Summer reading : Laurence Breiner.

It's when you start packing that you realize how many different modes of summer reading there are, all requiring different kinds of books. Summer's not just a day at the beach. There's reading for the rainy days. There's reading to accompany the morning's first coffee, when the birds are up but the houseguests aren't. There's insomniac reading (when the houseguests are still up). You need a little plan. I've tried several. My worst plan was to read books with the word "beach" in the title. Much more successful was the summer of nothing but plays. An equally rewarding variation reveals the underlying principle: Read no book of more than 130 pages.

But tradition strongly associates the lazy days of summer with wildly ambitious reading. Not hard books--fat books. It's the season for the really good Dickens they didn't tell you about in school: Dombey and Son, and Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend. The nearest contemporary equivalent must be Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (HarperCollins, $20)--1,300 pages of beautiful sentences, inhabited by a subcontinent of quirky and memorable characters. A truth universally acknowledged initiates the story: Mrs. Mehra needs a husband for her youngest. The search soon embroils four large families, and the political upheavals of India in the 1950s intrude unpredictably. This is leisurely reading, but not leisurely telling. The texture is opulent and detailed, the big crowd scenes are wonderfully managed, and the whole story is full of incident without melodrama--an amazing feat, considering the political background, which several other big novels of India are content to rely upon in lieu of a plot.

Considerably shorter, but compensating with greater metaphysical weight, is Georges Perec's masterpiece, Life: A User's Manual (Godine, $19.95, 600 pp.). It is accurate, but hardly adequate, to say that Perec weaves together the stories of the people living in a large apartment building in Paris, told from the perspective of a single moment. In the reading, you will discover a novel full of puzzles and conundrums, with an emotional and intellectual density comparable to that of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red, White, and Blue trilogy.

For a homegrown product on a similar scale, you could hardly do better than The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (Harcourt Brace, $15, 648 pp.). Here are more than forty pieces that never sound alike, though all abundantly demonstrate Welty's genius: her characteristic agility of imagination, the striking variety of her light, the polyphony of pitch-perfect American voices.

Summer is also the time to try to remember all those books friends once mentioned with a special note in their voices. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (Noonday Press, $12, 219 pp.) hardly needs to be remembered, since almost everyone mentions it, but since hardly anyone can explain why it is so fine, you have to read it for yourself. Imagine a haunting novel, in gorgeous sinewy prose, about two young sisters and a vagrant aunt who live beside an Idaho lake with a train wreck at the bottom.

Here are some others: Alan Isler's The Prince of West End Avenue (Viking Penguin, $10.95, 256 pp.), a funny and moving book about Jewish octogenarians who undertake, against the odds, to stage Hamlet at the Emma Lazarus retirement home. Egos! Passions! History! For a different kind of endgame, Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro (HarperCollins, $11, 219 pp.), set in postnuclear South Florida, tells a freakish coming-of-age story garnished with a feral symphony orchestra, errant Rastas, and a catch phrase that deserves a place in everyone's vocabulary: "Never happen. No way. Chance in Hell." Another sublimely goofy novel is Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao (Buccaneer, $18.95). A clue to how much fun this is: there's a film version, by effects-meister George Pal, with Tony Randall hamming it up as the Chinese impresario.

Chang-Rae Lee's debut, Native Speaker (Riverhead Books, $12.95, 349 pp.), is a moody and devious novel, which only appears to be a political thriller. There is, yes, a story about a political campaign in an Asian district of New York City, but it comes to us narrated by a twenty-something Korean-American who is by profession a sort of metaphysical hit man. The result fully deserves the occasional reviewer's comparisons to Ellison's Invisible Man (Random House, $19.95, 616 pp.). On the subject of appearances, there's also George Schuyler's Harlem Renaissance classic, Black No More (Northeastern, $13.95, 222 pp.). This sardonic tale about the social impact of a scientific breakthrough that turns black people white is so wonderfully wicked you can never admit you've read it. Bring it to a sparsely populated beach. After all, it's about the opposite of tanning.

But really, what goes in the straw basket with the sunscreen and the big towels? For total immersion (so to speak) you need pack nothing more than Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey (Farrar Strauss & Giroux, $10, 528 pp.) and Derek Walcott's salty Caribbean epic Omeros (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $12, 325 pp.). Worried about being seen reading books whose text lies mostly left of center? Well, there are those who say that the only essential reading, every summer of your life, is Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (Harcourt Brace, $11, 209 pp.).

Laurence Breiner teaches English and African American studies at Boston University. He is the author of An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge University Press).