HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

Pray grant me forgiveness for future bad behavior as I now most humbly offer this cache of books certain to enlighten, excite, and inspire. Amateurs in search of transcendent states of mind and place should lash themselves to their reading chairs, lest their imaginations spirit them straight up Mount Everest, in Sir Edmund Hillary's memoir, View from the Summit (Pocket Books), or into a past life—The Camino (Pocket Books) follows Shirley MacLaine's on-foot odyssey along the Santiago de Compostela trail in Spain, a spiritual journey back to the origin of the universe. Now, if we could only get those past lives to carry some of this baggage.

A Lhasa-ing we will go: Virtual Tibet (Metropolitan) is Orville Schell's enchanting meditation on a Westerner's quest for Shangri-la. Diki Tsering, revered as "Grandmother of Tibet," offers tales from the bearskin rug in her autobiography, Dalai Lama, My Son (Viking). Fashion photographer Michel Comte'sPeople and Plaees Without Name (Steidl) rescues images of Haiti, Cuba, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and, yes, Tibet.

Also this month: Paul Schneider's narrative The Enduring Shore (Henry Holt) tells what life was like when Cape Cod and the surrounding islands were overrun by Indians, Basques, whalers, and treasure seekers. In newcomer Caitlin Macy's novel, The Fundamentals of Play (Random House), a clique of young upper-class New Yorkers tacks through a storm of bad breeding, shaky investments, and bungled love affairs. Saul Bellow retakes the king-of-themountain position with Ravelstein (Viking), an elegy to male friendship. Maryann Kornely and Jennie Hirschfeld'sOn the Move (Bulfinch) is a pictorial ticket to ride, combining Life transportation photographs, from the rickshaw to the zeppelin, with road-fever scribblings of such wayfarers as Steinbeck and Kerouac. Social critic Stanley Crouch's first novel. Don't the Moon Look Lonesome (Pantheon), is the sad song of an interracial romance. Web slaves and media sluts rewind to a quieter, gentler time—the age of Pong and Ditto machines— J in Michael Gitter, Sylvie Anapol, and Erika Glaxer's W Do You Remember Technology? (Chronicle). Style apostle Tracy Tolkien kneels and kisses the hem of timeless fashion in Dressing Up Vintage (Rizzoli). Undercover-journalist-cumprison-guard Ted Conover springs a harrowing account of how the penal system degrades and brutalizes guards as well as inmates in New jack: Guarding Sing Sing (Random House). A cinephile's dream trove of writings by such legends as Truffaut, Welles, and Hitchcock is collected in Movies, edited by Gilbert Adair (Penguin). Dump your shrink, darling—all your couch problems could be solved by home-design guru Marco Pasanella'sLiving in Style

Without Losing Your Mind (Simon & Schuster). Finally, Sweet Smell of Success (Overlook), the long-out-of-print collection of the classic novellas and short stories of Ernest Lehman (who wrote the screenplay of North by Northwest and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), has been mercifully resurrected. See, there is a God. Or a Buddha ...