Summer reading specials in The Guardian:

"The weather gods may not have noticed yet, but summer is well and truly here - and as ever, you can't open a paper without coming across a list of summer reading recommendations from the current crop of in vogue writers and celebrities. But when it comes to the success or failure of a holiday book, factors other than the quality of the prose come into play - as anyone who has embarked on a holiday romance while reading Pride and Prejudice or spilled sun cream over the concluding pages of their Ian Rankin will testify. We asked Guardian Unlimited writers to tell us about their very best - and very worst - holiday reading experiences."

Also, five unbreakable rules on what books you and your bibliophile better half should take on holiday. No need to agree, again, what's wrong with reading Auster? Excerpt:

"1. Do not allow him to take any books that are more than 600 pages long. Men toil under the misapprehension that, on holiday, they really will read That Big Book, even though it has been gathering dust on a shelf at home for, ooh, only eight years."

From the NYT, Who's to blame for global warming?: "Indeed, when the author investigates why the United States is virtually the only advanced nation in the world that fails to recognize the severity of this growing crisis, he concludes that the news coverage is 'a large reason for that failure.'"