Hindu goddess

Get serious this summer

Packing for vacation, dedicated readers often tuck the summer's must-read "beach books" into their suitcases along with the Coppertone and mosquito repellent.

But why does relaxing with a best seller mean snoozing through the afternoon, barely digesting a fluffy romance about a sensitive stockbroker who empowers his secretary or a lurid thriller about the hottie detective who catches the salivating serial killer stalking her to a Caribbean hideaway?

Instead of nodding off in a hammock with an author as predictable as Aunt Dot's casserole, why not take a chance with a new writer who'll lead you into bracing waters.

Not to be snobby but toss anything advertised as "unapologetically romantic," "swift-paced and readable" or "just perfect for a quiet afternoon" out with the fish guts and Danielle Steele.

As summer approaches, several notable authors and a few newcomers have published novels and memoirs that address issues that touch the marrow of our lives with fresh language that stimulates readers' imaginations just like the best vacations.

Here are some eclectic suggestions about new books that'll make memorable summer reading.

American jihad

"The Garden of Last Days"

By Andre Dubus III

Norton

537 pages, $$24.95

Like the 9/11 hijacker propelling this searing novel, Andre Dubus III has scored a direct strike into the psyche of a bewildered nation unable to protect itself from its hungers and self-delusions. His audacious third novel, "The Garden of Last Days" gathers together four lost souls in a seedy Florida strip club where they'll enact a morality tale as current as tomorrow's car bombing.

Punt

April is a stripper who can't leave her sick 3-year-old daughter home alone so she brings her to the Puma Club on a slow September evening in 2001. She dances for an arrogant Saudi named Bassam who needs to stroke his own toxic carnality before taking off on a suicidal jihad that promises pleasures he can't achieve in a world corrupted by Infidels. Along comes embittered, not very good ol' boy A.J. who contends for April's attentions with unexpected consequences.

As in "The House of Sand and Fog," Dubus sets his characters on inexorable collision course fed by resentment, zealotry and plumb bad luck. Like a car wreck, you can't look away. Like the Twin Towers crumbling, you can't forget what you saw.

Dubus has accepted the post-9/11 artistic challenge that's bedeviled the world's finest English-language writers from Don DeLillo in "Falling Man," to John Updike in "Terrorist," from Brit Ian McEwan's "Saturday" to Jonathan Safran Foer's disorienting "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close."

Dubus may not be the polished stylist but he writes from his guts about people we pass in the street caring for a sick child, lusting after a stranger or seeking martyrdom. His "Garden of Last Days" is a masterpiece that captures the flavor of these troubled times with unflinching honesty.

Saving Lt. Flint

"Panther Soup"

By John Gimlette

Knopf

400 pages, $26

With U.S. servicemen and women fighting overseas, John Gimlette's fine "Panther Soup" observes war's carnage, tedium and absurdity through the sometimes bemused eyes and clear memory of 89-year-old Weston resident Putnam Flint. Subtitled "Travels through Europe in War and Peace," this Everyman's tale wrenches World War II from the History Channel to make it something personal that happened to a quiet uncle who still won't talk about it. A London attorney and travel writer, Gimlette accompanied Flint across Europe in 2004 following the route he took in 1944 serving with US Seventh Army in a tank destroyer unit called the Panthers.

On his first visit to Europe in 60 years, Flint recalls his adventures utterly without illusion. He killed when he had to. He visited the brothels of Pig Alley in Paris when he could. Like some buddies of German ancestry, he regarded their German enemies as "people like us" and "more sensible" than their French allies.

Part memoir, part quirky travelogue, Gimlette's "Panther" achieves what great war literature always has from "The Iliad" to "'The Red Badge of Courage." It personalizes hell through Flint's no nonsense recollections. Returning to the scene of the Battle of the Bulge, Flint discovers 60 years later his unit had flattened a church when they were trying to rout Nazi snipers. Readers will feel the young lieutenant's blisters, fatigue and growing disgust. Recalling his part in a war that left millions dead, Flint emerges as an honest chronicler who deserves to be truste ...

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