| Cathleen Falsani

What’s on the summer reading list this year?

So you’ve already chosen swim togs to flatter your hard-won, beach-ready figure after hours at the gym and a spring full of salads and fat-freeness.

The beach towel and flip-flops have been rescued from hibernation. And the pop anthems for the summer of 2004 are already working their way into your subconscious.

We the big town stumpas, and and big sound pumpas, the beat bump bumpas in your trunk trunkas . . .

Now all you need is a good book.

How about a little something to entertain your spirit as well as your imagination?

This week, a number of Chicago’s religious leaders — some better known than others — revealed what they’re reading, and what they’d like to be reading if they had time to sit on the beach for a few hours with a fruity umbrella drink or two.

When Rabbi Ira Youdovin, executive director of the Board of Rabbis curls up with a good book to pass the long summer evenings at the top of his list is a little something Kabbalistic: Daniel C. Matt’s new English translation of The Zohar.

“It’s … a fantastic and groundbreaking work,” Youdovin said.

He’s also picked up a copy of The Liberated Bride, a novel by the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua set in 1990s Israel chronicling the life of Professor Yochanan Rivkin as he deals with the mysteries of the Algerian Civil War and his son’s divorce.

While he travels through Spain for the Parliament of the World’s Religions next month, or sits on his deck overlooking New York’s Lake Champlain later this summer, Bishop William Persell, head of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, also will be reading one of Yehoshua’s novels, A Journey to the End of the Millennium: A Novel of the Middle Ages.

(Note to self: Check out this Yehoshua fella.)

Persell also will bring along The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem about a black boy and a white boy in modern-day Brooklyn (where the bishop used to live), and The High Flyer, a novel by Susan Howatch that weaves together spirituality and suspense.

Michael Kotzin, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Chicago, also will be turning his literary attention to Israel as he reads Still Life with Bombers: Israel in the Age of Terrorism, by David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Report. “It’s very current, very personal,” Kotzin said.

As he drives across rural Pennsylvania on his vacation this week, the Rev. Stan Davis, associate director of the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago, has brought several books — an eclectic mix.

There’s Credo, a collection of writings by William Sloane Coffin the former chaplain of Yale University; The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, a tome about the 1893 Chicago World’s fair and a serial killer by Erik Larson; and The Whitechapel Conspiracy by Anne Perry, a mystery novel set in Victorian England.

Davis is also digging in to The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War by Elisabeth Sifton, daughter of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote the original “Serenity Prayer.”

It might seem like an irreverent choice, but Kareem Irfan, chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago is reading The Koran for Dummies by Chicago writer Sohaib Sultan.

“I was looking for an amusing book, but when I picked it up, I realized it’s got more substance than I thought,” said Irfan, who admits he may also spend some time with one of cartoonist Scott Adams’ Dilbert books if he can find the time. “But it is a scholarly work. This guy did a fabulous job.”

When she’s not thumbing through an issue of Simple Living magazine or catching up on the latest Amy Tan novel, Asayo Horibe, president of the Buddhist Council of the Midwest, said she will be reading What Buddhists Believe by Elizabeth Harris, Teachings of the Buddha by Jack Kornfield, and an exploration of Christianity written by the Dalai Lama called The Good Heart.

While he doesn’t expect to have much time to lounge along the shores of Lake Michigan or anywhere else this summer, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church on the South Side, has picked up House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties by Craig Unger, and Charles Ogletree’s history of the first 50 years after the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown vs. Board of Education, All Deliberate Speed.

Pfleger’s “light” pick is The Dream Giver by Bruce Wilkinson, an evangelical Christian writer and author of The Prayer of Jabez. “I had to have one optimistic book amongst all the bull,” he said. “What are the dreams God has for us? Are we really trying to fulfill our dreams or are we just living life?”

In his quieter moments this summer, the Rev. Phil Blackwell, pastor of the First United Church at Chicago Temple, plans to lose himself in Jayber Crow, a novel by Wendell Berry.

“It’s a story about the recollections of a small-town barber in Kentucky,” said Blackwell, who is also reading the collected works of Irish poet Seamus Heaney. “Barry is pretty spiritual himself, so there are, for me, some very significant religious insights from a Christian point of view.”

One of the most spiritually wise people I know — a North Side lady we’ll call “Mrs. S.” — is reading Mitch Albom’s Five People You Meet in Heaven and Encounter the Enlightened: Conversations with the Master by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, a yogic mystic from India.

But when it comes to packing books for her trip to the beaches of Mexico next week, Mrs. S. has one simple rule: “On the beach, I’ll only read heaving bosoms and detective books.

“In the summer I won’t read anything that makes me sad,” she said, adding that Lisa Jackson’s bodice-ripper Impostress is at the top of her list.

As for me, my apple-green beach bag will be heavy with Drop City, a novel by T. Coraghessen Boyle about the less-than-utopian hippie commune in California and Alaska; The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions by Rolling Stone contributing editor Randall Sullivan; and Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, an on-the-road look at the spiritual underbelly of America by Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau.

But if I had to recommend one book, a laugh-out-loud, cry-a-little, change-your-life number, it would be Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul by British humorist Tony Hendra.

You won’t want to put it down, so remember to apply extra sunscreen.