"It makes you want to start drinking and smoking and jump into the back of a pickup truck and see the country - not that we do any of these things anymore," he says. The delight, though, "is in welcoming back an old friend."

For your warm-weather perusal

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love:

Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz. "The foremost historian on marriage. Immensely readable. Stupendously fascinating."

Easter Everywhere: A Memoir by Darcey Steinke. "Intelligent and beautifully written. A hipster growing up in a family of ministers and her own evolution through Christianity."

The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventure on the Edge of a City by Robert Sullivan. "Literally, in his backyard, he found this adventure story."

Oh The Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey. "Pretty spectacular memoir."

Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg. "Based on the notes of 18th-century naturalist Gilbert White's notes on a tortoise in his backyard and told from the view of Timothy, who is a she and one of the most eloquent, elegant narrators and a naturalist herself."

Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters. "A British advocate for the homeless recreates the biography of this homeless character who is like a Martin Amis character, a foul-mouthed, chaotic disaster of a person who is also very funny."

Christian Bauman, author of the novels The Ice Beneath You and Voodoo Lounge:

At Freddie's and Offshore, both by Penelope Fitzgerald. "The first is about a theater school in London in the 1960s run by this slightly crazed woman. Offshore [winner of the 1979 Booker Prize] is about a houseboat community."

Felicia's Journey by William Trevor. "People know him as this great Irish short-story writer, but he also writes great short novels. This one is a bit of a psychological thriller."

de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. "In my new novel, the protagonist is a woman and her husband is an artist so I'm reading this wonderful book," winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

Joe Drabyak, general bookseller, Chester County Book & Music Company, West Chester:

The Visible World by Mark Slouka. "Almost autobiographical fiction told from the voice of a son of Czech immigrants who settle in the Lehigh Valley after World War II. He goes back to reconstruct his parents' life, beginning with the understanding that his mother was in love with someone else, a man in their country's resistance."

Perfect, Once Removed: When Baseball Was All the World to Me by Phillip Hoose. "A lovely memoir about a boy ungainly in sport who wants to be proficient in baseball. So he writes his cousin once removed, who happens to be Don Larsen, the Yankee who pitched a perfect game in the 1956 World Series."

Grayson by Lynne Cox. "Memoir of a competitive long-distance swimmer who befriends a lost baby whale while training off the coast of California and realizes that, if she swims to shore, the baby will be beached and die. Her true efforts to reunite the whale with her mother."

Land of Lincoln by Andrew Ferguson. "There are 14,000 books on Lincoln, and he's adding another one while trying to understand our national fascination."

Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See by Robert Kurson. "Blind since youth, Mike May never hesitated to do anything, setting speed records in downhill racing, becoming the first blind analyst for the CIA. Then he finds out he is one of the rare people eligible for an operation where he can have his sight restored, and does."