Rice University English professor Justin Cronin’s new novel, The Passage, promises to be one of the hottest new books coming out this summer, and former Houston First Lady Andrea White has already read it. A one-time writing student of Cronin’s, White got an advance copy of the book, the first in a post-apocalyptic vampire trilogy, for which Cronin got a reported $5 million advance.

“If you don’t mind being scared, you won’t be disappointed,” says White, herself an author. “I never read scary books, and I am still having nightmares from this one. It’s addictive.”

White is a big reader, and one of several Houstonians we asked to discuss what and how they’re reading this summer. White, for instance, reads mostly in traditional book form. But because she’s currently traveling a lot helping her husband (former mayor Bill White) campaign for governor, Andrea often reads books on her Kindle and listens to others on audio tapes.

Bill White also reads widely, says his wife, and loves books about science, history and business while she prefers historical fiction and biography. Sometimes they like the same book, one of which was The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes, by Bryan Burrough. Bill hasn’t read anything on a Kindle though, Andrea says. Along with his wife, Bill White often listens to books on tape, including one he’s reading this summer called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford.

Like Bill White, Houston Mayor Annise Parker doesn’t have much time to read except when she’s traveling. Formerly the co-owner of Inklings, a gay/feminist bookstore in Houston, Parker likes espionage tales, science fiction and lesbian fiction, and she reads “the old-fashioned way, most definitely. My house is filled with books.”

For Rich Levy, executive director of Inprint, an organization that brings more than a dozen literary writers and poets to read and discuss their work in Houston every year, reading is “an occupational hazard.” His summer reading will include new books by some of the following authors in the upcoming Inprint series: Novelist and two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey (Parrot and Olivier in America) and poets Kay Ryan (The Best of It: New and Selected Poems), Alicia Ostriker (The Book of Seventy) and Major Jackson (Holding Company).

When he’s not reading this summer for his job, Levy hopes to reread True Grit by Charles Portis, a new adaptation of which is currently being filmed in Texas. He’d also like “to get to one or two novels by one of my favorite Victorians, Anthony Trollope” and “lots more poetry."

Author of the poetry collection, Why Me?, Levy says he loves “the gestalt of the book – the pacing of it, page by page, flipping back and forth through it, the heft and shape of it,” and can’t imagine using a Kindle. “I read books, not machines,” he says.

A soothing chapter or three

Texas writer Gwen Zepeda, on the other hand, loves the Kindle her husband gave her for Christmas in 2008 and carries it with her all the time, along with “various paper books,” to read while commuting or waiting for appointments. Zepeda, author of Lone Star Legend and other books, calls herself “a binge/purge kind of reader” who reads as much as possible when not working on one of her own books.

At the top of Zepeda's list for this summer is Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel The Help: “I read the first chapter of it and it’s stuck in my mind like a catchy pop song ever since.”

Mimi Swartz, an executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, is excited about reading this summer because “so many people I know have books out.” She wants to read Robert Boswell’s story collection, The Heyday of the Insensitive; Texas Monthly editor Jake Silverstein’s Nothing Happened and Then It Did; Justin Cronin’s The Passage (scheduled for publication June 5), and Antonya Nelson’s Living to Tell: A Novel.

Swartz says she uses “all the technology available to read. That means when I travel I take my Kindle, at the gym I listen to books on my iPod, and in the car I listen to a book on CD.”

When Vance Muse, communications director of the Menil Collection, reads, he needs “the feel and inky smell of real books, the printed page.” One book he plans to travel with this summer is The Portable Dorothy Parker, a collection of Parker’s fiction, poetry and book and theater reviews that he calls “particularly refreshing and unpretentious. You laugh out loud reading Parker on such legends as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Hepburn and Bankhead.”

He’d also like to reread Slouching Toward Bethlehem, “diamond-hard essays by Joan Didion from the 1960s that read as if she’d written them today.”

Muse reads in bed, at night, and also first thing in the morning, sipping coffee. “Reading a chapter or two of a good book seems to be a much better way to start the day than getting jangled by the news,” he says. “No matter how the rest of the day goes, at least you’ve begun it on a quiet note, exploring or learning something.”