Check out Alan Cheuse’s recommendations in Summer’s Most Magical Form of Transport: Books:
Books take us anywhere and everywhere. We look at letters on the page and translate them into scenes in our mind. When we read a wonderful novel, it’s as though, as my dear old late friend John Gardner used to say, we’re falling into a vivid, continuous waking dream. Short stories, novels, poems are someone else’s composition that we play and interpret, and so turn them into dreams of our own.
myfanwy collins 