Some readers trend toward pure pleasure, the breezy brief novel or short-story collection coruscating with humor or revelation, or a mystery that pulls you along in its slipstream, inviting you to devour the thing in one sitting. For the latter, Robert Wilson, Alan Furst, John Burdett, Ian Rankin, Ken Bruen and Denise Mina are contemporary masters.

Some readers feel the season is optimal for tackling overlooked classics, those big books never assigned (or finished) at school, the masterworks that seem essential to life's education. War and Peace remains the Summer of '97. The summer of '04 was spent in the Alps - well, not literally - with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Last summer? A festival of Roth.

Toward exploring the bounty of summer reading, we queried regional authors and independent booksellers about their seasonal traditions, favorites and current ambitions.

"Whatever I tend to be writing determines what I'm reading," says Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best-selling Eat, Pray, Love who now lives in New Jersey near the Delaware River. "The only sad thing about making my living as a writer is I've lost the ability to be a casually inspired reader. Right now, I'm writing about marriage, so I'm reading books on the subject."

Gilbert has written award-winning fiction and nonfiction, but tends toward the latter in her suggestions. "One of my favorite books ever, which I tend to reread, is Meadowlands by Robert Sullivan, which resonates even more now that I live in New Jersey," says Gilbert, a world traveler.

Her sister, Catherine Gilbert Murdock, author of the young-adult novels The Off Season and Dairy Queen, says, "Before I was ever a children's book writer, I was a passionate children's book reader. I still prefer them to anything written for so-called 'adults.' "

Christian Bauman, author of the novels Voodoo Lounge and The Ice Beneath You, acknowledges that his reading habits differ with the seasons. "It's a different time with a different mood, just as with food, things tend to be heavier in the winter," he says. "This summer, I'm really attracted to shorter and briefer novels. The British have this great tradition of the brief yet powerful novels, where in America all the writers seem to think they need to weigh in with 800-pound books."

Nevertheless, his nonfiction selection is a massive 732-page doorstop, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan's de Kooning: An American Master, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for biography. "This will span the summer," he says. "I'm writing a novel where the protagonist is a woman and her husband is an artist."

Ken Kalfus, a National Book Award finalist for A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, likes to read about places where he is traveling. He e-mails from vacation on the Greek island of Skopelos in the western Aegean, "I'm working through The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault, a novel about classical Greece, Socrates and the Peloponnesian War."

Summer doesn't always deliver a respite for writers. "It seems like the past many years, I always have a book deadline at the end of the summer," says Diane McKinney-Whetstone, author of Leaving Cecil Street and Tumbling. "Reading remains sort of a fantasy at this time. It almost feels illicit to read a short story when I sneak one from Edward Jones' collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children."

Andy Kahan, director of the Free Library of Philadelphia's author events office, says, "My summer reading is an opportunity to catch up on all the great books I missed during the fall when I'm forever just dashing through first chapters to keep up. The ones I love, I return to." In this case, he returned to Michael B. Oren's Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present and the enigmatic Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day.

William Lashner, the best-selling mystery writer, is big on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. "Books that are assigned in high school get a bad rap. This one is a blast."

He's also game to read a biography if the writing and reporting are significant. "I was never interested in Dean Martin," says the author of Marked Man and Falls the Shadow, "but Nick Tosches' Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams is amazing," an opinion shared by many.

"I literally have a list of 60 books at any time that I want to get to," says Curtis Sittenfeld, author of the best-selling novel Prep. "I have a bad habit of reading six books at once." Summer is proving no respite as she works on her third novel and is immersed in nonfiction on a specific subject - "but I can't say what it is because I'm sort of paranoid that way."

Lashner tries to finish a book before the season so he can relax. "The best summer books you can't stop reading. It's not a good time to go back to Ulysses for the third attempt. I reread Chandler and Hammett. Chandler is my one constant."

Sheila Avelin, owner of the Big Blue Marble Bookstore in Mount Airy, has "such piles and piles of books to read that I have an impatience for ones that don't immediately suck me in. I tend to reread detective series in the summer that are enjoyable."

"We're not really of the leisure class," says Ed Luoma, co-owner of the Readers' Forum in Wayne. "My reading habits don't really change. I'm always looking for good books."

Joe Drabyak, general bookseller at the Chester County Book & Music Co. in West Chester, says, "I have real eclectic taste but will read things related to a particular event when it's occurring. I'm always interested in the Tour de France and am reading a memoir of Floyd Landis."

Another seasonal read is Philip Hoose's Perfect, Once Removed: When Baseball Was All the World to Me, "which is just wonderful about the sport."