Packing for a vacation ...

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I’ve got a few days of vacation planned and some of it will include lazy hours of uninterrupted reading -- I hope! What to take along?

I consulted our excellent list of recommended summer releases, and jotted down a few musts (Alan Furst’s latest, ‘The Spies of Warsaw’ gets a boffo review from Jonathan Shapiro in The Times).

But if you’re like me, there are other fine books already on bookstore shelves that I haven’t yet gotten around to yet, novels like the acclaimed ‘Child 44’ by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central Publishing: 400 pp., $24.99) and ‘The Plague of Doves’ by Louise Erdrich, who, reviewer Brigitte Frase wrote, composes ‘symphonies filled with a complex wisdom about the strands of darkness and light that make up a human life.’

And with the Rockefeller clan recently demanding management changes at Exxon Mobil, I’m intrigued by a March release on the investigative journalist who forced change on the oil giant’s predecessor, Standard Oil, ‘Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller’ by Steve Weinberg (W.W. Norton: 256 pp., $25.95).

What’s in your book bag?

Kristina Lindgren