The worst and best reading for the long July 4 weekend

Really, July 4 is up there with Halloween as a reader’s holiday: What else are you going to do? On July 4, you have the best of excuses to lounge on a porch swing with a book: It’s hot and humid and generally sweat-baiting to move around in the oven that is Kentucky, you can’t stand over a hot grill all day, and the fireworks aren’t until 10 p.m. Besides checking out the marathons on basic cable, what else are you going to do?

So: a roundup of what the book haul has yielded this holiday-shortened week.

Worst blurb of the week:

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial Press, $22), a book that could use all the help it can get based on title alone, has this dust jacket gem: “Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the Society’s charming, deeply human members, from pig farmers to phrenologists.”

I love it when people are deeply human, don’t you? It sets them apart from my cats and dog and the bird who attempted to take up permanent residence in our garage last week and is, sadly, No Longer With Us.

And really, had the blurb just given up with letting humans be human, I would let it go. But no, it’s on a roll: “Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds there will change her forever.”

And, in the words of the immortal Randy Travis, forever and ever, amen.

Worst title of the week:

Santa Vs. Satan: The Official Compendium of Imaginary Fights by Jack Kalish (Three Rivers Press, $13.95).

Initially you think: Clever! And then you notice that for every Gandalf vs. Obi-Wan Kenobi, every Han Solo vs. Indiana Jones, you get a “The Constipated vs. the Incontinent” or a “Small Man with Breasts vs. Large Balding Woman” — that is, stuff you wouldn’t read even if you were in a college class where credit was at stake.

Still, props for quote selection, particularly in the Muhammad Ali vs. Bruce Lee dustup, in which Ali’s cool quote No. #1 is: “Here I predict Mr. Liston’s dismemberment. I’ll hit him so hard he’ll wonder where October and November went.”

Best title of the week:

How Dolly Parton Saved My Life: A Novel of the Jelly Jar Sisterhood by Charlotte Conners (Broadway Books, $12.95).

Isn’t it amazing how many publishers think they’ve got the next Mitford series? But after stealing Ms. Parton’s halo, the book suffers from a thoughtless cover (wigs and beadboard) and a godawful cover blurb that has something to do with “successful, independent women who put their families first” (as opposed, I guess, to all of us abject failures who put our families somewhere below lawn edging and beer swilling), Atlanta, bonding, “personal hurts,” prayer and “sisterly support.”

Do Whut, Now? Odd book of the week:

The World’s Coolest Hotel Rooms by Bill Tikos (Collins/Design, an imprint of HarperCollins, $29.95).

OK, I understand the concept of the coffee table book: random infobits, beautifully illustrated and consumed at reading increments of 5-10 minutes.

Even so, it’s hard to know where this book’s market is: “Fifty of the hippest, sexiest, newest, and most unusual hotel rooms in the most widely traveled destinations around the world.”

So: If you travel extensively and have megbucks, you already know these places. If you don’t, hearing about them is going to make you feel particularly Motel 6: poor, cheap and probably covered in wood laminate and polyester blend of a low thread count.

Unless, of course, it’s Hotel Basico in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, which, the book informs, “exudes industrial chic; the materials are recycled from the region’s oil refineries and factories.” A few pages later, it burbles: “For those who want to take back mementoes of their stay, there’s a Polaroid camera handcuffed to the bed.”

While I can understand the joys of a hotel that thoughtfully anticipates its guests’ need for hand restraints, the place basically looks like a jail with ocean views and bottomless mojitos.

Worth A Second Look:

Larry McMurtry’s Books: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, $24). I am a total fool for the book-lover-memoir genre (such as Paul Collins’ Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books), so this is the book I’m having with my July 4 potato salad.

Except, of course, when I’m reading Pillars of the Earth: entire family crises have wandered past this week while I’ve been following Philip and Aliena and Tom Builder and waiting for that sweet, sweet moment when hissable William gets dispatched. As far as I’m concerned, the medieval English yarn, be it Ken Follett or Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael series, is the reason I learned to read in the first place.