A Memoir on Writing by Stephen King. This is part biography and part writing advice from the horror master himself. Whatever you think of King as a writer, this revealing memoir is fun, insightful and explains a lot about King and his relationship with the world of the weird, and the writing advice is practical and engaging. (McKenna)

A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary by Ken Saro-Wiwa. Channel Islands, UK: Safari Books, 1995. This is "the extraordinary and moving account of Ken Saro-Wiwa's period of detention in 1993, and is also a personal history of the man who gave voice to the campaign for basic human and political rights for the Ogoni people." Saro-Wiwa was the spokesperson for the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), an environmental activist group fighting against Shell's destruction and pollution of Ogoni land in the Delta region of Nigeria. (Alabi)

Almost a Woman by Esmerald Santiago. Santiago’s new memoir which picks up her story with which she ended in Once I Was Puerto Rican, a memoir I recommended last year. Come along with her as she travels into womanhood in New York City. (Shepherd)

Anais Nin by Deirdre Bair. A biography of one of the most prolific diarist which, deservedly, won the National Book Award. As we learn about Nin and her adventurous life, we also meet Henry and June Miller, Edmund Wilson, Otto Rank and others with whom she marks, indelibly, their lives. Nin. whom some prefer to focus on her bigamy, incestual relationships. was first, and absolutely foremost, an artist in and of words. (Shepherd)

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I started reading this nineteenth century classic Russian novel over spring break because a close friend said it was his all time favorite novel. It's a story rich with questions about life and death, love and fidelity, and wealth and poverty (among other things). If you haven't read it yet, read it over the summer and come talk with me about it. (Detmer-Goebel)

Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman by Nuala O’Faolain. Surviving a childhood of poverty in North Dublin along with her eight siblings, O’Faolain uses her love of reading to survive and then rise to become one of Ireland’s most well-respected columnists. Her courage, honesty and strength provides us with a model of the importance of embracing, not shrinking from life. (Shepherd)

The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade by Wendy Doniger. This new book is a cross-cultural analysis of a wide variety of texts including Hindu myth, the Hebrew Bible, Shakespeare, and modern films about the representation of sexual impersonation. (Detmer-Goebel)

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. A wonderfully complex, layered "novel within a novel." The story is told in retrospect by a feisty 80 year old narrator that only Atwood could have created. Newspaper clippings (reminiscent of Alias Grace) and science fiction enrich this very Atwood novel. Great summer reading. (Crowe)

Chocolat by Joanne Harris. The novel is as enjoyable as the film, but for different reasons: the story Harris tells in her book about the mystically empowered Vianne Rochet and the town in which she opens her chocolate shop says something quite different about religion, temptation, acceptance, and community. I can only quote The New Yorker: "if Colette and Hawthorne had collaborated, the result might have been this serious delight." Enjoy. (Crowe)

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. This novel has everything: love, Civil War history, and a user-friendly Joycean style. (Guillory)

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges. Reading Borges is like falling into the inside of the World Wide Web before there were computers. Intellectual, abstract, strange, fascinating, it should be read by anyone who likes experimenting with writing or absorbing the experimental. (Bradway)

Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card. Card has two follow-up novels now to the spectacular sci-fi novel Ender's Game. These two, Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon, follow the progress of Ender's companion, Bean, in his life struggles and growth. Must reads if you liked Ender's Game. (O’Conner)

Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America by Jennifer Price (Basic Books). This funny historical book traces the way Americans deal with birds, and is full of very strange facts. My favorite bit of trivia is that women used to wear actual dead owls on their hats--I don't mean just feathers here--and that this was considered to be extremely stylish. And the popularity of pigeon pie helped to kill off the passenger pigeon. The author's commentary about what everything from stuffed birds to pink lawn flamingoes actually means is on target. (Bradway)

Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. Chevalier combines history and fiction (similar to The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber) to give us the gift of sharing the awakening sensual and artist vision of Griet living in Holland in the 1660s as she comes to merge with the soul of Vermeer. (Shepherd)

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling. I recommend these books if you have not read them. Read them in order! (Brooks)

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III. The story of 3 disparate characters connected only by a dispute involving a house is told in a fascinating narrative style. While the ending itself is reason enough to read the book, the plot and characters pose more questions about human nature than they answer. (Crowe)

The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan. Tan’s third novel for adults (she’s also written two children’s stories) provides us with a layer of the Chinese-American experience not evident in her first two novels. The present and the past meet, collide, coalesce with the delightful presence of Kwan Li who provides us with much knowledge about Mancho China. (Shepherd)

Icy Sparks by Gwyn Hyman Rubio. For most young people, growing up in Appalachia is a challenge; for ten-year old Icy Sparks in the 1950’s, an orphan living with her wonderful grandparents it is even more challenging because of her misunderstood and undiagnosed illness. only understood at the end of the novel. A must read. (Shepherd)

Isaacs’s Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson. On September 8, 1900, a huge hurricane ripped into Galveston, Texas. By the time the water and winds subsided, entire streets had disappeared and as many as 10,000 were dead, making this the worst natural disaster in America's history. In Isaac’s Storm, Erik Larson draws together hundreds of personal accounts and archival documents to tell the story of the hurricane and of how it changed Americans’ perceptions about themselves and about what their society could accomplish at the turn of the 20th century. Larson weaves his careful research into a really engaging narrative, and by focusing on Isaac Cline, chief of the Galveston Weather Bureau at the time, gives us a hero through whose eyes we witness both the event itself and the changes it wrought on his society. (Gunzenhauser)

Kiss My Tiara by Susan Jane Gilman. This is a guide written by a "second generation feminist" to her younger "sisters." She addresses ideas of beauty, love, work, sex and life with a humor that is bold, charming and filled with hard-earned truths. From the table of contents, with chapter headings like "Beauty Tips from a Mental Institution" and "Career Advice and Nail Polish," Gilman makes her readers laugh, and better yet, think about the role of present day feminists as well as the future of women as players in the 21st century world. (McKenna)

Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s Hotel by Seven Irish Writers. Each writer provides a story for seven separate rooms in the newly refurbished Finbar’s Hotel. A connecting thread helps weave the story into a loosely connected whole. The writers have chosen not to acknowledge, publicly, which room’s story they wrote. Have fun trying to decide. if it even matters to you! (Shepherd)

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich. This book continues with the line of characters the author created in Love Medicine, The Beet Queen and Tracks. Once you are caught in the intertwined stories of these families and their lives, how can you not read the latest? (O’Conner)

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (1886). How about a classic by a man whose ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and whose heart--literally--was removed, "wrapped in a small towel and placed in a biscuit tin," and buried in a cemetery near his hometown? In the first chapter of the novel a man sells his wife --and then we see what the fates have in store for him! (Mihm)

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. This is a great detective story at heart, but it’s also much more than that. The narrator, Lionel Essrog, is a private investigator with Tourette’s Syndrome, a condition that creates lots of barriers to clear and effective communication (among other things). so in the novel, Essrog confronts a dual problem: he tries to solve the murder case, but he also has to solve the problem of how to interview the witnesses he needs, and of how to tell us his story at all. The detective story is engaging, and the narrative problems that Lethem raises are a fascinating study, especially for those who are interested in writing some narrative themselves. A good, quick, thought-provoking summer read. (Gunzenhauser)

Paradise Dome by Yusef Komunyakaa (Wesleyan University Press). A collection of poems by an amazing contemporary writer. Raised poor in the South, venturing through stays in Vietnam, St. Louis and Bloomington, Indiana, finally coming to rest at Princeton, Komunyakaa is one of those rare poetic success stories. His work is honest, true, and moving. He's not overly obscure, yet remains deep. (Bradway)

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. This is narrated "by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959·. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa." (Alabi)

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman. Colette’s biography which took nine years to research and write is well-worth waiting for. Not a quick read. but one we must savor page by page. Would that we could experience the world as Colette was able. and use those experiences to write what some consider to be some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature. (Shepherd)

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900). How about a classic by a writer from Terre Haute, Indiana—a novel that was withdrawn from publication because—so the story goes—the publisher's wife found it offensive. The novel opens with a young woman of 18, raised in Wisconsin, going to live in Chicago, and with Dreiser's observation: "When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse." So what happens to Carrie? (Mihm)

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977). How about a brilliant contemporary classic by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature? The novel gives us characters with weird names—Pilate, Macon Dead, Milkman. It gives us a woman without a navel, a legend and tradition of flying Africans, and a search for gold treasure—all in a realistic setting of racial segregation, random acts of murder, and the central character's search for identity and purpose. (Mihm)

Therapy by David Lodge (the same English novelist who did Nice Work). This tale recounts the humorous unraveling of a British sitcom writer and his tangled relations with three separate women. (Guillory)

The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie. This fascinating collection of short stories surprises and delights in its tales of sexual ambiguity, mostly based on members of the Spokane Tribe in eastern Washington state. (O’Conner)
The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch. This is a touching, beautiful and fascinating book about the American way of death. Lynch, who is both a poet and an undertaker, looks at the evolution of our treatment of the dying and the dead over the past one hundred years. He observes that the family home was once a place where all major life events occurred: births, weddings, illnesses and deaths. Now we "sanitize" our homes by forcing these events into "institutionalized" settings. His prose is both blunt and poetic as he talks about lost relatives, indoor plumbing and the gains and losses of progress. (McKenna)

Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier. I will quote a review: "If Our Bodies, Ourselves has become the bible of women’s bodies, let Woman: An Intimate Geography be our Shakespeare." Peggy Orenstein. What else is there to say? National Book Award Finalist. (Shepherd)