Unsuccessful college education often turns our students into book haters who will stop reading as soon as they graduate. The idea of literature circles embraces the concept of "reading for fun" and is intended to create more independent readers and book addicts who will continuously read for the rest of their lives. Pioneers in literacy theories have used several terms like "literature study groups," "literary peer-group discussions," and "book club" to capture the small group, student-centered literacy discussion idea. This paper draws mainly on Harvey Daniels' (1994) definition of literature circles and intends to vividly illustrate the major components of literature circles by carefully looking into different reading roles. The presenter discusses the twelve key ingredients of literature circles. Special emphasis is placed on visualizing the procedure for running a literature circle, the eight possible student roles (i.e., 4 required roles--discussion director, literary luminary, connector, and illustrator; 4 optional roles--summarizer, vocabulary enricher, travel tracer, and investigator), and the teacher roles. Next, theories supporting the literature circles are discussed, including Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, Rosenblatt's reader-response theory, reading as a process, reading-writing connection, and independent learning. In addition, the examples of several EFL/ESL teachers who have successfully implemented literature circles in their reading classes are introduced. In the last section, tips on how to smoothly and successfully run a literature-circle-based reading class will be provided. A Literature Circles Role Sheet is appended. [This paper was published in: "The Proceedings of 2004 Cross-Strait Conference on English Education" (pp. 401-421), National Chiayi University, Chiayi, Taiwan.]