Who hasn't visited a small town, maybe one beside a lake or state park, and thought: "I could live here." Some of us have done that so often it would take months to narrow down the choices enough to investigate even the top 5.

"The 50 Best Small Southern Towns" by Gerald W. Sweitzer and Kathy M. Fields (Peachtree Publishers, $18.95, second edition) can save you some legwork.

People considering fleeing the city for "charming, livable places offering a

gentler way of life" as the subtitle says, might find

just the spot by perusing the book — or perhaps discover information on a small town they were already thinking about.

The book covers towns in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. The start of each section has a map that locates the towns, so you can see at a glance that Cullman, Ala., for instance, is fairly close to Birmingham, or Newberry, S.C., is near Columbia.

You'll find practical information such as population, rainfall and climate, cost of housing and taxes, health care, median household income and education level of residents, and the distance to the nearest cities, plus the other features that make a town worth considering: recreation (golf courses, lakes, state parks), culture (theater, arts, festivals) and spiritual life (number and type of religious denominations). Not surprisingly, many small Southern towns have no synagogue; the book tells you the closest town or city that does.

As for the top small towns in Georgia? The authors pick Carrollton, Covington, Dahlonega, St. Marys, Perry and St. Simons Island.

While the book is meant as a guide to living — not vacationing — in small towns, there's enough information on what to do that travelers who have no intention of moving could use the book to find interesting places to stop for a day or two. Or just read it and romanticize about how much easier life would be if the kids played soccer matches in their little town, not 50 miles and 1 million cars away on the other side of metro Atlanta.