Books: The Editors Like

THE HORSEMAN ON THE ROOFby Jean Giono. (Knopf, $4.00.) The adventures of a high-minded, peppery Italian officer who, caught in the cholera plague of 1838, virtually bushwhacks his way across Provence make a continually interesting, almost picaresque novel.

THE SNAKE LADY AND OTHER STORIESby Vernon Lee. (Grove, $3.50.) Violet Paget, who wrote as Vernon Lee, was a late Victorian specialist in baroque fantasy and semisupernatural terror. The stories reprinted here are fine stuff for anyone who enjoys a cauld grue.

THE NEW COMERby Clyde Brion Davis. (Lippincott, $2.75.) Young Henry Trotter records his agonies and errors in establishing himself at a new school with all the seriousness of a statesman writing his memoirs. The book is a beguiling, tongue-in-cheek tour de force.

THE SECRET STREAMby Marcel Aymé. (Harper, $2.75) A Jack the Ripper murder sets off uproar with political complications in a French town, and while the author’s thesis (poverty=virtue; steady income= depravity) is dubious, he spins an absorbing tale.

COMMAND MISSIONSby Lt. General L. K. Truscott, Jr. (Dutton, $7.50.) A commander in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France, the author tells of his experiences vividly and with considerable literary skill, and is extraordinarily forthright, for a general, in his comments on his colleagues.

THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE AND ADMIRAL RICKOVERby Clay Blair, Jr. (Holt, $3.50.) The backstage dissension in the Navy over the development of the atomic submarine is described here from the point of view of Admiral Hyman Rickover, who originated the scheme, and it’s as fascinating as a good sea battle.

THE MIDGET RAIDERSby C. E. T. Warren and James Benson. (Sloane, $4.50.) The story of the human torpedoes and midget submarines used by the British Navy during World War II is hair-raising, for these contraptions, dangerous at best, were also prone to alarming and improbable accidents.

JOHN KEATS: THE LIVING YEARby Robert Gittings. (Harvard University Press, $3.50.) In this study of Keats’s life and reading during the year of his greatest poetry, Mr. Gittings plausibly redates a sonnet and turns up an unsuspected lady.

IT ISN’T THIS TIME OF YEAR AT ALL!by Oliver St. John Gogarty. (Doubleday, $3.50.) The witty, opinionated memoirs of an Irishman who seems to have known everybody, tried everything, and loved every minute of it.

THE PROUSTIAN VISIONby Milton Hindus. (Columbia University Press, $4.00.) The author’s discussion of Proust’s ideas on love, philosophy, society, and kindred topics is highly individual but well reinforced with references to Proust’s work.