My sister and I moved my grandmother to a nursing home when she was 107. Clearing out her apartment, we stumbled on a box of old papers. A crumbling leather portfolio emerged, overflowing with love poems written in her assertive hand. Love poems? Nana was infamously unsentimental. Our grandfather had been the classic henpecked husband. We were pretty sure these weren't for him.

Despite the long years we spent with Nana, did we really know her? After all, most of us share only a fraction of ourselves with the world. Maybe that’s why books about family secrets are so delicious.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow by Graham Swift, paperback, 272 pages, Vintage, list price: $14.95

In the novel Tomorrow, by Graham Swift, Paula Hook stays up all night holding an imaginary conversation with her 16-year-old twins. She's compulsively worried about the news that her husband will tell them the next day. Even though Paula and her husband have agreed to the disclosure, she's terrified of her children's judgment, that the revelation will make them disparage her life choices. What’s remarkable here is the author's exploration of her anxiety. More than the actual content of her secret, which today would be commonplace, is the way it’s taken over her psyche. I had insomnia right along with her, hoping the truth wouldn't destroy her family.

Gilead

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, paperback, 247 pages, Picador, list price: $14

This same kind of dread infuses Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. In Gilead, Pastor Ames can't stand to hold his godson's secret. Here again, greater than the concealed information, is the pastor’s tormented knowledge of it. He swings between contempt and fear for his godson, and fury at himself for failing to be more loving and tolerant. Even if I couldn't relate to the reason for the pastor’s angst, I clung to his every word as he mapped his internal struggle. Pastor Ames' secret shakes the very foundations of his faith.

Fallen

Fallen, by David Maine, paperback, 256 pages, St. Martin's Griffin, list price: $14.99

For the primal set of family secrets that test faith, try Genesis. Talk about skeletons in the closet. Consider telling your kids that you were the one who bit the apple, or that you murdered Abel. These are crimes that are actually worse than the cover-up. In Fallen, author David Maine brilliantly re-creates these Old Testament stories. The book runs backward, beginning with Cain on his death bed, through Adam and Eve freshly expelled from the Garden of Eden. We discover secrets that are literally of biblical proportion. I'm amazed at how riveted I was, even though I knew how it came out.

Is it the secret itself or the guilty knowledge of it that's consuming? So many books revolve around shameful concealments. But aren't there some secrets that mix a little sweet with the bitter? I hope my grandmother's did. Unfortunately, I won't find the answer in a book.

Martha Toll is seeking publication for two novels, one of which is about family secrets.

Three Books ... is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Bridget Bentz

The global phenomenon of poverty tourism — or "poorism" — has become increasingly popular during the past few years. Tourists pay to be guided through the favelas of Brazil and the shantytowns of South Africa. The recently opened Los Angeles Gang Tour carries visitors through battle-scarred territories of urban violence and deprivation. But when does witnessing become rubbernecking?

This dilemma is hardly a new one. Though the label poorism is fairly recent, the practice is not. Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties. Here are three memoirs whose accounts of poverty do justice to both the integrity of their subjects and the extremity of their suffering.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, In Words And Photographs, Of Three Tenant Families In The Deep South

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee, paperback, 432 pages, Mariner Books, list price: $18

James Agee began working on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1936, while on an assignment (ironically enough) from Fortune magazine, which had commissioned a piece about the lives of sharecropper families in Alabama. Ditching the terms of his article, Agee wrote this 400-page prose poem on the farmer's grueling workdays instead. Framed by the haunting photography of Walker Evans, the book presents these families' dilapidated shacks and empty dinner tables in haunting lyric meditations, all the while struggling with the futility of its own project — the impossibility of understanding the lives of others at all.

Salvador

Salvador, by Joan Didion, paperback, 112 pages, Vintage, list price: $12.95

Joan Didion's Salvador is a slim volume that documents her 1982 visit to a country deeply enmeshed in a devastating civil war. The daily terror of life in El Salvador, and the brutal poverty at the roots of this unrest, become something palpable and close in Didion's sharp prose: a fear marked by suffocated anger in the streets and heart palpitations in the night. Didion's merciless matter-of-fact descriptions of body dumps and daily violence refuse to console readers with the sentimental delusion that awareness is sufficient. Instead, she implicates everyone — herself and readers alike — in the devastation she finds.

Poor People

Poor People, by William T. Vollmann, paperback, 464 pages, Harper Perennial, list price: $16.95

In Poor People, a more contemporary testimonial, William Vollmann trains his gaze on the entire world. His travelogue suggests that experiential categories like "invisibility," "numbness," and "estrangement" link the experience of poverty in countries as far-flung as Thailand and Colombia. Vollmann neither romanticizes the poor nor blames them. He simply shows us their lives: living in boxes under Tokyo bridges, begging for change to feed epileptic children, drowning awareness in alcohol. His style is raw and often confrontational, forcing us to encounter unbearable degradation without any immediate solutions in sight.

Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty. These authors present their books as part of a necessarily ongoing process in which reading is only the beginning of awareness, rather than its conclusion.

Leslie Jamison's debut novel, The Gin Closet, was released by Free Press in February.

Three Books ... is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Bridget Bentz.

I'm what's been called "easy." I've fallen hard many times. For books, that is. But I find I'm not attracted to the same qualities that once held me in their thrall. Where I once was seduced by torrid melodramas of the 19th century, I find myself attracted to works where the object of the writer's affection isn't another human being but a passion for words, an affair of the mind or even an obsession with the eternal.

The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress, by Gertrude Stein, paperback, 925 pages, Dalkey Archive Press, list price: $16.95

Gertrude Stein's dadaist masterpiece The Making of Americans has a narrative thread. From the very start it's clear to the reader that the words themselves are the main attraction. The best way to experience this book is aloud, savoring each word, letting the sound and beauty of the sentence construction wash over you. Stein's repetition of phrases takes on the quality of an incantation. To speak her language is as addictive as the temptation to whisper your beloved's name over and over when in the throes of a new love. Here's a radical thought: Instead of a game of charades, serve up The Making of Americans, recently published in paperback, as after-dinner entertainment — but eat lightly because "words have weight" — at least, that's what Shalom Auslander says in Foreskin's Lament.

Foreskin's Lament

Foreskin's Lament, by Shalom Auslander, hardcover 302 pages, Riverhead, list price: $24.95

Shalom Auslander's hilarious attempts to break up with God resemble nothing so much as the effort to extricate oneself from under the thumb of a demanding and jealous lover in Foreskin's Lament. Auslander's "just not that into" God. But by virtue of being born into an orthodox Jewish family, he finds himself in an arranged marriage with the Almighty. He steps out on the Supreme Being not with a lover but with ham sandwiches and pornography, and by failing to recite the correct blessing for Fruity Pebbles. It's the funniest rejection scenario since Diane Keaton tried to shed herself of Woody Allen in Love and Death. His misery rivals the pathos of any of the Russians — he's a Vaudevillian Anna Karenina with peyis!

I Am a Strange Loop

I Am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter, paperback 436 pages, Basic Books, list price: $16.95

Of course, making analogous comparisons between books is an ability that is unique to human consciousness. This is the elusive and mysterious mistress that scientist and author Douglas Hofstadter pursues in his book, I Am a Strange Loop.

Hofstadter claims to have been seduced at an early age by the beauty of high level perception. Reading even one paragraph demands a focus I once devoted solely to pursuit of sex, but I know if I can make it through even one elegant paragraph at a time, I might resuscitate even the tiniest bit of my brain that atrophied when I got suckered into a marathon of Flip This House episodes. His excitement about creative cognition never fails to turn me on.

All three of these titles are less fattening, less expensive and provide more lasting satisfaction than a box of gourmet chocolates. They offer more than fleeting romance; their timelessness and depth make them books you'll want "to have and to hold".

Annabelle Gurwitch is the co-author with her husband Jeff Kahn of the marital memoir You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up: A Love Story.

Three Books ... is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Bridget Bentz.

Feb. 14 is usually the day when those not in a relationship are relentlessly reminded of that fact. Hearts, roses and chocolates attack from all sides. Singletons arm themselves with rented movies and pints of Ben and Jerry's to defend against the onslaught. But this year, Feb. 14 is also Chinese New Year. Plump, little Cupid had better flap his wings as fast as he can, because it's the Year of the Tiger, and tigers don't eat chocolate.

Actually, Valentine's Day and Chinese New Year have more in common than you might think. The color red, for instance, symbolizes both love on V-Day and luck on Chinese New Year. Both days also hold the hope of new beginnings in love and in life. To commemorate this rare alignment of the calendar, here are three books about Chinese families who not only possess powerful love, but who also begin anew.

Disappearing Moon Cafe

Disappearing Moon Cafe, by Sky Lee, paperback, 288 pages, Douglas & McIntyre, list price: $15.95

Torrid passions, secrets and lies envelop the Wong family in Sky Lee's surprising and alluring novel Disappearing Moon Cafe. Kae Ying Woo, the narrator of this tale, delves into her family's tangled past and discovers the truth behind her aunt Suzanne’s death: suicide over a star-crossed love. Hidden family ties have led to accidental incest, and Kae finds out that many of her relatives throughout her family tree have tasted the bitter fruit of a love forbidden. Her discoveries help Kae find the will to set off on a new course and rekindle a past romance of her own. The loves in this book are as fleeting and transient as the disappearing moon of the title, yet they leave a permanent longing in each lover's heart.

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston, paperback 209 pages, Vintage, list price: $13.95

Of course, there are some loves that could stand to be a bit more fleeting, like the love between the mother and daughter in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. By sharing stories about life in her native China, this mother has created a world of "ghosts" that haunt her daughter with their violence and strangeness. These histories make living life as a conventional American girl feel impossible. Yet, even though the daughter complains nonstop about her mother's constant "talk-stories," it is obvious that she loves her. Through this phantasmagorical book about her childhood, Kingston sheds light on her own ghosts, rendering them powerless. She also reaches out a hand of forgiveness and love to her mother, a woman warrior in her own right.

The Good Earth

The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, paperback 368 pages, Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, list price: $15.00

Sometimes the greatest stories about love are ones of missed opportunity. This is the case in Pearl S. Buck's novel The Good Earth. An American who spent most of her life in China, Buck shares with her protagonist — a poor farmer named Wang Lung — a deep love of her adopted homeland. In Wang Lung's case, his love for his land overshadows love for his wife. O-Lan is no beauty but works hard and brings prosperity to Wang Lung's house. Their chance for a new beginning comes partially owed to O-Lan's resourcefulness and wisdom, but he still does not love her. Old lessons do not root easily as Wang Lung betrays O-Lan for another. In the end, only his love for land remains, though planted with seeds of bitter regret.

This Feb. 14, everyone — single or attached — can celebrate. Whatever your status, these three roaring good reads, with their lessons of strength, forgiveness and gratitude, are a great way to start off the Year of the Tiger.

Stacy Saunders is an English teacher and freelance writer. She blogs about her favorite books at 111books.blogspot.com.

Three Books ... is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Bridget Bentz with help from Naima Pearce.

The publishing world likes to say that young adult literature is in a golden age, full of great writing, and most important, growing sales in an otherwise dismal market.

But the genre is not without flaws: Many young adult novels don't set the bar very high in their language, character complexity or emotional nuance, which is why I — a young adult author — like to encourage young readers to venture into the adult shelf.

Here are three non-young adult novels featuring young protagonists that anyone — young or old — will read with both joy and fervor.

The Law of Dreams

The Law of Dreams, by Peter Behrens, paperback, 416 pages, Random house Trade Publishers, list price: $13.95

In Peter Behrens' The Law of Dreams, a young Irish boy takes to the road after his family starves in the potato famine and his home is burned by a British landlord. As he travels through his ruined country, Fergus O'Brien meets his share of thieves, prostitutes and soul mates. Forced to endure enough physical trials and heartaches to suit even the most thrill-addicted teenager, Fergus finds his way to a ship sailing for Canada. Since this isn't a young adult novel, there's no sappy ending that eases our hero's hardship, only clean, elegant sentences and page after page of heart-stopping adventure.

Gilgamesh: A Novel

Gilgamesh, by Joan London, paperback, 272 pages, Grove Press, list price: $13

The teenage heroine in Gilgamesh also travels far from home. Edith Clark grows up on an isolated farm in Australia, and when her cousin and his friend pay a visit, her life is changed forever. She spends one night with the friend, a young man from Armenia, and becomes a mother nine months later. Although this could be a tired plot, in Gilgamesh it becomes a new and powerful story as Edith and her son travel to London, and then to Armenia, in search of the boy's father. World War II intervenes, and she's forced to wait out the fighting abroad. By the novel's end, Edith's son is embarking on his own trip, but Joan London's writing — poetic, haunting and mesmerizing — will stay by your side for years to come.

Rumors of Peace

Rumors of Peace, by Ella Leffland, paperback, 400 pages, Harper Perennial, list price: $16

Rumors of Peace, by Ella Leffland, treats a teen's intelligence with the respect it deserves, instead of viewing it as a type of social plague. The main character comes of age among peers who are each discovering what being smart means. Leffland's novel follows one girl's passage from childhood to youth during the years between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. As Suse Hansen grows up and the world goes to war, she seeks out the news in libraries and on the radio, simply because it feels wrong not to know. Rumors of Peace is a rare find that covers the emotional and intellectual nuances that go into growing up.

What no one who markets or sells them likes to dwell on is that young adult novels are a steppingstone, not a stopping place. Smart, curious teens turn to books to discover the adults they will become, not to see the kids they already are.

Garret Freymann-Weyr is the author of After the Moment and four other books for smart teens.

Three Books... is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Bridget Bentz.

Times as complex as ours present us with huge moral dilemmas and require minds that receive constant sharpening, and sometimes news reports just don't do.

Since the United States sent military forces after al-Qaida following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the political and cultural landscape of Afghanistan has been a daily feature in newspapers across America. But America's involvement in Afghanistan predates Sept. 11 by two decades, and military engagement only begins to explain the relationship between the two countries. The following three books deepen our understanding of the news reports from Afghanistan.

'The Looming Tower'

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, paperback, 576 pages, Vintage, list price: $17

When the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, the reaction of many people was: "Who are these people? Why did they do this?" This book takes us back 30 years to the very first entanglement that the United States and Russia had with Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with radical Islam. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the United States and other Western countries, with the help of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, decided that billions of dollars of weapons would be funneled into Afghanistan to help the mujahedeen defeat the Soviets.

When they were defeated a decade later, the West turned its gaze away from the region, and the Afghan warlords plunged Afghanistan into a bloody civil war, to which not enough attention was paid in other parts of the world. And then Sept. 11 happened.

The Looming Tower is about consequences. As children, we are taught not to do this or that thing because the result will not be good: Don't lie, don't hit, play fair. This book charts it all — the Cold War years and how they were cold only for the privileged places of the planet; the Cold War was actually a hot war in places like Afghanistan.

Wright explains the creation of the Taliban and the gradual coming together of al-Qaida. He shows very powerfully how we are all connected. Hannah Arendt said in 1957 that, "For the first time in history, all peoples on Earth have a common present." That sentiment is true now more than ever before. Every war, in a sense, is a civil war, because we are all one species, all one nation. The Looming Tower shows us that we forget it at our peril.

'The Punishment Of Virtue'

The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban by Sarah Chayes, paperback, 400 pages, Penguin Press, list price: $16

After decades of war, most of Afghanistan was like a shipwreck — in the words of W.H. Auden, a "preserved disaster." That was the environment Sarah Chayes found in the autumn of 2001, when she reported from Pakistan and Afghanistan. After the Taliban fell, Chayes decided to stay, to see what could be salvaged from the wreck, and to see if she could help with the rebuilding of that nation.

She dressed like a man. She met warlords and opium dealers, had meetings with President Karzai. The result is this clear-eyed and extraordinary book.

'Earth And Ashes'

Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Erdag Goknar, hardcover, 96 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The Afghan poet Atiq Rahimi, who now lives in Paris, has written three novels, the most recent of which won the 2008 Prix Goncourt in France — and I ask you to please read all three of them.

Rahimi's short novel Earth and Ashes tells the story of the years of the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. In it, an old man and his young grandson take a journey across the war-torn landscape to bring a piece of news to the boy's father, a coal miner.

George Orwell once wrote: "A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph, but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him." Earth and Ashes is a tragic book, and a book about nobility.

The point of art and literature is to reduce the distance between two human beings. When I look at a beautiful mountain in the Yellowstone Park, or a river in China, I don't say to myself how beautiful the United States or China is — I say how beautiful the planet is. Similarly, these books will help us see Afghanistan's problems as our own.

Nadeem Aslam, author of The Wasted Vigil, is the author of two previous novels, both of which were long-listed for the Man Booker Prize: Maps for Lost Lovers, winner of the Kiriyama Prize and a New York Times Notable Book, and Season of the Rainbirds. Born in Pakistan, he now lives in England.

Three Books... is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Bridget Bentz.

For me, there's no page turner quite like a graphic novel. A good one takes me back to the forbidden story-form joys of my childhood — comic books, movies and True Confessions magazines.

The trouble is, I'm not crazy about tales involving superpowers, fantasy worlds, horror, sci-fi or armed combat, which leaves out about nine-tenths of the genre. My heart belongs to women's stories about their own flawed selves and their tribulations in the big bad world.

'Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic'

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel, paperback, 232 pages, Mariner Books, list price: $13.95

Fun Home: a Family Tragicomic, is Alison Bechdel's coming-of-age tale about growing up in a household where the truth is as dressed up and silenced as the people in the caskets in the family funeral business — what the kids call the "Fun Home."

In their real home, the roost is ruled by dad's obsession with decorative perfection. He restores the gingerbread to their denuded Victorian, and surrounds it with the perfume of flowers. Inside, floral wallpapers cover the truth — that where dad really lives is in the darkness of the closet homosexual, furtively seducing young boys.

Alison is also gay, but she has no idea what that is until she reads a book in college and recognizes herself.

The pictures in Fun Home, in black and blue on white, are as matter-of-fact as the evidence the heroine sifts to get to the bottom of the mystery of how she became herself.

'La Perdida'

La Perdida, by Jessica Abel, paperback, 288 pages, Pantheon, list price: $14.95

The first-person heroine of La Perdida, ("the lost one") by Jessica Abel, looks for her identity in Mexico, birthplace of her absent father. She carelessly crashes at an old casual boyfriend's apartment in Mexico City, pitching in sex in lieu of rent. With Frida Kahlo, the flamboyant painter and Stalinist as spiritual guide, she soon mistakes a nasty drug dealer for a fiery revolutionary. With her judgment in complete suspension, she winds up as an accomplice in criminal violence; she's lucky to escape with everything but her innocence. Abel tells her tale in English and in Spanish, with pictures that have the specificity and shadows of film noir.

'Cancer Vixen: A True Story'

Cancer Vixen: A True Story, by Marisa Acocella Marchetto, paperback, 224 pages, Pantheon, list price: $16.95

The drawings in Marisa Acocella Marchetto's Cancer Vixen are colorful, cartoonish, supremely stylish and totally delightful. They tell the story of a kid from the Jersey shore in love with New York's fashionable life, whose days are spent spoofing it for glossy magazines and queuing up on Tuesdays at the famous New Yorker market for cartoons — pardon me, drawings. Her life deepens in meaning after Sept. 11, when she turns the raw pain on the New York streets into her best work, and when, at 43, she finds the love of her life. On the verge of their wedding, she is diagnosed with cancer. Cancer Vixen is the story of what happened after that.

What's missing for me when I read good graphic novels is the pleasure of passing them on and getting leads to more. I don't know anybody else with my literary taste who cares about them. Months and months go by between good reads. If you've got a recommendation, I sure would like to know about it.

Harriet Reisen is the author of Louisa May Alcott, The Woman Behind Little Women and writer/producer of the American Masters documentary of the same name. She was raised in New Jersey, soon found herself in London, and later migrated to San Francisco. She went to film school, raised a child who was adopted internationally, and has generally exemplified every trend of her time. What a long, great trip it’s been.

Three Books ... is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Bridget Bentz.

Close your eyes. Imagine a shadow-soaked forest or a spider-webbed basement, the satin-lined belly of a coffin. Glance over your shoulder. Welcome the needle jab of panic.

How long has it been since you felt that way, since you were startled at the thought of a pale face in the window or a long-fingered hand darting out from under the bed to seize your ankle?

When I was a boy, I would use my allowance to buy Tales from the Crypt comic books. I would sneak Stephen King novels from my parents' bookshelves, and I would ask to sleep over at a buddy's house because his parents let him watch R-rated horror movies. In many ways, I am still that boy — terribly, wonderfully afraid because of books like these:

'Ghost Story'

Ghost Story, by Peter Straub, paperback, 560 pages

Peter Straub is a modern-day Henry James, but with sharper teeth and a long black tongue. He writes literary horror, in which the sentences are elegantly crafted, the characters wholly believable and the circumstances menacing.

In Ghost Story, four elderly men gather to swap stories, never speaking of the dark narrative that unites them: Fifty years ago, they accidentally killed a girl and in a panic disposed of the body. Now she is back from the grave, with a mouthful of cobwebs and a heart that pulses with the black blood of revenge.

'Wisconsin Death Trip'

Wisconsin Death Trip, by Michael Lesy, paperback, 261 pages

If you're looking to be frightened by fact instead of fiction, consider Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy. First published in 1973, this cult classic is a fascinatingly creepy blend of history, literature and photography. It chronicles life in Black River Falls, Wis., at the end of the 19th century with forbidding obituaries from the local newspaper and excerpts from the record book of a mental asylum, among other writings. Juxtaposed with these are photographs (see a gallery) of an albino horse, grim-faced men wielding razors and pitchforks, dwarfs in cowboy boots, and corpses propped up in chairs wearing their Sunday best. Ultimately we are left with a haunting collage of rural decay.

'The Exorcist'

The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty, paperback, 400 pages

You might have seen this next selection coming: The most terrifying novel inspired the most terrifying film, The Exorcist. But there is more to William Peter Blatty's story than demonic possession, more than a young girl named Regan speaking in a deep-throated voice and levitating above her bed. Ultimately this is a book about Father Karras, a deeply troubled priest who has lost his faith and must discover it again by recognizing head-on the forces of good and evil that may tremble beneath the surface of this world.

Most of us spend our lives pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. The horror story is curiously counterintuitive, as we willingly put ourselves in a situation where we will feel nervousness, repulsion, terror. This is the same reason we leap out of planes and swim with sharks and strap our bodies into roller coasters that rip along at 70 mph. Nothing makes you feel more alive — nothing makes you cherish the relative safety and normalcy of life — than dangling your foot over the edge of a cliff and then withdrawing it. That is why every October, I make certain that a horror novel creeps its way onto my reading list.

Three Books ... is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Bridget Bentz.

Related Links

• Extreme Horror: Basic Escapism Or Simply Base?
• How Scary Movies Stoke Fear
• 'Eco-Horror': Green Panic On The Silver Screen?

Houses can be bought and sold, but if nothing else, the current housing crisis teaches us the danger of treating a house as a mere commodity. Literature is full of reminders that houses have souls, a fact characters forget at their own peril. In some novels, the house is as much a force as any of the people in the story. When that happens, the human characters had better beware.

'Rebecca'

Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, paperback, 416 pages

Some houses are haunted by dead people, but in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, the people are haunted by the house. It's called Manderley, a bewitchingly beautiful estate on the coast of Cornwall. Everyone in the novel is obsessed with Manderley. The first thing we learn about the novel's narrator is that she dreams about the place. What we never find out is her name; let's call her the second Mrs. de Winter, a shy and gawky bride recently married to Manderley's owner, a widower twice her age. She's convinced that her husband is still in love with his glamorous first wife, Rebecca, and it sure doesn't help that the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers — one of literature's great villains — keeps telling her how much better Rebecca was at being the mistress of Manderley. But Rebecca was not what she seemed, and Manderley's many secrets will not stay buried forever.

'The Haunting of Hill House'

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson, paperback, 208 pages

If Manderley is seductive, the supremely creepy New England mansion in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, is downright evil. What makes a house go bad? According to Jackson, some of them are just built that way. At Hill House, every apparently right angle is slightly off, certain doors won't stay closed — or open — and nothing is quite where you thought it would be.

The house is literally deranged, which may explain why so many of its former residents have killed themselves. Into this malevolent environment come four would-be ghost hunters, determined to capture evidence of the paranormal. Hill House, however, has other ideas, and like any natural predator, it sets its sights on the weakest member of the herd.

'House of Leaves'

House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski, paperback, 709 pages

The house in Mark Danielewski's experimental novel, House of Leaves, is just as formidable as Hill House, even if it doesn't have a name. It's an ordinary suburban home in Virginia, until the day the residents come back from a vacation to find a closet where before there was only a blank wall. Careful measurements reveal the impossible: The house appears to be growing, becoming bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. A hallway opens out of the living room wall, leading to a seemingly infinite maze of dark rooms and passageways. Danielewski's novel is the latest literary twist on the house as a symbol of the human psyche, convoluted and absorbing. But the message remains the same: However fascinating we may find the insides of our heads, sometimes we're best off following mom's advice and heading outside for a little fresh air.

Three Books ... is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Bridget Bentz.

I'm drawn to novels by Japanese-American women. They write about the same things that I do: love, race, identity and history — and its effect on the present. Yet their stories couldn't be more different from mine.

'Summer Of The Big Bachi'

Summer of the Big Bachi, by Naomi Hirahara, paperback, 304 pages, Delta, list price: $13

Author Naomi Hirahara's parents were Hiroshima survivors, and her father was a gardener in Los Angeles. In her first mystery, Summer of the Big Bachi, she meticulously and affectionately takes the reader into the subculture of Southern California's Japanese nurserymen and gardeners at a moment when they are fast disappearing from our landscape.

The main character, Mas Arai, tends other people's gardens, but his own life has gone to seed. He's a Hiroshima survivor. He's a widower. He wears dentures. He's losing longtime clients to young men he once hired. And now, he's about to come face to face with bachi, the spirit of retribution. When a stranger comes to L.A. asking questions about Joji Haneda, who also lived in Hiroshima during the war, Mas becomes a reluctant detective.

'My Year Of Meats'

My Year of Meats, by Ruth Ozeki, paperback, 400 pages, Penguin, list price: $15

My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki is a wild romp — deeply comical, bitingly satiric and unabashedly romantic. Jane is a Japanese-American documentarian who is hired to work on a TV cooking show called My American Wife!, which takes her into the heartland to meet our very best housewives, who show off their most yummy dishes: Busy B Brisket, Coca-Cola Roast, and my favorite, Beef Fudge. The show is sponsored by BEEF-EX, a huge American meat-exporting business that wants to make a big splash in Japan.

It is there that Akiko watches My American Wife!, and dutifully cooks the Meat of the Week for her husband who happens to be the local PR man for BEEF-EX. Ozeki captures the problems of globalization — and global miscommunication — and the battle between personal and professional honor, while looking at some pretty serious issues associated with the meat industry.

'The Age Of Dreaming'

The Age of Dreaming, by Nina Revoyr, paperback, 320 pages, Akashic Books, list price: $15.95

Finally, one of my absolute favorite books is The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr. It's a literary novel masquerading as a noir mystery, also set in L.A. Jun Nakayama, who was once a silent film star, lives in near obscurity in the Hollywood Hills. A journalist tracks him down, and before you know it, the secrets that once caused Jun to retire from the movie business threaten to be revealed. Revoyr, who was inspired by real people and real events, including the murder scandal that destroyed Mary Miles Minter's career, has created a novel that explores Hollywood and Little Tokyo during the teens and '20s (a combination I doubt you'll find anywhere else); delves into the creative life and the toll it can take; and asks us to question what love is, how we recognize it, and what we will sacrifice for it.

Many of us straddle two or more cultures in our lives. I personally don't know much about what it means to be Japanese-American, but in these three marvelous books, these Japanese-American women writers have opened their world to me and given me a taste of that experience.

Three Books is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Bridget Bentz.

One of the biggest myths about the fashion world is that it's only for people who value lavish extravagance. Not true! Even the designs in the runway shows going on this week in New York are returning to simple lines and more affordable looks. And any genuine fashionista will tell you the most innovative clothing choices originate with those who have to get creative, not people who have the budget for hand-sewn gowns with 4,000 sequins. These three book will inspire you to find your true personal style — which has more to do with your sense of self than your bank balance.

The days grow shorter, but still, the summer heat surrounds you like an unwanted extra blanket. A trip to Iceland may seem in order, but who can afford it? And there are limits to how much cold beer one can responsibly drink. So you turn to books for relief. These three books should cool you down.

'The Children's Blizzard'

The Children's Blizzard, by David Laskin, paperback, 336 pages, Harper Perennial, List Price: $13.95

David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard offers a history of the storm of 1888. Kids were sent to school on what seemed like a fine day, a spring scene from Little House on the Prairie. But without warning, temperatures plummeted. Visibility through blowing snow was non-existent. Schoolchildren, trying to go home, lost their way and froze to death. Young Etta Shattuck stumbled upon a haystack and snuggled within it, only to die from the complications of severe frostbite.

This book is a history of life on the American prairie just before the 20th century, but it is also a story of hypothermia, windchill and the human response to low temperatures that, Laskin shows us, changed the history of the United States.

'Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold'

Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, by Tom Shachtman, paperback, 272 pages, Mariner Books, List Price: $14

Need something chillier? How about Tom Shachtman's celebration of the race to the coldest possible temperature? Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold tells the story of scientists who froze carbon dioxide and liquefied oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. As the mercury dropped they became increasingly obsessed. There were laboratory explosions and bitter rivalries. The prize was the lowest temperature on the Kelvin scale, the point at which molecular motion stops, absolute zero.

It turned out to be the stuff of quantum physics, as unreachable as the speed of light. But this didn't stop scientists from reaching within a billionth of a degree of that unattainable target in 1995.

'The Devil in the White City'

The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson, paperback, 447 pages, Vintage, List Price: $15

What can be colder than absolute zero? Answer: One of the most heartless serial killers ever known. Case in point — Howard Holmes, the real life murderer chronicled in Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City. Against the backdrop of the 1893 World's Fair, Larson unveils an evil colder than dry ice. He tells of a hotel with rooms rigged as gas chambers. He describes an incinerator large enough for bodies. Holmes "had dark hair and striking blue eyes," writes Larson, "once likened to the eyes of a Mesmerist" and "he stood too close, stared too hard." Holmes killed women he had seduced into unwavering love. He sometimes sold their skeletons to medical schools. If compassion is a form of warmth, Holmes was a man with absolute zero flowing through his veins.

Okay, books about cold won't lower the temperature. Icy pages can't replace air conditioning and freezing words don't change the humidity. But a vicarious dose of subzero might just make you appreciate a mild sunburn, and three cold books might just get you through the summer.

Three Books is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Bridget Bentz.

Related Links

• A Frosty Take On All Things 'Cold'
• Hot! Hot! Hot! How Much Heat Can You Take?

Just after getting married, my wife and I had a seaplane drop us off deep in the backcountry of New Zealand. We set out on our honeymoon with an "emergency locator beacon" in hand and a week's worth of provisions in our packs.

We soon reached a hut with a few cots, a potbelly stove, a bag of macaroni and a note that read: "Fishermen were here, enjoy the food we left." My wife and I unpacked our bags and then stepped out for a stroll. Upon our return, we discovered a family of New Zealanders devouring our provisions. Apparently, they read the note, assumed our unpacked food supplies were the fishermen's food and had themselves a feast.

"What are we going to do?" asked my wife.

I wish I could tell you that this was my MacGyver moment — that I made a fishing net out of dangling Spanish Moss and fed us for a week. But I had no reply to this question. It was humiliating. And we barely ate for the next week.

After surviving this ordeal, I discovered a wonderfully delicious genre of literature that will appeal to men (and know-it-alls) of all varieties: survival books.

'The Complete Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook'

The Complete Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht, hardcover, 512 pages, Chronicle Books, list price: $24.95

First let me suggest The Complete Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht. It offers advice on how to escape from quicksand, land a plane or survive if your parachute fails to open. The language is pithy — so pithy, you could probably finish reading the chapter on quicksand, while still sinking in the sand. Then you could simply maneuver onto your back, spread your arms and legs, and float toward safety — or so the book says.

'When All Hell Breaks Loose'

When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need To Survive When Disaster Strikes, by Cody Lundin, paperback, 450 pages, Gibbs Smith, list price: $19.99

For more nuanced advice, I suggest When All Hell Breaks Loose by Cody Lundin. Lundin explains how to treat wounds, dispose of dead bodies, and — of course — how to cook mice and rats over a campfire. Don't bother to skin these critters, Lundin says; the fur will burn right off, and the guts will pop out naturally over the coals. Soon the mouse will resemble a "blackened hot dog-like object," though Lundin urges readers to eat quickly because "mouse brains suck when they're cold."

'SAS Survival Handbook'

SAS Survival Handbook, by John Wiseman, paperback, 288 pages, HarperCollins, list price: $19.99

If you're truly serious about surviving, pick up a copy of SAS Survival Handbook by John Wiseman, who is a veteran of Britain's legendary Special Air Service. This is an encyclopedic work, with detailed drawings of medicinal plants, venomous snakes and easily built shelters. True survival, the reader soon realizes, depends upon such mind-numbingly boring tasks as tying complicated knots and studying storm clouds.

All of these books allow me to fantasize about that cataclysmic day when I will explain how I intend to land an old seaplane or escape a swarm of killer bees. My advice will be of questionable value, of course. What matters, however, is that when my wife beseeches me for my opinion — at the critical moment — I will, at long last, have something to say. Now that's peace of mind.

Three Books is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Bridget Bentz.

My friend Jacki recently asked me, "Are you one of those folks who prefers music to people?"

I had no idea she knew me so well. For a music fanatic, getting lost in the vibrations is as easy as letting a riptide drag you out to sea.

The power of music is similar to the power of books — but books are notoriously poor at describing the abstraction and subtlety of a melody. Still, authors keep trying to bottle the magic. Here are three books — one about a fan, one about a critic, and one about an unlikely musician — that sing like the real thing.

1969 was a big year in America: It was the time of Woodstock, the Manson Family and The Brady Bunch premiere on TV. If you want a vibrant microcosm of 20th century America, this is the year.

Literature was energized as well: Philip Roth's taboo-shattering Portnoy's Complaint was published, Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer for Armies of the Night, and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five hit the bookshelves. But these are only the most famous. Let's poke around a little and see what other titles we can find from that auspicious year.