“O’s 2010 Summer Reading List” showed up in our email-boxes Friday — that’s from Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine —- promising twenty “Lush historical novels, wise contemporary tales and crowd-pleasing beach reads…”

Last year at about this time MobyLives took a look at O’s Summer 2009 recommendations and found that independent presses had published seven of the twenty-five titles. This year, former PW editor and indie-press pal Sara Nelson and her band of reviewers at O didn’t find much to love among this Summer’s offerings from independents.

Atlantic Monthly’s Father of the Rain by Lily King would have had the field to itself if not for the somewhat eccentric inclusion of Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son, published by public domain specialists, Wordsworth Classics.

O’s choices disappoint only in providing the expected. (The magazine’s mass-market brief is spelled out in Nelson’s squib on twenty-something Sloane Crosley’s tepid essay round-up, How Did You Get This Number, described as “A little out there to be considered truly ‘crowd-pleasing.'”) I didn’t think The Passage by Justin Cronin needed any more help but O reviewer Bethanne Patrick gives it a supernumerary puff, writing “Let others quibble over whether The Passage is thriller or literature; we see it as vital, tender, and compelling” —- after quoting a passage that would draw the slashing red pen of any high school English teacher: “Amy felt their sorrow, but it was different now. It was a holy soaring. A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand thousand stories — of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief….” [All “thousands” in the original.]

The list includes two titles by defunct imprint Harper Studio, one an anthology of bromides helpfully titled Words That Matter, that will provide a shiver of woulda, shoulda, coulda nostalgia on 53^rd Street. As we say around the poker table, “No help.”

The inclusion of debut novel Elizabeth Street by Laurie Fabiano provides the only real excitement. It’s one of six titles published by yearling AmazonEncore —- that’s Amazon, the publisher.

Elizabeth Street is now 333 (half of 666) “in books” on Amazon (the retailer).