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On the drive to and from the city Monday night to hear Jonathan Lethem, Rachel and I discussed books. Precocious and well-read, but not yet 17, she has yet to discover authors like John Barth, Robert Coover, and T. C. Boyle. On the other hand, she has taken a workshop with Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon at 826 Valencia, is helping select entries for Dave's next volume of The Best American Nonrequired Reading series, and regularly peruses McSweeney's and The Believer, and is thereby able to introduce me to many younger writers and unfamiliar literary publications. So despite the generational difference, our book discussion was anything but one-sided. (I hope.)

As we spoke, it occurred to me that I had one book to recommend to her above all others, a book which conveniently enough I've also been meaning to champion here. So while it is still in print, treat yourself to a copy of The salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors, edited by Laura Miller. It is an indispensable reference guide every bibliophile should own and my favorite guide to modern American novelists. The only reason to think twice about recommending it is that it is now four years out-of-date (so add your voice to mine in begging for a new edition).

Nonetheless, this is a passionate volume crammed with useful and entertaining information on 225 authors with contributions by nearly 100 authors and reviewers (Eggers and Lethem among them). Each entry includes a complete (and invaluable) bibliography of the author's novels, along with the critic's opinion of the best material (including the one novel to choose if you plan to only read one), and suggestions of similar authors to consider.

These are zealous, opinionated entries incidentally, unlike the typical dispassionate bibliographical summaries available elsewhere. A few are scathing (like Kate Moses's dismissal of Edwidge Danticat's first novel as reading like "a high school student wrote it," along with her accusation of critics being guilty of "race pandering" and Danticat's career being "built wholly of atmosphere"... yikes!), while most entries, suggested as they were by critics who were passionate about an author, read like Lethem's description of Philip K. Dick as "a bohemian autodidact, who stumbled through genius and madness" and produced a "genre all his own."

The salon.com Reader's Guide is written for lovers of books and, by editorial design, reads as though it were written by intelligent, literate friends answering your questions about an unfamiliar author. If my library contained only the novels discussed and recommended in this guide, I would be set for life. In fact, about a third of the authors in this guide are already on my shelves and that undoubtedly contributes to making this volume so personally relevant and appealing. Just consider the following sampling of included authors, each of whom has at least two volumes in my library:

Martin Amis, Nicholson Baker, John Barth, T. C. Boyle
Charles Bukowski, Anthony Burgess, Caleb Carr, Angela Carter
Michael Chabon, Tom Clancy, Robert Coover, Michael Crichton
Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joan Didion
John Fowles, John Gardner, William Gibson, John Hawkes
Joseph Heller, Carl Hiaasen, John Irving, Ken Kesey
Jerzy Kosinski, Ursula K. Le Guin, Elmore Leonard, Jonathan Lethem
Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry
Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Walter Percy, Thomas Pynchon
Tom Robbins, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Paul Theroux
J. R. R. Tolkien, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Tom Wolfe

Just entering that list makes me want to lock all the doors, unplug the TV, and take the phones off the hooks, then start a roaring fire in the fireplace, make myself a big thermos of tea, and read non-stop for days without interruption.

You should do the same. Let this volume get you started.