Margaret Langstaff writes about books and the book business for several national periodicals.

OverBooked reflects her views on trends in the book industry.

The beach book, for shore

BY MARGARET LANGSTAFF

We are coming up on the time, sunny-warm-dreamy, when publishers and bookstore merchandisers unveil their "beach reading" promotions -- a blissful season when you can look forward to days passed aimlessly enjoying the sun and water and some light reading. Lazy hours off to just be free and easy, tan and relaxed, while you mark time with chapters of gripping yarns. Yarns not too intellectually taxing with galloping plots and exotic locales.

You've seen the displays in stores many times before. Each year they return with a slightly new spin, but they are essentially the same. Suddenly all of John D. MacDonald's titles reappear in stores in paperback with new covers -- "repackaged," as they say in the trade. There it is at the cash register: a whole display of them the size of a steamer trunk. You can't be certain you've read some of them because you don't remember the house boat that way, and Travis McGee looks younger on the cover than you remember him. Or you bump into a massive pyramid of a new Anne Rivers Siddons novel (glamorously available only in hardcover) in the airport newstand, the jacket depicting a scene right out of our own lives, if only we were rich and famous and somewhat better looking and had time to dally with exquisitely nuanced romantic complexities involving sea captains, moguls, royalty, artists and blackguards. Or you spot a mound of a new Belva Plain or a new Maeve Binchy as you round the corner to the checkout in the supermarket and decide, since it is discounted 20 percent, and you've been meaning to read her, and you're flying to Cancun a week from tomorrow, it is just the thing for the plane trip and the Mexican sand dune reserved in your name.

Giving in to our gut feelings

Publishers have got us figured out. They know that when we are on vacation we don't want anything that smacks of reality. We want something with the flavor and texture of good gossip. We want our eyebrows sprung and the tiny involuntary gasp of real surprise. Throw in some eroticism, a clear delineation of good and evil, a roller coaster thrill-a-minute story line featuring characters named Brent and Jade or Emilio and Chloe. It's the sea-level emotions and gut feelings we want aroused, if not the baser instincts. (Don't try to read Henry James or Proust on the beach. It's work!)

The physical size of the book is important too. It should be big with respect to others of its kind. That is, if it's a paperback it should feel stubby and dense in the hand like Roots or Hawaii. If a hardcover, it should be a doorstop. The cover or jacket art should have a lot of color, drama and maybe a peek-a-boo die cut that you have to lift to get the full picture. A shocking or gut-wrenching scene should be splashed across it portraying something you don't normally see in your own hometown. The chapters should be short, to give you a feeling of accomplishment as you whiz through one during the time it takes to suck down a piņa colada. And the read needs to deliver a lot of one-two punches to the solar plexus. You want to feel a beach book's muscles, experience its power. You want it to have its way with you.

Not that we don't learn anything from these imaginative excursions. For we indeed discover the odd fact here and there, like what to do in the event of a scorpion bite, or how to make a pipe bomb or the proper way to address deposed Eastern European royalty.

But information per se, or even wisdom, is not the point of the magic carpet ride a good beach book provides. It's the ride itself we plunked down the money for. The zing, the thrill, the danger, the rapture! All of which is absolutely vital for a good vacation. After we have been pummeled and burned by the waves, sun and pages into a kind of beatific stupor, we can shuffle home safely, somehow brighter, saner and, no doubt, more interesting to ourselves from the experience.