It’s unavoidable. Every time I see a production of “Hamlet,” or read the play, there comes a moment when I think of Bette Midler.

I mentioned this to my sister-in-law, an English professor, over dinner the other night, thinking it would be a common experience among people who partook of pop culture in the ’80s. Turns out I was mistaken. “I’m so sorry,” she said condolingly. And then I had to explain: It’s because of “Outrageous Fortune,” Ms. Midler’s 1987 movie with Shelley Long, which (blasphemously) takes its name from Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech in Act 3.

To be, or not to be: that is the question.

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?

That’s the curse, and the beauty, of “Hamlet,” of course. Even among Shakespeare’s plays, snippets of which have popped up in our speech for hundreds of years, “Hamlet” is a richly plundered script. Its lines, ripped from their context, are part of our common language: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” “The play’s the thing,” “what dreams may come” — another movie title cribbed from the “To be, or not to be” speech. Hearing such lines intact, as anyone can do right now at Shakespeare in the Park, prompts the urge to pluck the book from the shelf and give it another read.

But when it comes to reading in general, plays are like poetry for most of us: We stopped with what we encountered in school, which probably meant Shakespeare, and probably gave the impression that reading drama isn’t for recreation.

Ah, but it is.

“My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of a road, or requited love,” Beverly, an alcoholic poet, says in Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County” (Theatre Communications Group, 138 pages, $13.95). Having collected not only the Pulitzer Prize but, as of last week, also the Tony Award for Best Play, Mr. Letts’s darkly comic portrait of a teemingly dysfunctional family headed by a bracingly vicious matriarch is one of the hottest tickets on Broadway. While the best-play Tony honors the production, and therefore the producers, the Pulitzer is purely for Mr. Letts’s writing, and this play, on the page, is riveting.

The disappearance of Beverly as Act 1 begins is the catalyst for his three grown daughters and the whole rest of the family to descend on his home, a “rambling country house outside Pawhuska, Oklahoma,” that couldn’t possibly be big enough for the bunch of them. Part of the fun of reading “August,” much like the fun of reading Alan Ayckbourn’s scenic jigsaw puzzles for the stage, is in imagining the action erupting in the various rooms and passageways of that house.

In Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer” (Theatre Communications Group, 107 pages, $13.95), the space doesn’t ramble, but the people sometimes do, sodden as most of them are with drink. Set on Christmas Eve in North Dublin, it’s an eerie tale that opened on Broadway last December: bad timing despite the strong reviews, as it’s too bleak a comedy, and perhaps a bit too close to the bone, for Christmastime. The production closed in March, but the book is an entertaining read right now.

The brothers in “The Seafarer” — Richard, newly blind after hitting his head on a fall into a Dumpster, and Sharky, a violent screwup who’s trying not to be — are just as unbalanced as anyone in “August,” but Sharky long ago made the youthful error of promising his soul to the devil, and Richard, well, he’s truly repellent. Sample stage direction for him: “Coughs up some deeply embedded old phlegm and rubs it into the side of the armchair.”

Stage directions, the instructions from the playwright that pepper a script, are one of the pleasures of play-reading and one of the strengths of Rolin Jones, whose breezy, boisterous roller-derby comedy, “The Jammer” (Dramatists Play Service, 65 pages, $7.50), is newly published, though local audiences saw it at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2004. Set in 1958, it’s the story of a grown-up good Catholic boy from Brooklyn who finds his true calling, and a raging case of STD, when he goes on the professional roller-derby circuit.

Written when Mr. Jones was a student at the Yale School of Drama, “The Jammer” is highly theatrical in the way that good plays have to be when the budget for costumes and scenery is nearly nonexistent. “It’s a cheap date,” he writes in the author’s note. Because it’s so no-frills, it piques the curiosity: Can a play staged for $1.98 pull off everything he requires?

It can indeed, as that Fringe production proved. But readers can also simply stage “The Jammer” in their heads.