Here are some more things to consider for room in your beach bag or your knapsack, depending on your destination.

Short story collections are a tough sell, but nothing is better for the short-bite approach to reading than a good book of stories. I've always been fond of the Flannery O'Connor and John Cheever collections, but Alix Ohlin's new book, Signs and Wonders (Vintage, $15) is one of the best story collections I've read in a decade. These are some cracking-good tales — deep and rich as any novel, with twists and turns you don't expect. We encounter fascinating characters at just the moment their will and mettle are tested. How many story collections fall into that can't-put-it-down category? This one does. These are tough, original, funny and tragic, all at once. Cannot recommend this book highly enough. By the way, Ohlin published Signs and Wonders the same day she published her novel, Inside (Knopf, $25). Can't recall anyone being so logo-audacious since that day in 1968 when Tom Wolfe published The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Pump-House Gang. The New York Times raved: "The SAME Day: heeeeeewack!!!; Too Freakin' MUCH!!!" We might echo the Times' sentiment.

Honky Tonk (W.W. Norton, $50) is a glorious, big book of photographs, so it deserves its own beach towel. Henry Horenstein here collects 40 years of photographs of great country musicians — many of them while performing near his New England home, but many of them at the old Ryman Auditorium or Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. There are classic portraits of Mother Maybelle Carter, Speck Rhodes, Harmonica Frank Floyd, and other entertainers, but the book also turns the camera toward the audience for a loving and leering look at the Country Music Fan. Some of them have hair that defies all laws of nature. It's a fascinating look at that time and a celebration of the closeness between artist and audience in country music. Great to see some of those faces of the old, traditional country music and contrast them with today's bland, middle-of-the-road country singers. There are still great, authentic country singers today, but few of them reach the sort of audience that the manufactured ones do.

In honor of Woody Guthrie's 100th birthday, Ed Cray's decade-old biography Ramblin' Man (W.W. Norton, $17.95) has been reissued in paperback. Back in the 1980s, Joe Klein's celebrated Guthrie bio introduced a younger generation to this American treasure. But Cray was the first Guthrie biographer to have access to the family archives and this is a deep, rich portrait of this brilliant and sometimes exasperating man. Let's hope this work reaches yet another new generation.

OK, so maybe you don’t like to read. Maybe you’re at the beach to ogle the dudes and dudettes in their skimpies. Perfectly fine. But it’s still good to have a book as a prop. Here are three short-bite books that not only provide amusement, but might also be conversation starters should above-referenced dudes and dudettes stop by your towel.

Check out Shit Happens, So Get Over It (Summersdale, $7.95), How to Survive Parenthood (Summersdale, $7.95) and The Very Embarrassing Book of Dad Jokes (Portico, $13.95). (This last one works best if you are a single dad.)

Shit Happens is a quote book with life-affirming comments to help people deal with the crap in life. It’s a good book to share — read a page aloud, then ask your towel mates to comment. Discuss!

Parenthood is like an extended halftime speech about raising children. It has a real go-out-there-and-parent-like-a-champion feel to it. It's not like therapy, though. This is supposed to be — and is — fun.

The Dad Jokes are pure corn and the book’s steeped-in-the-seventies cover is perfect for the material. Q. What was Beethoven’s fifth favorite fruit? A. Ba-na-na-na! Q. What happened to the snail that lost his shell? A. He became very sluggish. Subtitle of the book is “Because Your Dad Thinks He’s Hilarious.”

If you want to minimize reading and look at funny pictures, get Rude London (Anova, $14.95). Maybe you're Londoned out by the Olympics, but trust me — NBC hasn't shown you all of London this summer. The picture here is typical of the book. (The subtitle is "Snapshots of a City With Its Pants Down.")

Guilt got you down? Can’t enjoy your time off because you’re not working? Pick up The Decision Book (W.W. Norton, $14.95), a nearly pocket-size guide to running a business or even just an office. It’s also written in the sort of short bites that makes for perfect beach reading, and it includes lots of charts. It's almost like watching a Power Point presentation. This is a good book for the desk, but if you read it on the beach, then maybe it makes at least part of your vacation a business deduction.

But you know, I've discovered nothing says "beach reading" more than a book about sharks. The subtly titled 100 Facts About Sharks(Square Peg, $17.95) is the perfect size to fit between your beach towel and sunblock. As much as anything, it's a chronicle of weirdness. Did you know that the French briefly marketed a lasanga-flavored sunblock, which attracted sharks? (That wasn't the original intent, of course.) Did you know the original Play-Doh was made from tiger-shark brain? (Thirty-eight shark hunters died fetching the stuff of Play-Doh.) And if you've ever wondered what music to play to repel the predator during an attack by a great white, the answer is jazz. Apparently, sharks can't stand Coltrane.

And if you want something that is purely an adrenalin rush of nonfiction storytelling, by all means pick up Richard Lloyd Parry’s People Who Eat Darkness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $10). This compulsive page-turner tells the story of a young Englishwoman in Tokyo . . . who just . . . disappears . . . . This has such an incredible, manic pace that it becomes a master class in writing true crime. This makes In Cold Blood seem like Beany and the Beckoning Road.

William McKeen’s latest book is Homegrown in Florida, a collection of stories of childhood in the Sunshine State. His other books include Mile Marker Zero, about the artistic life of Key West, and Outlaw Journalist, a biography of Hunter S. Thompson.