Summer Reading.

For those looking to expand their reading horizons this summer, I cannot recommend too highly the late Octavia E. Butler, who died last spring at her home in Seattle following an accidental fall. Her works are usually categorized as science fiction. Yet Butler, an African-American and a feminist of quiet determination, defied formulaic sci-fi while exploiting the freedom of the genre to take her usually female and nonwhite characters to places where mainstream fiction would tend to deny them. Kindred (Beacon Press, $14,287 pp.), for instance, uses the convention of time travel to send its African-American heroine journeying to the antebellum South, where she experiences slavery firsthand. Parable of the Sower (Aspect, $6.99, 304 pp.) takes us to a believable dystopian Los Angeles as experienced by a literal empath, a woman for whom others' pain is experienced physically. One of Butler's last books was Fledgling (Seven Stories, $24.95, 352 pp.), an extraordinary vampire story that takes us beyond cliche to empathize with a race of alien beings that must feed on others' lives to survive. These are a few of my favorites. But all of Butler's work deserves to be read and reread often enough to help fill the gap left to us by her premature death.

Another great African-American author has been lost to us prematurely in recent years--poet June Jordan, who died in 2002 of breast cancer. Her brilliant poetry was published intermittently over the decades, in small collections that lent themselves to being showcased in mainstream media as the work of a "topical" or "activist" author. The full span of this writer's genius can now be appreciated with the republication of nearly all her poetry in one beautiful edition, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, $40, 660 pp.). Though the activist impulse remains visible throughout, Jordan's work in its complete form is certainly not narrowly rhetorical in its focus--certainly no more so than that, say, of the Cavalier poets of the seventeenth century, or of any other population subject to urgent political pressure. Far from being doctrinaire, to my mind Jordan's poetry presents an accomplishment of the highest order.

Science fiction and poetry do not, at first glance, appear to have much in common with murder mysteries, but it gives me pleasure to recommend the Robin Light series by Barbara Block, beginning with Chutes and Adders (Kensington, 296 pp., out of print but available secondhand online) and continuing currently with Salt City Blues (Severn, $28.95, 263 pp.). Block's heroine is, like the author herself, a Manhattanite transplanted to Syracuse, New York. But there the outward resemblances end; Robin Light runs a pet shop and works as an amateur private detective. Though Light is an agreeable heroine, with a chilling sense of humor and an acerbic compassion for her fellow human beings, the central character of Block's novels is Syracuse itself. The strange upstate city with its grim weather, decaying neighborhoods, omnipresent university, and multiethnic population is rendered as deftly and as potently as William Kennedy's Albany--a richly detailed setting that will be seductive even to those readers who are not devotees of mysteries. It's only gravy that the mysteries are fun and sometimes eerie, with a supporting cast of feckless urban teens and other Salt City types, and an inevitable pet-related twist.

Ann-Marie MacDonald's As the Crow Flies (HarperPerennial, $14.95, 848 pp.) is also a mystery, but at the opposite end of the scale in tone. It is more researched than many straight historical novels, though the action takes place only some forty years ago. The plot follows parallel tracks involving the murder of a grade schooler and high derring-do between British, Nazi, and American agents, on the one hand, and a young girl's coming of age amid parental betrayal and sexual abuse, on the other. Like the author, Madeleine grew up on army bases around the Western hemisphere, and like many autobiographical stand-ins for their creators, this heroine becomes another kind of artist. She does not, however, become a painter or a musician: she becomes a standup comedienne (with Bugs Bunny as her heroine), and manages to solve the mystery while making her own journey toward healing and forgiveness. Though the plot occasionally overreaches, the writing is so engaging and Madeleine herself such a sympathetic protagonist that the reader is all but guaranteed to race to the book's end.

Tanya Avakian, a librarian, lives in Delaware.