in Belgian Congo during its fight for independence. There are various phases to the journey, each framed in biblical imagery: the shock of the first years (Genesis), the father's growing derangement and demise (Judges), and the women's slow coming of age (Exodus).

The four daughters, highly satisfying as fully developed characters, can also be seen allegorically as representing different aspects of the American mindset: the politically incorrect Rachel, the fierce (and rather judgmental) Leah, the proud and physically challenged Adah, and the youngest, Ruth May, who encounters tragic circumstances. For all her shortcomings, it is Rachel who offers the most honest account of their first days in a strange land: "... when we stepped off the airplane and staggered out into the field with our bags, the Congolese people surrounded us--Lordy!--in a chanting broil. Charmed I'm sure ... I looked around for my sisters ... Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everybody did?"

It is in Rachel that we see in clearest relief the unapologetic archetype of America's consumer culture, although all five women are caught up in it, hauling trunks of Underwood deviled ham, number 2 pencils, Band-Aids, and Anacin behind them into their new life.

We get a radically different take on the same culture when, at story's end, Leah stares in disbelief at all the products in American supermarkets during a trip back "home": "It's a funny thing to complain about," she says, "but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time back I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived I kept rubbing my eyes, thinking I was losing my sight or maybe my hearing. But it was the sense of smell that was gone. Even in the grocery store, surrounded in one aisle by more kinds of food than will ever be known in a Congolese lifetime, there was nothing on the air but a vague, disinfected emptiness."

In many ways, Leah's unsettling journey home is not so different from the one Nafisi makes to her native Tehran: odysseys that mirror those made by the reader. Each leaves the traveler changed as she comes to see both self and other with different eyes.

Robin Antepara writes from Japan. Her article "Culture Matters" appeared in our April 8 issue.