To herald beach-read season, we've come up with our own list of eight reads from the past 100 years that still possess enough snap and crackle to complement any day in the sun.

"RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE" BY ZANE GREY (1912)

It's probably the greatest western ever written. At least so says Joe Wheeler, co-founder and executive director of Zane Grey's West Society, which is dedicated to the man who nurtured the myth of the West through his clean, rich prose.

"I did a lot of corresponding with people who were more current western writers, like Louis L'Amour," says Wheeler, on the phone from Montana's Glacier National Park, site of the society's annual convention. "They all agreed that one of the things that makes Grey totally unique was that he was the last western writer to write when the West still existed."

"Riders of the Purple Sage" is set in southern Utah in 1871. Its heroine, Jane Withersteen, realizes she must break with her oppressive church with the help (and love) of the gentle, roguish Lassiter, the prototype for all literary gunmen who followed.

Setting in Grey's novels was as important as characters, so can you read "Riders of the Purple Sage" on Hawai'i's beaches, miles away from the canyons and deserts of the Old West?

"Oh, sure," Wheeler says. "It's a great escape book. Once you get into that book, Grey has the ability to essentially take you outside of time as you knew it, and you are just carried away into a world you won't escape until you finish it."

"GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES" BY ANITA LOOS (1925)

While riding a train from New York to Los Angeles, Loos sketched some thoughts on a yellow legal pad as she watched a horde of men fuss over another woman, who was equal to Loos in youth and beauty, inferior in intellect but naturally blond and, therefore, more attractive. It was an "important scientific fact which had never before been pinpointed," Loos wryly wrote in her introduction to "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," a comic novel composed of the ditzy diary entries of Lorelei Lee, an American flapper who slingshots herself into the ritzy social orbits of Europe.

"The great American novel," Edith Wharton and Merle Miller proclaimed.

The best book of philosophy ever written by an American, George Santayana said.

Other fans included William Faulkner and Benito Mussolini. Talk about wide appeal.

Loos, who made a name for herself writing screenplays for Hollywood, parlayed the novel into a 1949 Broadway show starring Carol Channing and the beloved 1953 movie with Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei.

Loos' original diary entries sing and flow with zippy wit. ("Paris is devine," Lorelei writes, stumbling typographically, "because the French are devine.") It's a fizzy aperitif for those breaks between beach volleyball and a welcome tonic for those whose social fantasies have been heretofore narrated by Carrie Bradshaw.

"FROM HERE TO ETERNITY" BY JAMES JONES (1951)

It's easy to pick off several short books during a weeklong vacation. Perhaps a more deeply rewarding task would be to tackle an epic, to start at Page 1 and end at Page 864, with waves of drama and emotion rushing over and around you. Sort of like they did to Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in that famous scene on the O'ahu beach, from the 1953 film adaptation of "From Here to Eternity."

Set at Schofield Barracks during the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the dialogue-heavy novel follows two soldiers (one who refuses to join his company's boxing team, one who's having an affair with a superior's wife) as they contend with the brutality of peacetime Army life in a beautiful oceanside setting.

Joan Didion wrote lovingly about the novel in a 1977 essay she penned during a stay in Hawai'i: "A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image, and not only Schofield Barracks but a great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged for me to James Jones."

"THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD" BY JOHN LE CARRE (1963)

After romances, spy thrillers might be considered the most appropriate kind of beach read. Intrigue, danger, escapism, exotic locales, muscular plots reliant on double crosses and brushes with death are all ingredients in an addictive page turner. Strange, then, that le Carre takes a subtler approach, one more identifiable with the '60s Cold War reality, in "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold," which was on the best-seller list for more than a year after it debuted in the United States.

Graham Greene wrote that it was the best spy story he ever read. Perhaps this is because le Carre (who once worked in British intelligence) goes for truth of character over mechanics of plot, and quality of writing over hard-boiled linguistics, seeking to define a political era instead of merely offering an absorbing yarn. In the book, a British agent is assigned one last mission: to take on the guise of a disgraced agent, get back behind the Iron Curtain and position himself as bait to bring down the head of East German intelligence.

"It's a terrific story, so absolutely it's a terrific beach read," says fellow spy-thriller scribe Joseph Kanon. "Ironically enough, one of the great appeals of the book when it first came out was that it was 'realistic' as opposed to fantasy, but now, 45 years later, it's not the world as we see it. It is a lost world, a vanished world."

"ROSEMARY'S BABY" BY IRA LEVIN (1967)

It starts with the banal. A young couple sign a lease on Apartment 7E in New York's fancy Bramford Building. They celebrate by lunching on chicken salad sandwiches at the Russian Tea Room. Only at the end of the first chapter, when a character marvels at the gargoyles crawling between the windows of the building, does writer Ira Levin hint at the sinisterness to come. The beach seems the perfect place to read this novel, if only because pleasant weather might provide a little relief from its scares.

Levin's delicate writing style propels his horror story of a woman who is, as luck would have it, impregnated by the devil soon after moving into the Bramford. Before Rosemary realizes her neighbors are witches, the book hisses with insinuation; after, it pulses with paranoia. But there is a resonant social message underneath the fright, according to author Chuck Palahniuk.

"In big, funny, scary ways, you acknowledge our faults," he wrote in a letter to Levin, part of a collection of essays titled "Stranger Than Fiction." "The problems we're too afraid to recognize. And by writing, you give us less to fear about living. That's very, VERY creepy, Mr. Levin. But not creepy-bad. It's creepy-nice. Creepy-great."

"THE THORN BIRDS" BY COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH (1977)

If it's a family saga you want, there's "The Sound and the Fury." But despite its craftsmanship, Faulkner's classic is unlikely to hold your attention when there are racks of ribs and jugs of pinot grigio to be had on the back deck. For an accessible, operatic family saga, journey down under to the Australian Outback, where the Cleary clan contends with forbidden passion, hollow marriages and a whole boatload of other feelings. People die in each other's arms, and mysterious kinships are revealed. In other words, it's the perfect scandal-as-drama treat.

Hailed as the new "Gone With the Wind" when it was published, "The Thorn Birds" debuted to ravenous word-of-mouth enthusiasm, sold 7 million paperback copies and spawned one of the most-watched miniseries in television history. It's "the most commercial, most obsessively readable, most satisfying novel it's ever been my good fortune to be involved with," one of its publishing directors said before its release.

Not convinced of the novel's gigantic splendor? The title comes from a mythical bird that sings its sweetest song when it impales itself on a thorn. "One superlative song, existence the price," goes the legend. Sigh!

"DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS" BY WALTER MOSLEY (1990)

Named one of the 100 favorite mysteries of the 20th century by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association, "Devil in a Blue Dress" marks the introduction of recurring character Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, an L.A.-based war veteran who unwittingly becomes a private detective. Mosley, one of Bill Clinton's favorite authors, stretched Rawlins' story over 11 books, which take place from the late '40s to the '60s. The final installment of the series, "Blonde Faith," came out last year.

"Devil in a Blue Dress," though, is the place to start. Rawlins, having just lost his job and facing a looming mortgage, finds himself accepting a task from a mystery man in a white linen suit. The job: Find a woman named Daphne Money. The yarn unspools from there.

The Thrilling Detective Web site praises Mosley for offering an alternative social history of Los Angeles life through the Rawlins series, and New York magazine called the first installment "a black 'Chinatown,' a cross between Richard Wright and Raymond Chandler." And there's no better place to read a hard-boiled, sun-soaked mystery than on the shore.

"A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS" BY KHALED HOSSEINI (2007)

The follow-up novel to Hosseini's "The Kite Runner," which remained atop best-seller lists for two years, "A Thousand Splendid Suns" tells the story of two generations of characters swept up in the earthshaking events of Afghanistan's past three decades, from Soviet occupation to life after the Taliban. Whereas Hosseini's previous book focused on Afghan men, this one tells the story of two girls who live near each other and eventually are brought together by marriage to the same man. The subject matter is heavy, but the compelling, emotional way it is delivered makes it suitable for digesting in a tranquil poolside setting.

"The book is powerfully moving, as was 'The Kite Runner,' but Hosseini is not above melodrama and heartstring-tugging," Jonathan Yardley wrote in The Washington Post last year. " 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' is popular fiction of the first rank, which is plenty good enough, but it is not literature and should not be mistaken for such." Literature (with a capital "L") isn't what most beachgoers are looking for anyway, especially if the alternative is, as Yardley said, "brave," "honorable" and "big-hearted."