A Room With a View and Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster-Just in case you want to be on my wave-length about Italy and Tuscany. Throwing in Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun would help too. (Boaz)

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster-Upbeat and occasionally kinky essays on tennis, television, corn-dogs at the Illinois State Fair, and the films of David Lynch. Still not satisfied? Try his Infinite Jest, over 1,000 pages of a bizarre futuristic vision in which even the months of the year have corporate sponsors. (Guillory)

Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish--Nobody, and I mean NOBODY can write a story like Abish can. Who else manages to make one of the most significant comments about colonialism while writing a great mystery story--all the while confining himself, literally, to the linear structure of the alphabet. Really. All the words in chapter 1 begin with "A", in chapter two with "A" or "B" and so on all the way to "Z" and back down again. Incredible. (DeJoy)

Angle of Repose (Pulitzer Prize) and All The Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner-You can smell the dusty July sunlight on the pyracantha in these slice of life of people-a-little-smarter-than-we-are stories. One paints an intellectual, upper middle class portrait of the Eastern folks who emigrated West and the other looks at issues of birth and death. Underappreciated except as a Western regional writer, Stegner is a tour de force. Read one of these and judge for yourself. (Sterns)

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt.-About growing up poor in Ireland. Has been on the New York Times' bestseller list for over a year. (Boaz)

Anything We Love Can Be Saved by Alice Walker-Alice Walker shares with us her life as an activist. In a series of essays, she shares with us her views on a variety of contemporary issues. (Shepherd)

The Autobiography of my Mother by Jamaica Kinkaid-Poetic, evocative prose marks this look at life in the author's homeland, the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica. Kinkaid has made her mark as a writer (she writes a garden column for the New Yorker, for example). If you haven't read her, here's a great starting point. (Sterns)

Black Zodiac by Charles Wright-The 1998 Pulitizer Prize winner in poetry. Sounds interesting. (Boaz)

The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine dePizan--If Freud had read this book, he might have had a clue when he asked the question: "What do women want?" He didn't. But you should and this is still one of the best ways to start since 1405. (DeJoy)

CyberReader by Victor J. Vitanza--Who knows what is the cyberverse doing to our notions about reading and writing and our reading and writing practices? Vitanza does. This is a really readable book with lots of essays about important stuff for English types. Vitanza is as wacky as ever, but much more comprehensible than usual. (DeJoy)

The Fool's Progress by Edward Abbey-The senior voice of environmental activism writes an astonishingly rich and lucid semi-autobiographical novel. Writers should take a look at this for style alone. (Sterns)

Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman-A modern-day Wuthering Heights. (Shepherd)

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.-Long but stylish. (Stolley will beat me to finishing it.) About tennis, drugs, counter-culture, you name it. Wallace pushes post-modern to another level (and is very good). Catch his essays in Esquire, Tennis. (Boaz)

Killing Rage/Ending Racism by bell hooks--If you read American Literature, you have to read this collection of essays. In her usual cutting way, hooks tells us what we need to think about if we are going to read and write texts and lives that are true and focused on a difficult but necessary justice. It's not bad reflective history, either. (DeJoy)

Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat-Very interesting collection of short fiction by this young Haitian-born writer. (Sterns)

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick-This is one of those "what-if" novels that ask the question: what if Germany and Japan had won World War II? How would our world today be different? Or would it be that different at all? Great reading and a good introduction to Eastern philosophy and thinking, especially the I Ching. (O'Conner)

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (1945, 1984)-What's that book the Millikin statue on the bench is reading? After describing experiences in Nazi concentration camps, Frankl makes a wonderful case for the human spirit and what he calls "tragic optimism." (Mihm)

Men of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor-Gloria Naylor's most recent novel in which she revisits Brewster Place, the (living area) of her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place. In this new work, Naylor gives a voice to the men who were a part of her first novel, but whose presence were peripheral at best. (Shepherd)

Neuromancer by William Gibson-Some say this is the book that started the phenom known as cyberpunk, one of the foundations of the X-Generation culture. Case, a cyber-cowboy or data thief, plugs directly into the net to help steal the ultimate exchange medium of the future, information. But now dark and sinister forces are up to something big, putting Case's team into peril and threatening to change completely the world of the future. (O'Conner)

Paradise by Toni Morrison-Plan on your first of many readings of this novel. The density of the various stories told about several women of an all black town in the West merits a first, a second, a third . . . visit. A wonderful read. (Shepherd)

Personal History by Katherine Graham-Pulitzer Prize of 1998 for non-fiction. Quite a story about the publisher of the Washington Post at the time of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. (Boaz)

Rita Will by Rita Mae Brown-An intriguing autobiography of one of our more prolific contemporary writers who has always maintained that in order to write well one must have a cat sitting on the writing table. (Shepherd)

The Rules of Life by Fay Weldon--Miss Gabriella Sumpter returns from the great beyond in this classic re-wind tale about the untruth of the rules of life that keep us from doing good while we are alive. This is classic stuff--really--and full of the best kind of humor. Actually, check out anything by this author; you won't be disappointed! (DeJoy)

Sabbatical by John Barth-The life of the mind meets the lap of the waves. A stylistically and thematically fascinating look at literary criticism, sailing and sex during a summer sabbatical cruise along the Atlantic coast. (Sterns)

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb-I had to keep checking to make sure the author is male. She's Come Undone is the story of a young woman coming to terms with her life as she travels through the trials and tribulations of being eccentric in a non-eccentric world. (Shepherd)

Three Levels of Time by Harold T.P. Hayes-Clock time meets geological time meets astronomical time. A very cool look at the concept(s) of time. If you find a copy of this, you'll loan it but never give it away. (Sterns)

The Tree of Knowledge by Eva Figes--The great John Milton's daughter (fictionalized in relation to reality here) speaks about her father's ideas about gender and how they affected his daughter's economic, emotional and social lives. Enter into Deborah Milton's parlor as she talks with her guests about the great and not so great Miltonian 'ideals.' This is a quick and extremely engaging read. If you think you know Milton, READ THIS BOOK. (DeJoy)

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen F Ambrose (1996)-Drawing on diaries and journals, Ambrose gives us an intimate journey of discovery placed in the cultural and political contexts of the early 1800s. (Mihm)

Weird Words by Berent and Evans (1995)-Not your usual summer read, but a delightful book to keep on the breakfast table to pick up for a minute or two at a time. So what's "digamy," "olid," "oofle," "topophobia"? (Mihm)