Staycation reading: true love, class wars, wanderlust and homesickness

Not enough money for a real vacation this year? Poor you. Poor me, too — I did the math and realized my travel budget would get me about as far as my sister's sofa bed in upstate New York.

Maybe that's why I'm enjoying "The House at Sugar Beach" (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks) so much. Reading New York Times reporter Helene Cooper's 2008 memoir of growing up in Liberia is like taking a vicarious trip to a place of palm-fringed sands and breezes scented with tropical flowers and dried fish. It's a tale of giddy first love and brutal class wars, wanderlust and homesickness. And, like all good stories set in faraway places, it transports you.

So if you're planning a staycation, that fancy word for hanging around your own house, or just a modest trip, you might want to sweeten it with "Sugar Beach" or one of the following two novels or three nonfiction books, all available in paperback, set in places worth visiting. Each provides a perfect armchair — or sofa bed — escape.

"Brick Lane" by Monica Ali (Scribner): Like a modern Dickens with multicultural seasoning, Ali chronicles the life and hard times of Nazneen, a transplant from Bangladesh to London, whose tedious older husband and glamorous younger lover are just two elements of a complicated and altogether compelling story.

You'll fight back tears, you'll laugh out loud, you'll love this surprising and richly textured novel.

"Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides (Picador): "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

If the first sentence of this long, luxurious novel doesn't hook you, Eugenides' mesmerizing retelling of events in Greek history will. A sparkling and tirelessly inventive writer, he makes transportation in Detroit seems as colorful as transsexuality in Berlin.

"Blue Latitudes: Going Boldly Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before" by Tony Horwitz (Picador): Re-creating the English explorer's 18th-century voyages of discovery from Polynesia to the Bering Sea, Horwitz writes with a sailor's gusto and a biographer's eye for the telling detail. Driven more by curiosity than imperialist ambitions, Cook is as fascinating to read about as the islands he charted.

"My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq" by Ariel Sabar (Algonquin): A minority within a minority, Sabar's family, Kurdish Jews, fled oppression in their homeland by moving first to Israel, then to California — but like Helene Cooper's, they paid the price with a pervasive, even debilitating, homesickness. Sabar's trip to his father's village yields a fresh perspective on such places as Baghdad and Mosul while introducing readers to a slice of Iraqi culture that has all but vanished.

"A Supremely Bad Idea: Three Mad Birders and Their Quest to See It All" by Luke Dempsey (Bloomsbury USA): Binoculars dangling from their necks and iPods in their pockets, Dempsey and two friends traipse all over the United States in pursuit of the painted redstart, the buff-breasted flycatcher, the elf owl and something called the elegant trogon, which turns out to be as fabulous as its name.

Why iPods? Because it's easier to find birds when you can listen to their songs in the field.