A lot of authors complain about book tours. They gripe about endless flights and a numbing string of hotel rooms, tell horror stories about early-morning talk shows and moan about the wrist strain brought on by autographing hundreds and hundreds of books. To hear them tell it, being on a book tour is like hell on earth.

Not Suzanne Vega, though. She loves going out to promote her new book, a collection of poems, song lyrics and prose called "The Passionate Eye." But then, she probably has a different perspective on touring from the average author, because she's spent large chunks of the last 14 years touring as a singer-songwriter.

In that time, she's played her songs -- including the hits "Luka" and "Tom's Diner" -- in clubs, concert halls and amphitheaters of every description. But given the choice between a club show and a bookstore appearance, like the one she's doing at Bibelot Books in Canton this evening, Vega will go for the bookstore every time.

"I don't mind clubs, but there's something very nice about coming to a place and knowing that people would like to hear you read as well as sing," she says, over the phone from her home in Manhattan.

"First of all, nobody's drunk, at least to look at." She laughs. "Then afterward, there's a lot of hanging around and talking and stuff, which I really like, too. It's way more informal than being on a music tour."

It's also way more comfortable. "On a music tour, it's a very different feeling," she explains. "You're trying to save money. You're paying for things yourself, so you end up in some horrible little hotel in the suburbs. But then when you go on the book tour, you're staying at the Ritz-Carlton. You have a nice dinner, then you go over to the bookstore, where there are actual people hanging out, waiting for you."

Even the performance end of things is more enjoyable. "Because it's just me, it's a lot more impromptu than a [full-band] show is," she says. "So I take questions, and I change the readings, and do what I feel like doing. And then when I don't feel like doing it, I end it.

"It's really very nice."

It's only natural that Vega would feel more at home in bookstores than nightclubs. Because deep down, she sees herself more as a writer than a musician.

"A lot of it is because I've worked really hard on my writing, over my whole life," she says. "Whereas the music wasn't something I felt technically good at, at all. I mean, what I do musically is completely by instinct. I can't read music, and I don't feel that I'm a great singer. I hit the notes, but it's taken me a lot of effort to get to the point even where I am now."

Although Vega admits that the music has always been secondary, "more of a vehicle for the words," she does enjoy making music. "I get a thrill out of it," she says. "I get a bodily thrill out of singing.

"But it's not as though I feel that I'm a fine instrument or anything." She laughs at the thought. "I feel like [my voice] is simple and plain, the vehicle for the words. Because the words are, for me, where I spend more time. That's where the real love of it is for me."

In recent years, a lot of songwriters have published books -- Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, even Jewel. So for someone as literarily minded as Vega to take the plunge is no surprise.

"I've written for most of my life, in various ways," she says. "Most of what I've written in my life has been a journal, which I started when I was 13, I guess. And now I have more than 40 notebooks."

"The Passionate Eye" draws from the whole of Vega's writings, everything from "Written After a Triumphant Fight," a poem she wrote at age 12, to the droll essay "On Being Photographed," written relatively recently. But her song lyrics are at the heart of the book, and not just because they're her best-known work.

Vega had an enormous amount of writing to sort through for the book. "I keep everything," she says. "Trying to explain to my editors why I was having trouble making the deadlines was a problem. It was like being in a gerbil cage. I had little scraps of paper with things written on them, and it was all flying all over as I tried to sift through all the bits and figure out which parts were good.

"Finally, I decided that the lyrics should be the backbone of the book," she says. "That's what I ended up using as a guideline. If there was an early poem that could be included with some of the themes that had gathered around the lyrics, then it went. Otherwise, I would have just gone nuts."

Word perfect

What: A reading and performance by Suzanne Vega

When: Tonight at 7

Where: Bibelot Books, 2400 Boston St. in Canton

Tickets: Free

Call: 410-276-9700 Pub Date: 3/11/99