E-Mail This Article to a Friend The graduating class The best and the brightest of summertime reads BY RICCO VILLANUEVA SIASOCO

June is the month for lilac-scented weddings, bon voyage parties, and, of course, graduation ceremonies. In the literary world, the relay of the spring-to-summer baton means decidedly lighter fare: beach reads, wine and dog books, the latest over-hyped New York Times bestseller. But with the onslaught of titles published every summer, the brightest, most sparkling gems often get buried in the sand. Here we hail a few magna and summa cum laudes among the literary pack.

THE HEAD OF THE CLASS: NADEEM ASLAM

A friend’s mother once told her wisely that the reason the French did not get fat — or waste time obsessing over Atkins or South Beach or the latest calorie-ridding diet craze — was because they savored their food as if each bite were an expensive four-course meal. The French could sup on calorie-rich Brie with a fine meaty Bordeaux because they ate it without rushing, relishing every drop, every slice, every trace of flavor on their tongues and lips. Good writing does the same, allowing a reader to delight in sumptuous storytelling, to embody Milan Kundera’s idea of "slowness," to make close reading a quality to admire. Such intricate, somewhat Victorian pacing characterizes Nadeem Aslam’s acclaimed second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (Knopf), a captivating diorama of a close-knit Pakistani family surviving in a difficult English town.

"Shamas stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself." Here, in the book’s first few lines, Aslam seems to tell his readers: relax, put down your coat, this is the kind of Pointillist story I’ll be telling; this world that I’m going to reveal to you will unfold as deliberately as these snowflakes being pulled to the earth. And so it does.

THE SOFT-SPOKEN POET: SUSAN WHEELER

Wheeler, an award-winning poet, proves her prose-writing mettle in Record Palace (Graywolf). In contrast to Aslam’s quiet tale of a Pakistani family and its rigid community, Wheeler’s story centers on a single white woman making her way alone in a less-restrained African-American neighborhood. This is the rough-and-tumble South Side of Chicago in the late ’70s, a down-trodden place where "downtown buildings thinned and the streets darkened, each boarded brownstone abutting another in rubble." Enter Cindy, a white girl fleeing the staid, suburban life of her California childhood, seeking jazz albums, friendship, and the elusive meaning of life.

In all her writing, Wheeler’s lyrical voice remains inescapable. We’re treated to an intriguing, jagged syntax that reads like a manual transmission sliding into gear: "Soon after I found Acie’s, stopping by on a Friday for a paycheck." Like a well-crafted poem, Wheeler’s prose gradually draws the reader into its rhythms. This is a solid novel about a graduate student studying art yet unable to escape her passion for music, and the oddly engaging syntax mirrors this tension: "The beat threw me, but not the sound: the brain, jumping. The interplay turned on a dime." Ultimately, Record Palace is a prose ballad of longing and love.

THE TORTURED BUT POPULAR RICH KID: SEAN WILSEY

When you’re a voracious reader who constantly picks up books, browses one or two pages, puts the same book down, and picks up another before putting it down and trying to remember which of the books on your coffee table or the bookstore’s table or your rumbling white washing machine you happened to be reading last — then, the fact that a randomly picked-up book entices you to keep reading is often the only true mark of something good. Sean Wilsey’s Oh the Glory of It All (Penguin Press) is, despite all its publishing-world hype, that kind of book. I’m serious: the book is that good.

Wilsey’s sprawling memoir is a whopping 482 pages, one of those door-stoppers of a life story, and it comes at you like an avalanche of memories and wonderment. It has Nobel Prize winners discussing the Holocaust over lunch; Wilsey’s effervescent father delivering the author to a video arcade via his private helicopter; and later, Augusten Burroughs–like tales of therapy and a life out of control. The paragraphs are often clipped and feel breathless, as if the author wants to tell you everything about his life before he runs out of time. I haven’t read anything quite as attention-grabbing or bursting with life since Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. And as in Eggers’s work, this book’s capacity for joy is no small feat.