Last year I took a field trip to the Whitney Museum's Biennial exhibition. Even though our trip was focused on some of the video installations, one thing that the students (and myself) were taken in by were the tiny illustrations of Zak Smith. Smith created 760 illustrations for Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow - one illustration for each page of the book, often finding inspiration in a single phrase or visual image. While some of the illustrations (and indeed some of the content of the book) might by inappropriate for your class or school (I report, you decide) there are a good 760 illustrations to choose from.

Possible project:
Create illustrations from your favorite book (obvious but interesting).
-or-
Choose a few lines in a given book and focus on the visual image of the line over its context in the book.