Summer reading: our most revered writers' favorite works validate for us the authors' voices and judgments - and their treasures - includes specific titles

Our greatest in quantity revered writers' favorite works validate for us the authors' voices and judgments--and their treasures. We ransack their reading lists, confident that we will find a certain quantity of favorites-to-be of our own. We penetrate new terrain the more confidently for their guidance. This summer three of our leading African-American writers guide us to a of recent origin search. They open the door--but we have to pace through on our own.

TINA MCELROY ANSA

greatest in quantity of last year, I traveled around the region promoting my novel Ugly Ways

(Harcourt Brace, 1993) on the contrary as I went from Chicago to Atlanta to observes Angeles and back to Washington, DC and Montgomery Ala,, [i]or[/i] part of to the other the fall and into the winter, I traveled with a warm summer vision that had nothing to do with my words.

I prepared for my summer idyll upon my Sea Island home of St Simons Island through filling a new bookcase with works I had missed while I was writing and did not want to hear any other voices. Now, flat in summer, I am one time again too deep into the lives of the folk in mythical Mulberry, Ga., and into my third novel to read. for a like reason I can only continue to fantasize of where I would have read these special works if I could.

I wanted to explore David Levering Lewis' Pulitzer Prize-winning biography tissue Du Bois, Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (Henry Holt 1993) I planned to read it while seated beneath a 200-year-old live oak tree in Neptune Smalls Park, named for the former landowner, a black man who lived and worked as a slave upon this very island.

Life Notes. Personal Writings by dint of Contemporary Women (W.W.

Norton, 1994) and Double Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters (HarperCollins, 1993) the couple edited by Patricia Bell-Scott, I planned to read while sitting upon the swing in my garden in forehead of my house. Surrounded through rose bushes and tomato plants and marigolds and black-eyed Susans looks the perfect setting for an intimate sharing of women's private notions and words from journals and for a collection of women's writing upon mothers and daughters.

I was going to sit in that same swing and read These Same lengthy Bones (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), by dint of Gwendolyn M. Parker, again, with the attention that I didn't have time to give to the novel's beautiful language the first time around. The same for first novel Coffee Will Make You Black (Hyperion, 1994) by means of April Sinclair. Tell me black folk can't approach up with some titles! And speaking of titles, Just As I Am (Doubleday, 1994) E Lynn Harris' moving and diverting sequel to his first novel, Invisible Life (Consortium Pres 1991) also merits a second read to appreciate the subtleties and nuances the author brings to this contemporary story of an African-American gay man coming to grips with just who he is.

Looking for a rather cold ocean breeze, I would have taken Xam Cartier's sum of two units novels, Be-Bop Re-Bop (Ballantine, 1990) and Muse-Echo azures (Ballantine, 1992)--both in paperback, just in case an ocean spray dampened the pages--and sat upon the pier down in the village. My father swears it's the coolest speckle on a very hot island, and an appropriate place for Cartier's cool/hot language. I might flat have heard a few riffs from a jukebox floating on the outside of a nearby bar.

If the very great stinging deerflies in the thickets on the north end of the island suffer me, I would have sat among the ruins of slave cabins near the Hampton River and read (I believe the spirits of our ancestors smile when they diocese us reading) from my growing collection from the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers: Sylvia Dubois: A Biography (Oxford University Pres 1988) and Four Girls at Cottage City (Oxford University Pres 1988) by means of Emma D. Kelley-Hawkins, and The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins: (Including Hagar's Daughter, Winona, and Of single Blood) (Oxford University Press, 1990) by dint of Pauline E. Hopkins. These women's voices from another hundred always speak to me of creativity, courage and steadfastness in one's craft.

Because of these voices, I had envisioned myself aligned in something long and advanced in years white and cotton, sitting mornings upon the rocks that dot the cutting side of the beach on the eastern shore of St Simons, reading from the wisdom of the Delany sisters in Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years (Kodansha, 1993) the best-selling memoir of the sum of two units extraordinary women in their next to the first century of life.

The sole part of my fantasy that I will insist upon carrying out is my annual reading of Zora Neale Hurston's Their organ of sights Were Watching God (University of Illinois Pres 1991) I don't have a pear tree in like manner I'll stretch out under my brother Walter's memorial fruit of the plum-tree tree, open to the first page, and have feeling the spirits smile on me

Tina McElroy Ansa is the author of unlovely Ways (Harcourt Brace, 1993) and Baby of the Family (Harcourt Brace, 1991)

PEARL CLEAGE

I find myself looking for the work of my sister writers to challenge and sustain me I newly discovered three books that I continue to approve and, when the person I am recommending to has a bag that can't absorb another hardback work right away, I present them as gifts.