With A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila off the air for another season and daylight savings tacking on an extra 60 minutes of sunlight to our waking hours, the time is right for spring reading. Here are a few books worth checking out, along with one that should be avoided like the plague.

• Dirtbags by Teresa McWhirter (Anvil Press, 235 pp.) — This affecting and affectionate story of a soft-spoken punk’s struggle to find something to believe in follows Spider Rose McKenzie as she navigates through the treacherous waters of her early 20s. McWhirter sketches vivid portraits of people on the periphery, from punk-rock burnouts on Vancouver’s East End to broken mill workers in Spider’s B.C. Interior hometown. Her clear, emotionally detached voice serves the story superbly, refusing to pass judgment even as the character’s actions lead them to ruin. This search for beauty amid chaos and anarchy resonates long after the last page is turned.

• Men in Space by Tom McCarthy (Alma Books, 278 pp.) — Less accessible than Dirtbags but equally worth reading is the latest novel from the bestselling author of Remainder. Unapologetically a novel of ideas, Men in Space is set in a central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of communism, with a narrative voice that echoes this disintegration as it follows political refugees, a soccer referee, a drifting astronaut and a disturbed police agent in search of a stolen icon painting. Set in a time that is neither past nor present, McCarthy reveals through a series of repeating ellipses a vision of a humanity that is adrift in history.

• Into Hot Air by Chris Elliott (Weinstein Books, 352 pp.) — Readers looking for a lighter read might be advised to pick up this tome. Marginal celebrity Chris Elliott brings the persona he cultivated in appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and the short-lived but beloved television program Get a Life to the printed page with his second novel, Into Hot Air. Ostensibly the story of Elliott’s attempt to prove once and for all that his great uncle Percy beat Sir Edmund Hillary to the peak of Mount Everest, Elliott uses this premise as a springboard for his seriously silly send-up of adventure writing and celebrity activism.

• What Happened Later by Ray Robertson (Thomas Allen Publishers, 327 pp.) — Like Elliott, Ray Robertson makes himself a character in his latest book, but the similarities stop there. Robertson’s book is a stylistically ambitious, structurally complex novel that explores the parallel stories of Jack Kerouac’s last road trip to explore his French-Canadian roots in Riviere-du-Loup, and the story of a typical small-town teenager who falls under the spell of Kerouac’s myth. The dual narratives give the novel a pleasing symmetry, and while the book may sound overly formal, it transcends these ambitions and is an entertaining read.

• Merde Happens by Stephen Clarke (Penguin Canada, 381 pp.) — Another road trip novel, though this one is decidedly less ponderous than Robertson’s. The third entry in English satirist Stephen Clarke’s Paul West series finds the affable Englishman forced by financial straights to take a dodgy job touring across America in a Mini with his French girlfriend and American poet friend. With a nice balance of adventures and observations, Clarke proves that his clever approach to cultural criticism rings as true on Rodeo Drive as it does on the Champs-Élysées.

• Smuggler’s Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer by Jay Carter Brown (ECW Press, 288 pp.) — When I lived in Montreal, I used to sometimes buy weed from Ben, a 45-year-old co-worker. Though he sold good weed cheaply, he was always my dealer of last resort. His deep paranoia ensured he would only sell dope from his home, which meant visits of indeterminate duration, during which he would tell me tales of partying with April Wine while showing off his collection of dragon figurines and arsenal of medieval weaponry. Jay Carter Brown has written a “memoir” that captures perfectly the experience of being in Ben’s living room. Avoid.