My North Avenue beach is banked by man-made dunes. Get yourself beyond those and the beach offers a wide swath of sand pebbled with crushed shells. Also washed-up wood slabs from wave-smashed piers, a dead fish or two, emptied booze bottles.

Our boat-shaped boat house is closed. Nets strung for beach volleyball leagues have been taken down, rentable beach chairs and umbrellas packed away.

What a place to walk! Before me is the city’s cutout skyline, fronted by the seemingly infinite lake. There’s so few people on the paths and the beach on a weekday morning it feels eerily post-apocalyptic. There is the city; where are its people?

The lakefront’s beautiful desolation this morning reminded me of a section of Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms: If I Forget Thee Jerusalem.” Faulkner describes the Midwest’s off-season gift of warmth as “the long sigh toward autumn and the cold.” His doomed lovers overstay the season in their Lake Michigan beachfront shack, and nearly freeze, almost starve.

Dan Chaon’s masterful “Await Your Reply,” gives us a Northwestern University college student presumed dead in Lake Michigan’s frigid waters. We stand over his shoulder as he reads the news story of his probable suicide. Gulp.

In Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes,” the eponymous narrator spends his Chicago off-hours drinking excessively, bedding beautiful young women whose names he checks scraps of paper to remember. “In the first flush of the morning sun, the city lay spread out to my left, more like a dream than I had ever imagined it….the city gave everything…and I bawled like a goddam madman to be so lucky…”

In the enchanting “The Art of Fielding,” Chad Harbach compares a scholar’s love for literature with Lake Michigan. “Walking along its shore called forth some of the same deep feelings that his reading of Melville did, and that reading explained and deepened his love of the water, which deepened his love of the books.” Unexpectedly, and memorably, the lake becomes this man’s final resting place.

In Patricia Albers’ rich portrait of the abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell, the biographer says Mitchell painted the lake her whole career. “She watched rain clobber the lake, ice lock it up, thunderheads billow above…it shimmered, turquoise and sapphire like a tropical lagoon, or pulsed with dark ochre along its edges…”

“‘The Lake is with me today,’” Joan would say, years after leaving Chicago. “‘The memory of a feeling. And when I feel that thing, I want to paint it.’”

For more Chicago in literature: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/448.html

Now Larson has put out “In the Garden of Beasts,” a widely praised nonfiction account of an American ambassador and his family posted to Berlin in 1933, as the Nazis come to power. Its first pages pulled me in. William E. Dodd is chairman of the history department at University of Chicago. An aging scholar, what Dodd wants most is to finish his multi-volume history of the South and retire to his Virginia farm. A call from Washington changes his life.

Off to Berlin with him is wife Mattie and their two adult children Martha, 24 and Bill, 28. (Endearingly frugal, Dodd ships their Chevrolet.) Recently divorced, Martha’s affairs on both sides of the pond cause even a modern gal to blush. Strangely, Martha hardly comes to life, even though we’re let in on her teas and parties, her lakeside and late night outings.

I’d like to say this is a thrilling read. It’s not. It is well written, and sobering. There’s the drip drip drip of Nazi aggression coupled with Dodd’s well-meaning but ineffective diplomacy. He’s a decent man in a magnificent country headed by murderous statesmen. Dodd gives speeches, he brings warnings to high places. No one listens.

Is this a time and place worth revisiting?

Dodd is dull but admirable. I pined with him as he ached to spend time on his farm, and worried with him that he’d die before finishing his “Old South” manuscript. Berlin comes to life, but the Dodd family barely registers. (Indeed, I was more concerned for the Jewish family who rented the Dodds their mansion, then hid in its attic.) The Nazis and their brutal rise to power overwhelms this story.

When we first meet Michael Beard he’s 53 and fat, a Nobel-prize winning physicist riding the high-fee, high-calorie lecture circuit. His (fifth!) marriage is in shambles and his public comments about women’s intellect has made him a reviled household name. Even a boondoggle to a polar region, to witness global warming, turns sour: Beard mangles the skin of his penis when it freezes to his zipper.

And he keeps getting fatter.

Why read on? I fell for the lunacy of Beard’s situation. He’s a snob. It’s great fun seeing him brought to his knees by wives, lovers, thinkers, artists, outdoorsmen, doctors, business associates, scientists and the young daughter he most certainly did not agree to father.

Charmed by a serial adulterer? I was. Beard pines for his wife, nursing himself with excess wine and late night television, listening to Patrice dress for her lover and leave the house. ”No woman had ever looked or sounded so desirable as the wife he suddenly could not have.”

Same with his misadventures in the polar region. Always the last to arrive, in ill-fitting outerwear and cracked goggles, the one who can’t find the “start” button on his ski-doo: Beard tugged at my heartstrings.

I even bought into his complicity in framing Patrice’s lover for a murder.

Not so much his theft of a dead colleague’s research, which he’ll use to create an energy source that could save the planet. Couldn’t he share credit?

Of course not: Beard is liar, thief, cheater, glutton. Beard is the Military/Industrial Complex: brilliant but uncaring, consuming, destroying, polluting.

And he keeps getting fatter.

“As he listened to Parks enumerate his possible futures, he decided not to mention his recent acquisition of a classic symptom, the occasional sensation of tightness around his chest. It would only make him appear even more foolish and doomed. Nor could he admit that he did not have it in him to eat and drink less, that exercise was a fantasy. He could not command his body to do it, he had no will for it. He would rather die than take up jogging or prance to funky music in a church hall with other tracksuited deadbeats.”

McEwan is one of our finest living authors, smart and accessible. His blockbuster “Atonement,” and smaller works such as “Saturday” and “On Chesil Beach” are skillfully told, but serious, even grave.

“Solar” is playful, outrageous. McEwan tells it with great calm, one nutty situation rolling into another. It’s a delicious situation: a man who won’t save himself may hold the key — which he stole! — to saving the planet.

A very funny, uncomfortable read. (My friend Libby hated it.)

Because books, and their creators, are like lovers: we may have parted but we want to recall the initial attraction.

Rose Tremain’s “The Road Home” disappointed. It was so predictable: an immigrant comes to London, sleeps in a corner, lucks into better and better jobs, falls in love, and goes home. Tremain writes beautifully, and the characters were likable. But the whole story was linear, and plodding.

Tremain’s newest novel surprises. “Trespass” begins with a frustrated school girl, unhappily relocated from Paris to a village in the Cevennes, in rural France. The girl wanders away during a group picnic and discovers something that shouldn’t be in the stream.

This isn’t a thriller, but the story kept me in its grip. At stake: an old French estate, the Mas Lunel. Its owner, Aramon Lunel, is an alcoholic mess. He can’t keep himself or the grounds or his hunting dogs clean. He decides to sell. But everyone who comes to look at the estate has one complaint: there’s an ugly bungalow at the edge of the property. Whose is it? Can it be removed?

Audrun Lunel owns the bungalow and its land, split from the estate when their father died. Audrun had a happy life while their mother was alive, but when she died, Audrun was a young teen. She was taken from school and made to work in an underwear factory. Far worse, her father and Aramon sexually abused her.

Forever dirtied by them, Audrun spurns the one good man who would love her.

Enter Anthony Verey, an English antiques dealer who wants to leave his life in London behind. House hunting, he falls in love with Mas Lunel; he must buy it. But there’s that unsightly bungalow.

When Verey returns for a second look, he disappears.

Coming off a bender, Aramon finds the Englishman’s car in the barn and two empty cartridges in his hunting rifle. Quite literally, Aramon becomes sick with worry. Did he kill the man? Where are the car keys? Why are there spent cartridges in his gun, when he always empties it?

There is no happy end to this story. Its last pages shock and sadden.

This book haunts.

Chaon gives us three narratives that eventually merge. We first meet college student Ryan as he’s losing consciousness, comforted by his father. Ryan’s hand has just been sliced off by some thugs. Next, we meet Lucy Lattimore, who has ditched her small-town life in Ohio with George Orson, her high school history teacher. Miles Cheshire is the third leg; he’s on a quixotic drive to the Arctic Circle in search of his identical twin, Hayden, who’s clinically insane. (It’s a 4,000 mile drive: who’s the crazy one?)

I was hooked by all three but I confess a fondness for Lucy, a dumpy orphan who blossoms under the tutelage of her older, wiser lover. Theirs is the most Gothic of the three stories: George takes her to his family’s home, a Victorian house beside a shuttered motel, on the banks of a dried-up lake. There he hides himself in the study, with computers and a wall safe. Lucy, like any out-of-place teenager, watches t. v. and eats poorly. Even she gets bored with that routine. When George leaves her alone too long, she has to snoop — and what she finds in the safe turns her into a player.

It’s a dangerous game.

I liked Chaon’s first novel, “You Remind Me of Me” (2005) but had a hard time recommending it because it was so sad. In it, a young man whose face was scarred by the family’s dog sets off to find his brother, who was given up for adoption as an infant. The scarred brother has spent his whole life with the mother who regrets her decision. Beautifully written, but heart wrenching.

“Await Your Reply” will find a larger audience. It’s not a thriller, but its characters will keep you in their grip.

Earlier this week I was fortunate to join in a book club’s discussion of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. I hadn’t talked about a difficult read, at length, with a group of smart, educated women since I was in college. Such interesting talking points: Does it matter if a character is unknowable? Unlikeable? If there’s a plot? If we know the story’s end at its beginning?

When we couldn’t agree on the book’s subject — alienation? immigration? colonialism? a marriage? — the hostess (thank you) piped up. She liked the “business” of the book we were discussing, but pined for a structured read with a character-driven plot. Such as? “Jane Austen.”

I enjoy difficult reads, but I also welcome and sometimes deeply need an Austen-like read, where there’s a problem, or three, worked out in a pleasing way that sometimes ends with a marriage. “Or two marriages,” a book club member observed.

This is a long way to recommending Cathleen Shine’s The Three Weissmans of Westport. Using Austen’s Sense and Sensibility as a frame, Shine provides a smart, funny, satisfying read about two adult sisters who move with their elderly mother, newly divorced and homeless, to a Connecticut cottage. They’re all New Yorkers, so the dislocation from fabulous lifelong digs on Central Park West, to the suburban seaside, is a hilarious jolt.

They’re a recognizable but nutty bunch. Instead of divorce, the mom pretends she’s widowed; after all, she is mourning a marriage. Sister Miranda falls in love with … her lover’s toddler son! Sister Annie frets over their collective spending (they have no money!) and her puzzling on-again, off-again romance with a famous writer.

Sure, it’s Austen’s set up, but Shine unravels the story in new, fresh, witty ways. I laughed out loud, on a city bus, reading it. Best of all, the book ends with a funeral that’s as good as a wedding.

A delightful read.

Mason offers alternate tellings and endings for the Trojan War and Odysseus’ life. Achilles is “reborn” in clay, and continues his ruthless fighting. Odysseus never goes home. Penelope marries another. Penelope is dead. Ithaca is abandoned. Revisiting Troy, Odysseus finds a carnival town for tourists, his shield remade as a cheap souvenir.

I found myself weeping, more than once, while reading these tales. Incredible, to be moved again and again by these characters! Credit Mason, who is never glib or jokey. His tone is majestic, befitting these great ancient tales. I easily bought into the book’s conceit: because “The Odyssey” was from an oral tradition, there were many other tellings and retellings, additions, subtractions. This novel is those “lost” and now found books.

And in this age of Kindle, I particularly enjoyed holding this book in my hands, tucking it into my bag. It’s tiny: short and thin, with a white paper cover that features a warrior etched in red and black lettering mixed with silver discs, for the words’ O’s. While I was reading it other people wanted to touch it, or picked it up when I’d put it down.

With so many wondrous tales retold, this story could go on and on and on. I was sorry to come to its end.

I’ve said before that books are like lovers. Private companions. We take them to bed, tuck them into our bags, panic (as I did) when we misplace a book pages from its conclusion.

The object of my grief? Russell Banks “The Darling” (2004). Hannah Musgrave is a 60ish hippie farmer who returns to Africa to find the body of her husband and the fate of their three young sons.

Hello? Why is a counterculture WASP who clings to her Puritan roots sneaking into Liberia in the back of a flatbed, under a tarp?

The answer to that question is the story of the book, and in Banks’ hands it is a deliciously slow, steady, surprising read.

It’s a discomfiting tale. Hannah is variously cold, uncaring, willfully blind, criminal, proud, foolish, naive, mean, generous, racist, sexist. Also, an adulterer, and a thief. Her husband is a high-level functionary in a corrupt African government; it is he who calls her Hannah, darling.

Like the characters in Banks’ “The Book of Jamaica” (1980) and “Continental Drift “(1985), Hannah is the American dreamer who loses herself in a foreign place, with tragic consequences.

As with all Banks’ work, this is a story of place. He weaves Liberia’s fantastic past into the story’s present, where the nation and its decorous capital turn from civility to savagery.

I didn’t especially like Hannah — she trades a false American existence for a hollow wifely life in Africa — but I understood her choices. At its close, I felt like I’d lost a difficult but treasured friend, one whose life was more varied, and more foolish.

I know, I know: buy a Kindle. But I like books, big books, messy full-bodied reads. Hardy, Dickens, Tolstoy. From the here and now: Price, Russo, Ishiguro, Diaz. Their weight, their textured jackets, their pages.

I end up with door stoppers because I take chances; I want to find and devour good reads, to be taken in, seduced. These led me on, but left me cold.

1) I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe. Pre-ordered from Amazon. Read 90 pages. A boring, predictable read from the master of the universe? When I tried to sell, hundreds of new copies already for sale, for $1.40. Later, a born-again friend invited me for coffee; she was troubled Charlotte gave up her virginity. All I could say was, “You read that whole book?!?”

2) Man Gone Down, Michael Thomas. Interesting set up: a black man has only a few days to regain his young family. That’s all: an interesting set up.

3) And then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris. Don’t know anyone who made it to this book’s end. Told in the collective first person.

4) The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud. New York narcissists? My kind of story! One chapter. Friend who lent won’t take it back.

5) Beautiful Children, Charles Boch. A child is missing: where’s the urgency?

6) Driftless, David Rhodes. If fly-over country is this odd, we’re doomed.

7) A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore. Same suspicions as above, re fly-over country. Provocative ideas, none fleshed out.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl. One breathless chapter.

9) Away, Amy Bloom. Rapturous reviews, ludicrous tale. When my friend Jennifer wouldn’t take it back, we left in on an empty seat at a book signing.

10) The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver. Read to page 62. Bland character heading into a Forrest Gump life. Even my niece, a Kingsolver fan, won’t take it off my hands.

Another, by a lauded literary writer, had an interesting set up but was so poorly told I pressed it on a writer friend as a great example of a how not to tell a story.

Why keep reading?

When we open a book, we take a leap. And sometimes we’re rewarded: we’re hooked, we’re grabbed, we’re taken in.

From a stack of newly published books I pulled C.E. Morgan’s “All the Living,” Farrar Straus Giroux, $23. I was nabbed by its first sentence: “She had never lived in a house and now, seeing the thing, she was no longer sure she wanted to.”

She is Aloma, a young woman just out of school, orphaned at a young age, arriving at the tobacco farm her boyfriend, Orren, has come to own.

Sex is their common ground. She’s a trained musician, aching to leave the moment she arrives. He devotes his every hour to saving his family’s farm. When Aloma signs on to play piano for the local church, the pastor quietly, and heartbreakingly, pursues her. It sounds hopelessly old-fashioned, but the book’s most moving passage is when the pastor shames Aloma for leading him on.

It’s a present day story but the world we’re taken into — its language, and foods, and landscape — seems from the near past. Television, but it’s on only for its tornado warnings. Telephones, but no cell phones; no texting, no tweeting. Places to eat, but no fast food. “Don’t be ill” means “don’t be mad.”

There’s no bad guy, no boogie man lurking in the woods. The only menace is the drought, and a mean rooster, and Orren’s buried grief for the family he’s lost.

It’s a Plot 101 tale — will she stay or will she go? — but the quality of the prose kept me reading. A simple story in a remarkable landscape, tightly focused and exquisitely wrought. A model of Aristotle’s unities of time, place and action.

It had me in its grip all weekend.