Are you planning a trip to Long Beach, Coney Island, or Saint-Tropez this summer? Are you panicking already about your inability to bring your bookcase with you? If slogging through “In Search of Lost Time” isn’t your idea of beach reading, The New York Sun offers some lighter book suggestions for occupying those idle hours in the sand.

Elaine Dundy
The Dud Avocado (NYRB Classics, 272 pages, $14.95)

In the five months preceding the publication in 1958 of “The Dud Avocado,” Ms. Dundy landed an agent, sold foreign rights, and first serial excerpts of her American-in-Paris caper appeared in a number of women’s glossies. Born Elaine Brimberg to a prosperous Jewish family on Park Avenue, she married the theater critic Kenneth Tynan and became a literary “It girl.” Her first novel attracted a cult following. This summer the New York Review of Books reissues it as part of its Classics series. “The Dud Avocado” follows a charming, if blundering, 21-year-old Missouri native, Sally Jay Gorce, who spends two postcollege years sipping Pernod on “la plus belle avenue du monde,” the Champs-Élysées; staging William Saroyan and Tennessee Williams with an American theater troupe, and fumbling terribly at love.

Pamela Druckerman
Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity From Tokyo to Tennessee (Penguin Press, 204 pages, $24.95)

Conducting research on the sexual mores and mating habits of men and women is not for the faint of heart. During a fact-finding interview for this absorbing inspection of global infidelity, Pamela Druckerman meets with the director of research at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research. He cuts her off abruptly midsentence. Her offense? She has used the term “infidelity.” “What do you call ‘infidelity’? I don’t know what infidelity is,” the director rails. “By using ‘infidelity,’ it’s a negative value. It means you’re not faithful, you’re a liar.” According to the former staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, a dalliance by any other name would sting no less, at least on our shores. It is another matter entirely in regions as disparate as Russia, the West African nation of Togo, and other locales. There, the identity of the adulterers themselves surprise as much as their reasons.

R.T.

Heather McElhatton
Pretty Little Mistakes: A Do-Over Novel (Harper, 512 pages, $14.95)

A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure experience for adults: Heather McElhatton is a producer for Minnesota Public Radio. Her job is to weave tales, and in “Pretty Little Mistakes,” she offers countless ways for readers to choose their own destiny. You find out on page 1 that you are graduating from high school and that you have a choice either to go to college or travel — and that you’re female, and that your boyfriend “annihilated your virginity in an abandoned Christmas tree shack by the highway.” After taking a deep breath and shaking off the question “Whatever happened to sweet, sweet romance?” readers can choose among Italy, California, or Britain as travel

choices, and science or art as major choices. Do you keep the boyfriend as he expresses his disappointment that you don’t wear lingerie all the time in your college apartment? Do you drop out of school and end up traveling anyway? It’s easy to pick and choose a fate in “Pretty Little Mistakes,” but sometimes a page turn can make for surprising selfrealizations.

Pete Jordan
Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States (Harper Perennial, 358 pages, $13.95)

Some people travel to discover themselves. Some find religion, or form a band, or get married and have children. Pete Jordan, a selfdescribed slacker, chose to work as a dishwasher in all 50 states to realize his place in life … as a dishwasher. He begins his tale by describing a stint in Vermont, the 23rd state he worked in, as he smears leftover crème brûlée on leftover garlic bread while standing over a sink of hot, soapy water. The story can only go up from there: Mr. Jordan first decided to pursue dishwashing as an easy way to eat free food and earn fast money. But it wasn’t until 1990, when he followed a girlfriend to Alaska, that he realized dishwashing was his true calling. Throughout his national travels, he drops out of two colleges, appears on the David Letterman show, eats his way through a free buffet at Columbia University, works on an oil rig, and is soon recognized as a hero by his fellow dishwashers across the country. What’s best about the book, however, is that despite Mr. Jordan’s hardened exterior as a tough-guy slacker, he approaches his experiences with a delicate sensitivity toward the people he meets along the way.

J.D.

Cynthia Rowley
Slim: A Fantasy Memoir (Rizzoli, 112 pages, $29.95)

With “Slim,” Cynthia Rowley, a clothing designer and author of the “Swell” lifestyle books, has created an illustrated diary in the vein of those published in recent years by other fashion luminaries. The creative director of Vogue, Grace Coddington, produced “Catwalk Cats” (Edition 7L), and model Sophie Dahl wrote “The Man With the Dancing Eyes” (Bloomsbury). Ms. Rowley’s “Slim” is a wisp of a collection of short stories and tall tales inspired by her sensible upbringing in Illinois. She showed an early talent for dressmaking, fashioning a voluminous frock from helium-filled balloons. Artfully decorated in gilded trim and with Ms. Rowley’s familiar girlish cursive throughout, the book is as light as the baked Alaska its author concocts in one vignette. But it should sustain the eastbound trip on the Jitney from Brooklyn.

R.T.