Jane Smiley

Simon says:Did you ever wonder what Chanel Nos. 1-4 must have smelled like?*I don't understand people who wear T-shirts with the names of places they've never been to.*It's downright scandalous that it cost taxpayers $649 million to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. Especially since I hear Lens Crafters offered to do it for $69.95 and have it ready in an hour.*And speaking of the Hubble, I was watching a live broadcast of the repair and saw one of the astronauts floating in space holding a nut in his hand and asking for instructions because he didn't have any place to put it down.

Boston -- As a certified member of the pre-post-literate generation, I still think of ''summer'' as an adjective for ''reading.'' My school days are long past, but this always feels like the time between semesters when we can read for pleasure.A teacher-friend insists that this reading habit carbon-dates me as ancient. She specializes in the modern aliterate -- students who can read but don't want to.Every year, she sends her classes off on vacation with reading instructions. Last year, they came back with ''book reports'' of novels that had -- surprise!

Boston. -- To a bona fide member of the reading public, what might be called the pre-postliterate generation, news from the book world is not encouraging. Libraries are getting the budget ax. The paperback best-seller list is replete with novels written from movie scripts. Publishers' talk at a recent booksellers' convention wasn't about censorship but survival.In response to this dire forecast, I have come up with a proposal. What we need is more summer.My entirely unscientific survey shows that more people read lying in hammocks, sitting on lounge chairs, rocking on porches and spacing out on beaches than they do throughout the rest of the year.

Campbell Scott creates a new movie anti-hero - the weak silent type - and goes all the way with it in The Secret Lives of Dentists. He's the unique center of a deliciously tender black comedy about husband-and-wife dentists who learn that a neat suburban office, three daughters and two homes (one in the country) can't cushion them from pain. Scott's character realizes that his spouse (Hope Davis) has taken a lover but fears that confrontation will lead to an irrevocable rupture. So he waits for the end of the affair and tends to the three girls.

Last Saturday, a week before the running of the 130th Preakness Stakes, Pimlico Race Course was far from the crowded, frenetic scene it promises to be today. The track was, in fact, sedate. Good views of the finish line were easy to find and so were empty seats. And Amanda Joyce of North Baltimore was working on a promising Pick 4 in which she needed to select the winners of four successive races to collect. Joyce, who has been smitten with racing ever since reading a Jane Smiley novel about the sport, said she'll be at today's Preakness and trying to do what most of the other 112,000 race fans hope to accomplish - pick a winner.

Ginny Cook Smith, incest survivor, could have been a guest on "Oprah" or "Geraldo" if Jane Smiley had not made her up.In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "A Thousand Acres," Ms. Smiley tells this story: the adult Ginny stretches out on her childhood bed, and suddenly images cascade forth. Her body trembles as the teen-age memories of her rapes rush back.The way Ginny first denies the incest but then remembers it bears an uncanny -- and, Ms. Smiley says, unintended -- resemblance to a tale told with numbing frequency on the afternoon talk shows: an adult recovering a long-buried memory of sexual abuse.

BOSTON -- The true moment of cross-cultural convergence came to my neighborhood this year when the local Starbucks started selling books. Not any books, mind you. Oprah's books. Books that came with Oprah's seal of approval.So the cycle was complete. We had bookstores selling coffee, coffee shops selling books and both being served by the same mass media maven. As if that weren't enough, companies that published books were being gobbled up by one or two vast international conglomerates in Germany or Britain.

Havre de Grace. -- Book sales are up, but reading is down. The last research I came across indicated that a majority of American adults haven't read a single book in the last year. So who's doing all that buying?Either a small number of people are buying and reading lots of books, or a lot of people are buying books but not reading them. The latter seems more likely. And though it's a little bizarre to think that all those people crowding into Waldenbooks just before Christmas were buying books neither they nor the people they intended to give them to would ever read, what they were doing wasn't necessarily wrong.

I was about to cancel my subscription to the Atlantic Monthly when the October issue came in. For years, I've looked to this venerable mag to provide a meaty mix of reportage, commentary and good fiction, but lately it's been drowning in dullness. Whither the articles of yesteryear, the quirky and wonderful pieces on the likes of mosquitoes and tornadoes? Now we get cover stories on reinventing government, abortion -- the Big Subjects of the day. Nothing wrong with that, certainly, but these articles' prodigious length has been enough to put the most die-hard reader to sleep.

Mothers of Waterloo Elementary School's students are invited to have breakfast at the PTA-sponsored "Muffins for Moms" at the school, 5940 Waterloo Road and Route 108, at 8:15 a.m. April 25.Information: 313-5014.*Sisters United Now will hold its first meeting at 6 p.m. April 20 at the Other Barn, Oakland Mills Shopping Center.The nonprofit group of black businesswomen was organized to nurture business relationships and foster positive energy and growth with common values, interests and concerns.