Martin Sheen in "Apocalypse Now." (United Artists)

Summer is here, the season when, at least theoretically, we all get to relax by the pool with a book. One problem: it can be difficult to settle on the perfect vacation read. Which is why we've come up with suggestions, ranging from thrillers to true-life comedy to biography.

We include some of the high-profile new releases because we determined, well, they're high profile for a reason. But we also zero in on lesser-known 2018 tomes that deserve more attention. And we pair each recently published book with an older one that's (more or less) in the same vein, seeing as it's easy to miss great books -- and have them disappear forever under the constant barrage of new titles. (Plus, you'll be able to save a few bucks by picking up a used book.)

Read on to find out what you should be reading.

Don't Edit

Bill Murray in "Caddyshack." (Warner Bros.)

Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story

By Chris Nashawaty.

The 1980s comedy, starring Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield and Ted Knight, is a modern Hollywood classic. The behind-the-scenes goings on, it turns out, were classic, too. The Washington Post calls Nashawaty's recounting of the film's making "a granular, glandular re-creation that's much more fun to read than the movie was to watch."

Don't Edit

If you like 'Caddyshack,' try ...

"The Apocalypse Now Book," by Peter Cowie.

Director Francis Ford Coppola summed it up perfectly himself: "Over the period of shooting, this film gradually made itself; and curiously, the process of making the film became very much like the story of the film." The movie, of course, is about an American soldier's "Heart of Darkness"-like descent into hell in Vietnam. This 2001 book expertly shows how Coppola and his cast and crew spiraled into their own horror.

Don't Edit

Circe

By Madeline Miller.

The author offers a witty, fast-moving, feminist retelling of "the most infamous female figure from the Odyssey," showcasing witchcraft, vengeful gods and much more. "In the novel's most unnerving encounter," writes the Washington Post, "young Medea stops by mid-honeymoon fresh from chopping up her brother. Chastened by bitter experience, Circe offers her niece wise counsel, but you know how well that turns out."

Don't Edit

If you like 'Circe,' try ...

"The Song of Achilles," by Madeline Miller.

The author's 2011 debut novel is a reimaging of "The Iliad." Author (and bookseller) Ann Patchett calls it "at once a scholar's homage to 'The Iliad' and a startlingly original work of art by an incredibly talented novelist."

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Invitation to a Bonfire

By Adrienne Celt.

Soviet refugee Zoya Andropova begins a torrid affair with the married writer Lev Orlov in this intense love-triangle story, made all the more enticing by the fact that Celt has based the fictional Orlovs on the very real Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera. Offers Publishers Weekly: "Though the ending is implausible, it's nonetheless cleverly twisted. This is an incendiary and provocative novel about obsession."

Don't Edit

If you like 'Invitation to a Bonfire,' try ...

"The Paris Wife," by Paula McLain.

Novelists used to lead fascinating lives, and Ernest Hemingway's was even more fascinating than Nabokov's. So were his wives' lives, come to think of it. This 2011 novel tracks the romance and marriage of Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson. "The tale of [the relationship's] ruin is familiar," wrote the Washington Post, "but it gains freshness from Hadley's point of view."

Don't Edit

The Mars Room

By Rachel Kushner.

This much-anticipated novel by the author of "The Flamethrowers" is set in a women's prison. Writes The New York Times: "It's one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart, and in its passion for social justice you can finally discern a connection between all three of Kushner's novels."

Don't Edit

JoJo Whilden, Netflix

If you like 'The Mars Room,' try ...

"Orange is the New Black," by Piper Kerman.

This is the 2010 memoir that inspired the hit Netflix series of the same name -- and "The Mars Room." "You get the sense," Slate wrote in its review of the book, "that if Kerman weren't forced to go to jail, she would have seen those heroin-running years as a great cocktail party story."

Don't Edit

Neverworld Wake

By Marisha Pessl.

The author of the teen-centric "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" has officially turned to the Young Adult genre with this murder mystery about five boarding-school friends who reunite a year after a schoolmate's death -- and get stuck in a strange, otherworldly "limbo." Writes Kirkus Reviews: "An eloquent and haunting tale, especially for philosophically-minded readers."

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

If you like 'Neverworld Wake,' try ...

"The Other Side of Dark," by Sarah Smith.

The 2010 YA novel, writes BookPage, "is no ordinary ghost story, but rather a meticulously researched and poignant tale about grief, identity and the dark pasts that can define us."

Don't Edit

Paper Ghosts

By Julia Heaberlin.

The Texas-based crime novelist makes a play for the literary big time with a disquieting tale of murder and ravaged childhood. Writes D magazine: "Like [Patricia] Highsmith, Heaberlin displays a keen grasp of the casual cruelty that defines human interaction, not to mention a flair for stories in which no one -- least of all the protagonist -- can be trusted."

Don't Edit

If you like 'Paper Ghosts,' try ...

"Listen to Me," by Hannah Pittard.

Traveling together often blows apart fraying relationships, and so it goes in this short, creepy 2016 novel in which a young husband and wife try to outrace thunderclouds in a drive from Chicago to the East Coast. Wrote The New York Times: "The road will throw them back on their own resources, turn them back into the pioneers they once were, rediscovering each other as they skirt more than one kind of storm."

Don't Edit

AP

President Carter: The White House Years

By Stuart Eizenstat.

Jimmy Carter's single term in office is widely considered a failure. Is that fair? Reexamining the Georgia native's presidency more than 35 years after the fact, Eizenstat's conclusion is ... well, that it's complicated. "It is Eizenstat's contention that Carter began what his successor, Ronald Reagan, would get credit for," Jay Nordlinger writes in National Review. "My fellow Reaganites will gag on this, but Eizenstat has a case, when it comes to the taming of inflation, the rebuilding of the military, a liberating deregulation, and more."

Don't Edit

AP

If you like 'President Carter,' try ...

"The Contender: Richard Nixon, the Congress Years, 1946-1952," by Irwin Gelman.

Every president, whether considered a success or a failure in his time, eventually gets reevaluated. That includes the disgraced Richard Nixon, and in this 1999 tome, Gelman focuses his rigorously researched rehabilitation project on Nixon's congressional career, arguing that it "has been grossly misinterpreted."

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Robin

By David Itzkoff.

The much-buzzed-about biography of the late comedian Robin Williams has arrived. USA Today calls it "an engaging and intimate chronicle of the cultural icon who took America by storm 40 years ago." The San Francisco Chronicle goes further: "Itzkoff has delivered a breathtakingly good biography, exhilarating a lot of the time, yet disturbing, too, and one of the best books ever written about anyone who sees no way out of life except by trying to make people laugh."

Don't Edit

AP

If you like 'Robin,' try ...

"Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi," by Bob Woodward.

Cocaine! Sex! Screaming fits! More cocaine! Wrote The New York Times of the 1984 biography: "One gets the impression from all the evidence that John Belushi's humor was achieved at the cost of an almost total disinhibition."

Don't Edit

Sorority

By Genevieve Sly Crane.

How do a clutch of sorority girls at a Massachusetts college handle the shocking death of one of their own? Not well. Writes Publishers Weekly of the novel: "The multivoice structure fits the story perfectly, resulting in a stellar examination of female relationships."

Don't Edit

AP

If you like 'Sorority,' try ...

"I Am Charlotte Simmons," by Tom Wolfe.

The great stylist died this week at 88, having single-handedly changed journalism and fiction writing. 2005's "Charlotte Simmons," following the travails of a sheltered but game college student, isn't one of his best. But the novel is still plenty memorable. "Like everything Wolfe writes," The New York Times insisted, " 'I Am Charlotte Simmons' grabs your interest at the outset and saps the desire to do anything else until you finish."

Don't Edit

Star of the North

By D.B. John.

A Georgetown politics professor hooks up with the CIA and heads to North Korea to try to find her sister, who was apparently kidnapped by Hermit Kingdom operatives a dozen years before. Writes Publishers Weekly of the novel: "John excels at drawing the everyday details of life in a closed society -- the drug use of the lower classes, the paranoia and fear of those who have gained access to the upper ranks, the omnipotence of the Bowibu, the state security force."

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

If you like 'Star of the North,' try ...

"Polar Star," by Martin Cruz Smith.

Before North Korea was the most oppressive regime on the planet, the Soviet Union held that title. And in 1989 Smith captured the brutality and insanity of the now-defunct USSR's system in his second Arkady Renko novel, in which his ill-starred detective is forced into back-breaking menial work on a large fishing ship -- until a murder returns him to what he does best.

Don't Edit

"And Now We Have Everything," by Meaghan O'Connell

More

Coming soon: Best Summer 2018 books by Oregon authors.