Editor’s Note

I’VE never understood why people shy away from serious reading during the summer. The longer days, all those sprawling weekends and vacations -- they seem made for diving into something meaty and intense. This week, Book Review offers a roundup of the coming season’s new titles as well as an array of reviews. Denise Hamilton looks at books for the reluctant boy reader, while Susan Salter Reynolds visits Grace Paley in Vermont. And at latimes.com/books, Sarah Weinman’s Dark Passages takes on the post-Sept. 11 thriller, in the form of R.J. Hillhouse’s “Outsourced.”

David L. Ulin

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This Week in Calendar

The following reviews are scheduled:

Nicholas A. Basbanes reviews “Stalin’s Ghost: An Arkady Renko Novel” by Martin Cruz Smith.

Robert Hilburn reviews “Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector” by Mick Brown.

Tim Rutten reviews “North River,” a novel by Pete Hamill.

Andrew J. Bacevich reviews “1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the

Middle East” by Tom Segev.

James Marcus reviews “The Cult of the

Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing

Our Culture” by Andrew Keen.