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Summer Reading

by KARINA WOLF

Compleet Molesworth (Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle)

Hilariously illustrated, the Molesworth series recounts the eponymous character's years at St. Custard's, a 1950s English boarding school. Half the fun is deciphering the slang; the anti-hero's misadventures prefigure Harry Potter and Burgess' Nadsat lingo. Also clears up any niggling questions you might have about parts of speech:

Social snobery. A gerund 'cuts' a gerundive:

Against Nature (Joris-Karl Huysmans)

For the budding aesthete and all levels of control freak (meaning, of course, all New Yorkers), Huysmans offers a solution for anyone who wants to escape the discomfort and ennui of seaside and summer. I took another look during a bad trip to Nettuno, which is the Italian twin city to Belmar, NJ.

This is anti-beach reading in the best sense. A wealthy Parisian retreats to a country house in order to devote himself to a life of aesthetic refinement and dies as a result of his excessive pleasure. The book's plot is said to have directed the behavior of Wilde's Dorian Gray, causing the main character to live an amoral life of sin and hedonism.

You Can Get There From Here, Shirley MacLaine

I love Hollywood memoirs and I love Shirley MacLaine. She can be the most scenery-chewing of actors and often writes the purplest prose; she is also candid, funny and connected—she knows everyone. In this volume (there are quite a number), she chronicles working for the McGovern campaign and traveling as a delegate to China.

Scandinavian authors who I'm going to read: IMPAC award-winning Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses; the Norwegian Norwegians read instead of Nazi-sympathizer Knut Hamsun, Tarjei Versaas (The Ice Palace); and Scandinavian crime writer Henning Mankell (The Man Who Smiled).

The Best of Myles (Flann O'Brien)

Collected works of the Irish humorist best known to Lost viewership as author of The Third Policeman.

I just spent a month rooming in an 100 degree, un-air conditioned apartment with three PhD students who felt compelled to quote Homer at the dinner table: "That would be Chapman's Homer—the Homer of Keats? The version used by Shakespeare?"

These vignettes kept me from triple homicide. O'Brien, writing as Myles na gCopaleen, composed the columns for the Irish Times. Keats and Chapman are depicted as Hope and Crosby-esque pals whose misadventures conclude in puns worthy of the Marx brothers.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbles here. She twitters here.

"La Dolce Vita" — Sebastien Tellier (mp3)

"Universe" — Sebastien Tellier (mp3)

"Broadway" — Sebastien Tellier (mp3)

"League Chicanos" — Sebastien Tellier (mp3)

"Kissed By You" — Sebastien Tellier (mp3)

"La Ritournelle" — Sebastien Tellier (mp3)