It's July, and there's still no hot beach book

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Where, oh where, is the big book of the summer?

Last summer Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova were the go-to books for hungry readers.

But this summer, without the boy wizard or a summer Oprah's Book Club pick, there's not what Jerome Kramer of Kirkus Reviews calls "a get-them-into-the-air-conditioned-bookstore destination book."

"It has been a very slow summer," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, who lamented the lack of a big summer book in a recent column.

August is approaching, but there's still time for a book to pull ahead of the pack. That could be the trade paperback edition of The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards (Penguin, $14).

"The book is flying out of the store," says Karen Corvello of R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn. Says Sessalee Hensley of Barnes & Noble: "It really took off from the very start. I think it's going to be another Kite Runner or Secret Life of Bees. It's really kind of viral."

Edwards' book about a family torn apart by the birth of twins, one a healthy boy and the other a girl with Down syndrome, is No. 1 on Publishers Weekly's trade paperback list and No. 3 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, up from No. 5 last week.

It's also a best seller at Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. Published as a hardcover last year, it sold 30,000 copies. Paperback publisher Penguin has gone back to press 10 times since May, and 824,000 copies are now in print.

It's not that other books aren't doing well. Old reliables such as The Da Vinci Code and The Devil Wears Prada are still selling, as are brand-name authors with new books such as Danielle Steel, James Patterson and Janet Evanovich.

And the novel that critics and booksellers predicted would be the big book of summer -- Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, about a veterinary student who joins a second-rate circus during the Depression -- has gone through seven printings; 130,000 copies are in print.

Craig Popelars of Algonquin, which published Water for Elephants, gives credit to the good words from booksellers for the book's success.

And John Updike's Terrorist, which has had mixed reviews, is in its eighth printing with 144,000 copies in print.

Also slowing buzz is the lack of an Oprah's Book Club pick. Last summer she selected novels by William Faulkner, and in summer '04 it was Anna Karenina.

"It's too bad she didn't pick a beach read," Kramer says.

But Winfrey hasn't left her club devotees in the lurch. In the July issue of O, the first devoted to summer reading, Winfrey writes that she's reading If The Creek Don't Rise, a memoir of growing up in poverty in the West by Rita Williams.

She also recommends 64 titles in "What You Really Want to Read This Summer." They include mysteries, memoirs, novels about families and non-fiction. (The picks can be viewed at oprah.com.)

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