Benedicta Cipolla.

With a beefed-up Brad Pitt kicking off the summer movie season as Achilles in Troy, what better time to revisit the ancient epics? The obvious choice is to turn to Homer, and perhaps, in response to Hollywood's continuing interest in sexing up Greco-Roman adventures, many will. I, however, think the better bet during languid summer days is to crack open that other, often-over-looked epic, Vergil's Aeneid (Vintage, $10, 464 pp.).

I read most of the first six books in Latin back in high school, though I am ashamed to admit my dead-language skills are no longer up to snuff. Even today, though, I can remember the words that open this great tale of love, war, and the founding of Rome: Arma virumque cano--in Robert Fitzgerald's classic translation, "I sing of warfare and a man at war."

Like Odysseus, Aeneas faces a host of tasks following the Trojan War, but unlike the Greek hero, the Trojan Aeneas is destined to found a divinely ordained empire. First he must escape the sacked city and deal with the guilt that his flight causes; if you're ever in Rome, don't miss Bernini's moving statue of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises out of the burning Troy, at the Galleria Borghese.

Along the journey to Italy, Aeneas must contend with Juno's long-held grudge against the Trojans, the menacing Cyclops, the passage between Scylla and Charybdis, and a trip through the underworld. Book 4, the tale of Queen Dido's crazed passion for Aeneas during his extended layover in Carthage, is the one that really gets me, though I've always been a sucker for the dramatic rhetoric of tragic love.

With a review of who's who among gods and mortals fresh in your mind, check out Wittgenstein's Mistress (Dalkey Archive Press, $12.95, 256 pp.), David Markson's fascinating 1988 experimental novel. Markson's stream-of-consciousness narrative echoes James Joyce on Molly Bloom, with a postmodern gloss. Alone in a landscape devoid of life, the heroine ruminates on characters from Greek mythology, philosophy, and art. Familiarity with Italian Renaissance and twentieth-century painting, Greek tragedy, and metaphysics is helpful, but even without it, the book makes for a rollicking ride into the mind of someone who may or may not be clinically insane. Markson injects humor into his character's meditative monologue on being, lending the book a light-heartedness without which it might have become just an arid exercise in pushing the boundaries of fiction.

Humor also runs throughout Michael Frayn's Headlong (Picador USA, $14, 352 pp.), an absolutely hilarious look at the world of art critics and dealers. It's a perfect summer pick--literature in the guise of a page-turner--so you don't have to feel guilty devouring it on the beach.

Martin Clay, a philosopher who can't focus on his overdue book manuscript during a sabbatical at his country house, believes he has discovered a lost Old Master painting at the home of a once-wealthy neighbor. What follows is an uproarious string of lies and double-dealings. With its subtle commentary on academia, the art world, and English society, Headlong reminded me of The Information, Martin Amis's laugh-out-loud take on the publishing industry. Clay is a selfish boob who neglects his wife and baby in his quest for the painting he is sure will lead him to greatness and historical permanence, but Frayn is too skilled a writer to leave the character without any sympathetic qualities. Despite Clay's harebrained schemes and self-absorption, you find yourself rooting for him. And in the process, you even learn something about sixteenth-century painting and Dutch history. Not bad for a 350-page book that's hard to make last longer than a few days.

Summer is the season when daydreams threaten to hijack my workdays and my imagination is spurred, perhaps by the temperature, to ponder far-flung alter-natives to humid cities such as New York. It's when I most often feel like riding off into the sunset without any specific destination in mind. When that's not feasible, due to mundane commitments of job and rent, I turn to Bruce Chatwin, the late, peerless travel writer.

Most famous for In Patagonia, the book for which he abandoned a job at London's Sunday Times with a curt telegram "Have gone to Patagonia," Chatwin managed to capture not only place but personality in his writings. What Am I Doing Here? (Penguin, $15, 384 pp.), published in 1989, the year of his death, is a collection of brief sketches examining people and locales like Maria Reiche, a German who studies the Peruvian pampa, and a 1980 "Lament for Afghanistan," which should be of particular interest to the American reader of 2004. In the process, you get a glimpse of Chatwin the man and his self-described "anatomy of restlessness." The sheer breadth of his travels and experiences with foreign cultures may leave you wondering if you're really tied to those mundane commitments after all.

Benedicta Cipolla

A former correspondent for Catholic News Service in Rome, Benedicta Cipolla is a freelance writer in New York.