Nancy Pearl's summer reading list

It's summer, yes? The sky is blue, the bees are bobbing and weaving, and my zinnia starts have shaken off their usual and accustomed coating of mold.

Now you know and I know, and if we forget there's always that climatological Cassandra Cliff Mass to remind us, that summer never really gets here until mid-July. But in honor of our spasm of wonderful weather last week, I called up Nancy Pearl to get some summer reading recommendations.

There may be an unfortunate few amongst you who don't immediately perk up at the name; a former Seattle Public Library librarian, Pearl wrote a book called "Book Lust" a few years ago that became a national bible for the well-read. Then she had a "librarian action figure" named after her and achieved supernova literary status (as in, she recommends books for National Public Radio).

But she doesn't forget the local folks. Tonight she'll present her personal summer reading list to folks at the Bellevue Regional Library.

But wait a minute, what makes a good summer read?: "I think that for many people, summer reading implies lighter reading — it doesn't matter if saltwater splashes over it or the covers get ripped off," Pearl says. "You don't have a lot of emotional capital tied up in the book."

Well put. Here are three from her list:

"Narrow Dog to Indian River" by Terry Darlington (Delta). This is a memoir about a British couple who bring their narrowboat — "6 foot 10 inches wide, 60 feet long," says Pearl with admirable precision — to the U.S. They decide to travel up and down the 1,150-mile long Intracoastal Waterway, along with their whippet, Jim, a suitably narrow dog for a narrowboat.

To cite the irresistible jacket copy: "But the real danger came from the Good Ole Boys and Girls of the Deep South who were waiting along the shore. Captains and Colonels, bums and heroes, fishermen and plantation owners, weathergirls and gongoozlers and beautiful spies ... all wanting to meet the Brits on the painted boat and their narrow dog and take them home and party them to death."

"The Family Man" by Eleanor Lipman (Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt). Pearl says Lipman's new novel, about a long divorced gay man leading a solitary existence on the Upper West Side until he reconnects with his irrepressible ex-stepdaughter, "is just a delight. ... Like a 1940s screwball comedy."

"Border Songs" by Jim Lynch (Knopf). This long-awaited novel by the Olympia author of "The Highest Tide" is in bookstores this month. It's about a very unusual U.S. Border Patrol agent on the U.S.-Canada border near Blaine, and Pearl likes its cast of indelibly drawn characters: "I think what's most important to me in books is character, ... it's the way he created these characters and the way they interact, and it didn't end the way you expected it to end."

For the rest of the list, please attend the reading of the week, when Pearl appears at 7 tonight at Bellevue Regional Library, 1111 110th Ave. N.E., Bellevue; free (425-450-1765 or www.kcls.org).

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357 or mgwinn@seattletimes.com.

Mary Ann Gwinn appears on Classical KING-FM's Arts Channel at www.king.org/ community/bookdrive.aspx