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Between the beach books and all the long-postponed professional tomes, summer has reading covered. Summer reading is a uniquely personal pleasure, with time for the projects we put off all through the year. For many Harvard people, that can mean catching up on colleagues' works or scholarly subjects that have been neglected during the term. But even in the groves of academe, sometimes all one wants to do is relax with a good read.

Just ask John Stilgoe. The Orchard professor in the history of landscape development will not be totally free to indulge in reading for fun. But in between teaching summer classes, he looks forward to the pages of Peter H. Spectre's A Passage in Time: Along the Coast of Maine by Schooner. "Since I'm not sailing along the coast of Maine this summer," he says, "this is the next best thing."

Marlies Mueller also looks for a summer escape through books. Her top picks include Paul Johnson's The Birth of the Modern. "I've read it before but I want to go through it again," says the senior preceptor in Romance languages and literatures. "It's one of my favorites. I also can't wait to start John Julius Norwich's Byzantium: The Decline and Fall. I'm really looking forward to that." Otherwise, Mueller's summer reading will be related to her work. As a specialist in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature, she says she hasn't much time for Spanish authors. Before classes start again, therefore, she means to read Nobel laureate Camilo Jos� Cela's Primer viaje Andaluz (The first Andalusian voyage).

Nonfiction surfaces on everyone's list, but recent fiction also scores points with Crimson luminaries. Women's basketball coach Kathy Delaney-Smith intends to read several books on motivation and leadership: "I have a new assistant coach with a tremendous library that I hope to invade," she says. Delaney-Smith also admits that she plans to indulge a sweet tooth for the novels of both Stephen and Tabitha King, as well as those by Joseph Wambaugh and John Hall. Chemistry professor Cynthia Friend will also be starting her summer with nonfiction, particularly Bob Rotella's Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect, which she hopes will improve her own game, and Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics, by Ruth Lewis Sime, Ph.D. '65. The recent Meitner biography has a personal connection; Friend was given her copy by Leo Kahn '38 after he heard her speak on women in science. (Kahn also endowed a chair for associate professors that Friend held before she received tenure.) But Friend is also looking forward to reading The Shape of Wilderness, a novel by Shelley Berc, and plans to indulge in some mystery and murder by way of P.D. James's Innocent Blood, which she will be reading with her daughter.

Irven DeVore is not above a little cloak-and-dagger business either. The Moore professor of biological anthropology and curator of primatology at the Peabody Museum concludes a particularly long summer reading list with "anything new (or that I have not previously discovered) by Elmore Leonard, Tony Hillerman, or Emma Lathan." His other fiction picks include the "wonderfully campy" 1936 publication Harvard Has A Homicide, by Timothy Fuller, and Sue Townsend's The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4. Lest anyone mistake DeVore for a lowbrow, his summer plans also include God: A Biography, by Jack Miles, Ph.D. '71 ("How can one resist a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography with such a title?"); Richard Posner's Sex and Reason; Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, by Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams; and Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus, by John D. Crossan. The Crossan book, DeVore explains, was loaned to him by fellow anthropologist David Pilbeam, director of the Peabody Museum. "We have recently discovered a mutual interest in the early history of Christianity."

For most, however, the vacation season retains fairly close ties to the school year, as the number of work-oriented titles show. Howard Gardner, for example, plans to reread some books by British novelist Pat Barker and the "Rabbit" tetralogy by John Updike '54 (see related story). But the professor of education will also be perusing "large portions of Virginia Woolf's fiction, diaries, and letters" for a project. Susan R. Suleiman, professor of Romance languages and comparative literatures, looks forward to Israeli novelist David Grossman's See Under: Love and to a collection of essays, Museums of the Mind, by Ellen Handler Spitz, M.A.T. '64. But she will focus much of her vacation reading (and rereading) on Holocaust memoirs (such as Miklos Nyiszli's Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account and Gerda Klein's All But My Life) for her class next year on "The Holocaust and Problems of Representation." The Young professor of Sino-Vietnamese history, Hue-Tam Ho Tai, intends to pick up Jane Smiley's Moo, "now that it's in paperback," and hopes to finally finish Pat Barker's The Ghost Road, but that may be all for fiction this summer. "As chair of the Benda Prize committee of the Association for Asian Studies, I can expect to be reading a lot of scholarly works on Southeast Asia over the summer," she explains. "I also hope, finally, to read Simon Schama's new book, Landscape and Memory, and various other works on memory, museums, and tourism as part of my current project on the presentation of the past in Vietnamese museums and other commemorative sites."

Fellow Harvard-Radcliffe authors rate high for everyone. Along with Updike, who appeared on several lists, other authors with Crimson ties include Seamus Heaney, Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory, who has a new collection of poems out, titled The Spirit Level, and Stephen Jay Gould. The Heaney collection and Selected Works, by the late Jane Kenyon, come from the reading list of Stratis Haviaris, curator of the Poetry and Farnsworth rooms in Lamont Library. Haviaris says that his own writing, as well as reading current works for the library and for the Harvard Review, which he edits, keep him busy during the semesters. Over his vacation, therefore, he also hopes to get to Extinction, by the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard; Italo Calvino's Numbers in the Dark; and a new biography of surrealist Andr� Breton, Revolution of the Mind, by Mark Polizzotti.

Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man graces Radcliffe president Linda Wilson's reading list. Wilson admitted that she hadn't yet organized a complete list, but her candidates include a mix of novels and nonfiction works, such as All God's Children, the recent study of violence and families by Fox Butterfield '61, A.M. '64; Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error; Hitler's Willing Executioners, by Daniel Goldhagen '81, Ph.D. '92; and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust. For lighter reading, the president lists Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before. And on a practical note, she has set aside Leadership without Easy Answers, by Ronald Heifetz, M.D. '77, M.P.A. '83, lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School, and The Effective Board of Trustees, by Richard P. Chait, Thomas P. Holland, and Barbara E. Taylor.

Her Harvard counterpart boasts an equally diverse list. Neil Rudenstine lists among his summer hopefuls the acclaimed biography Lincoln, by Warren professor of American history emeritus David Donald, as well as compendiums of shorter works perhaps better suited to lazy afternoons, including Collected Essays by Ralph Ellison. The head of Harvard also hopes to get to David McCullough's The Great Bridge, Fritz Stern's Gold and Iron, Osip Mandelstam's The Noise of Time, and Flow Chart, by poet John Ashbery '49, this summer. Last but not least, Rudenstine looks to the classics, listing Melville's Pierre and Trollope's He Knew He Was Right as most likely to be gracing the presidential beach blanket this summer.

Clea Simon '83 will have her first book, Mad House: Growing Up with Mentally Ill Siblings, published by Doubleday in May 1997, just in time for everyone's reading list next summer.

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