By Christopher Cappiello

Whether you're lounging by the pool, lying out in the sand, or curled up on the couch with the air conditioning cranking, the dog days of summer somehow lend themselves to catching up on some good reading. IN Los Angeles has scoured the landscape of LGBT literature to come up with some handy suggestions for your reading pleasure in the second half of this sultry summer. You'll find a mix of fiction and nonfiction, the serious and the silly. Hopefully you'll find something you didn't know about before or a happy reminder about that book you've been meaning to peruse.

Alternatives to Sex

By Stephen McCauley
Simon & Schuster, $24

This latest novel from the author of The Object of My Affection centers on William Collins, a gay 40-something realtor in Boston whose competing obsessions are Internet hookups and housecleaning. “If everyone were having as much sexual activity as he'd like,” William muses, “there'd be no such thing as road rage, and no one would ever have voted for George W. Bush.” Set in the year after Sept. 11, Alternatives to Sex is filled with wicked wit and smart observations about our many cultural absurdities (yoga gets a particularly sharp skewering), while also conveying a tangible strain of anxiety in our contemporary culture.

Able Was I

By Drew Banks
Dot Dash Press, $16.95

“Able was I ere I saw Elba” is a palindrome that Napoleon (Bonaparte, not Dynamite) probably never really uttered, but it gives Drew Banks the title for his debut novel, a sweeping, romantic tale of longing and discovery spanning 15 years and much of Europe, including the infamous island. Grey Tigrett, the novel's protagonist, visits Elba on a post-graduation trip in 1985 and has a life-altering gay encounter with a married man. Fifteen years later he returns and the island's spell turns his conventional gay New York life upside down. Banks, an MIT grad and home networks entrepreneur, eschews the droll humor that has become de rigeur in so many gay novels, and writes with a refreshing seriousness of purpose and eye for detail.

The G Quotient

By Kirk Snyder
Jossy-Bass/A Wiley Imprint, $24.95

USC business professor Kirk Snyder gives his new book the following subtitle: “Why Gay Executives Are Excelling as Leaders … and What Every Manager Needs to Know.” Backed up by research and interviews with a range of recruiters, employees of gay executives, and gay professionals themselves, Snyder concludes that in an age of record-low levels of employee morale and job satisfaction in America, gay executives are leading the way in effective management. Employees led by gay managers demonstrate 35 percent higher levels of satisfaction and engagement, and gay leaders are more likely to value inclusion, creativity, and communication. A must-read for any ladder-climbing young gay exec.

Gay & Lesbian Parenting Choices

By Brette McWhorter Sember
Career Press, $14.99

On the heels of last year's The Complete Gay Divorce, retired attorney Brette McWhorter Sember offers her latest up-to-the-minute guide book for LGBT couples or singles feeling the tug of parenthood. This well organized, easily digestible guide is a great starting point if you are trying to determine the route to parenthood most appropriate for you. Sember covers adoption—both international and domestic—as well as biological methods of parenting, including insemination, sperm and egg donors, and surrogates. With checklists, sample forms, and helpful hints about the pros and cons of each method, Sember's little book is an invaluable resource for those looking to join the ever-expanding numbers of LGBT parents.

Surviving James Dean

By William Bast
Barricade Legend, $24.95

In 1956, one year after James Dean was killed driving his brand new Porsche Spyder, William Bast wrote a biography of his good friend and schoolmate from UCLA. What that otherwise thorough biography left out was the fact that Bast was in love with Dean and the brooding actor had his own pan-sexual tendencies. Fifty years later, after a long and successful career writing for television and film, Bast pens Surviving James Dean, an intimate, lovingly written, and much more candid memoir of his time with one of Hollywood's most enigmatic shooting stars.

Queen of the Oddballs

By Hillary Carlip
Harper Collins, $13.95

Like the wide-ranging life she has led, lesbian writer Hillary Carlip's quirky memoir of “a life unaccording to plan” careens in style from essays, to lists, to scripts, to diary entries, with each chapter headed by a run down of major world events from the year in question. This SoCal native worked as a teen to elect George McGovern in 1972, juggled on The Gong Show (and got Rex Reed's first “10”), and made an appearance on Oprah (hilariously recounted) following the release of her 1995 book, Girl Power. Somehow the mad hodgepodge holds together and keeps the reader reading and, often, laughing.

Now is the Hour

By Tom Spanbauer
Houghton Mifflin, $26

Two years before Stonewall, 17-year-old Rigby John Klusener is hitchhiking to San Francisco from his rural upbringing in Pocatello, Idaho, at the beginning of Now is the Hour, the latest novel from Tom Spanbauer (The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon). With tales of Catholic guilt, confused but good-willed parents, obligatory high school sweethearts, and the tedium of farm life, the story then starts at the beginning and shows the reader how the likeable, sexually questioning young man got to the side of the highway in the first place. A long simmering attraction to a 30-something Native-American farm worker forms the heart of this touching and finely observed coming of age tale, with more than enough humor and eccentric characters to make it worth the ride.

Americana the Beautiful

By Charles Phoenix
Angel City Press, $35

Author Charles Phoenix has spent more than 10 years scouring thrift shops and swap meets for the discarded slides of countless American family vacations and holidays. Combining classically kitschy images from the 1950s and '60s with photographs of masterpieces of mid-century Modern architecture, Phoenix offers Americana the Beautiful, a collection of more than 200 color images that chronicle a culture of growing comfort and consumerism. For anyone whose childhood straddled those space-age, super-8 film years, these images (and Phoenix's often hilarious accompanying captions) will bring back memories of a pre-Internet and cable era that seems at once attractive and absurd.