Summer Books Season. Back in May, the lovely Worth Reading blog began compiling links to summer reading lists, and it's grown quite large.

Now that I'm on vacation, I'm interested.

You can check the R.I. libraries catalogue online to see if any that strike your fancy are on the shelf at your local library, and reserve them with a few clicks. If a title is available at another library, you can request it, and they'll send it to any library you choose for pickup.

Just have your library card handy so you can copy the number off the back -- it's your login.

Libraries are one of the great, still-free, true services in our society.

I picked up some books today and am now reading a mystery starring a female Swedish police detective -- Detective Inspector Huss, the first in a series by Helene Tursten. No review link -- I don't want to read about it, I'm already reading it. So far: Lots of dialogue and fleshed-out characters; she's less introspective than that more famous Swedish detective, Henning Mankell's appealing but gloomy Kurt Wallender.

It didn't come from a list. The book's spine caught my eye on a library's mysteries shelf.

One completely different and far more modern title I readily recommend -- not new, but essential for a quick update on our modern world -- is William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. The link goes to the author's description of the book at his site.