Fifteen Books to Kick Off Your Summer:  As spring winds down and summer roars into being, here is a list of fifteen phenomenal books that would make for a great summer of reading:

1: Glenn Blake "Drowned Moon":  Blake's short stories, all set in Southeast Texas, are near perfect etchings of the struggles from down below.  His characters yearn and fight and claw their way around, all in the attempt to escape what is and what has been made for them.  He'll haunt you as much as he'll make you think.  A great, poetic collection.

What follows below is an abbreviated list of some of my favorite books from the past year. Many of them were written well prior to 2011, but I am not interested in a "best of" list from whatever books were released between 2010 and 2011. A brief glance at publisher's catalogs will show you that most of those books are worthless. But I won't use this space to bemoan the state of contemporary literature. That would, after all, not be totally accurate. For as much crap is out in the world, there is also a plethora of fine reading if one knows where to look. The books below are the ones that affected…

I'm known as a construction worker who became a novelist and college professor, and because of this, I regularly get e-mails from people who are not in a position to leave careers and go back to college, but who want to read great books.

During finals week my last semester of undergraduate school I did one of the few smart things I've ever done. I roamed the university, walking into the various buildings, finding the offices of the professors. Anthropology professors, Math professors, Engineering professors, History, Philosophy, Geology, Physics, Music—scores of professors in dozens…