Summer books bring fantasy, romance, mystery and more

Summertime, and the reading is easy.

For many of us, vacation is a golden chance to get into a good book, and publishers make sure to provide us with a new crop of them every summer.

Avid readers will already know about the high-profile releases of the season, like Dan Brown's Inferno and Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed, both published this month, and James Lee Burke's Light of the World, coming in July....

Review: 'King of Cuba' rooted in long-simmering political strife

Goyo Herrera, old and sick and angry, has only a couple of reasons to stay alive. Second among them is that "he didn't want to miss the pachanga in Miami when word spread of the tyrant's death. Other cities had disaster relief plans, backup generators, designated emergency shelters. Miami had a victory parade prepared to march down Calle Ocho on an hour's notice. ... When that hijo de puta finally kicked the bucket, everyone would be partying like it was 1959."...

Notable: Business books outside the box

Notable

No more Mr./Ms. Nice Guy

Guess which one of these self-help books is a parody; the other two are serious.

Earn Your MBA on the Toilet: Unleash Unlimited Power and Wealth From Your Bathroom (Ten Speed Press) by Kasper Hauser is full of NSFW advice about work, with chapters like "Leadership: Harnessing Your Inner Darth Gandhi."

Working With Bitches: Identify the 8 Types of Office Mean Girls and Rise Above Workplace Nastiness (Da Capo/Lifelong) by Meredith Fuller offers advice on how to sort out the Excluders, the Screamers and the Narcissists, and how to deal with them....

Review: Dan Brown's 'Inferno' a typical, cryptic journey

Abandon common sense all ye who enter here.

Dan Brown's new novel, Inferno — its name borrowed from and its plot built around Dante Alighieri's 14th century epic poem of that title — will no doubt be the bestselling novel of the summer, if not the year. Led by his 2003 blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, Brown's thrillers have sold more than 200 million copies; the new one arrived with a first printing of 4 million....

For Mother's Day, books for moms and others who just say no

Notable

Maybe not, Mom

Three new books address questions like how to raise kids — or whether to have them at all.

The Diaper-Free Baby (William Morrow) by Christine Gross-Loh explains the latest all-too-natural parenting phenomenon: teaching babies less than a year old to go on command, so they can go without diapers. Keep a mop handy.

I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids (Simon & Schuster) by Jen Kirkman is a standup comedian's hilarious explanation for why, gee, thanks for asking, but she isn't going to change her mind about not having children. ...

Book review: The love of Carol Burnett's life — her daughter

On Mother's Day, every mom is a celebrity, at least to her family. These three new memoirs by well-known women explore their experiences with motherhood, as daughters, as mothers or both. Maya Angelou recalls a mother just as strong and unusual as the daughter she produced, although not always an easy mother to love. Carol Burnett remembers, with both grief and joy, her relationship with her oldest daughter, which ended too soon. And Julia Sweeney mines the absurdities of modern motherhood with a warm touch....

Motherhood memoirs worth checking out

Here are a few more new memoirs about motherhood.

Baby Steps: Having the Child I Always Wanted (Just Not as I Expected) (Lifelong/Da Capo) by Elisabeth Rohm is a recounting by the actor (Law & Order, The Client List) of her struggles with infertility — a subject she found was taboo in Hollywood — that finally ended when she conceived her daughter, now 4, through in vitro fertilization....

Review: Julia Sweeney's poignant, skewed view of motherhood

Julia Sweeney writes in her new memoir that she assembled her family backward, "first a delightful daughter, then a beloved husband." She adopted that daughter, Mulan, as a toddler a decade ago, after a bout with cervical cancer left Sweeney unable to give birth.

She might have come to motherhood via the road less taken, but she certainly has one essential qualification for the job: a big sense of humor. If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother is a hilarious account of her journey from a glam show-business career that included several years in the cast of Saturday Night Live to her current role as happy minivan-driving mom in a Chicago suburb....

Review: Walter Mosley brings Easy Rawlins back from the brink

Say hallelujah: Easy Rawlins has risen from the dead.

At the end of his 2007 novel Blonde Faith, his 11th book about the Los Angeles private detective, Walter Mosley left Easy hanging between life and death — and Mosley hasn't written about him since. It echoed Arthur Conan Doyle's decision in 1893 to rid himself of Sherlock Holmes by hurling him over the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem — only to bring Holmes back, by popular demand, in 1901....

'Wool' author Hugh Howey chimes in on print, digital, self-publishing

In April, megabestselling author James Patterson made headlines when he bought full-page ads in the New York Times Sunday Book Review and Kirkus Reviews and the cover of Publishers Weekly to ask "Who will save our books?"

When I interviewed him, Patterson said he wasn't concerned about his own book sales (275 million and counting), he just wanted to start a conversation about the recent enormous changes in the book industry — particularly the explosive growth of e-books and the closely related boom in self-publishing....

Reviews: Pedigree evident in Stephen King's sons Owen King, Joe Hill

If nothing else, you'd have to give Joe Hill and Owen King credit for nerve.

For the two sons of Stephen King, continuing the family business means writing in the gigantic shadow of one of the planet's bestselling and best loved authors, a man who has frightened and delighted millions of readers. Even if his novels don't scare them — ever wonder what bedtime stories were like in the King household? — Dad's reputation might....