Summer Reading List

Summer is a bracingly honest season for readers: it's too hot to pretend to be clever, so you just read books you actually like. TIME asked some of its favorite writers what they read when they read for fun

Glen David Gold

Glen David Gold, author of Sunnyside.

Jonathan Sprague
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Glen David Gold picks Scott Pilgrim series by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Scott Pilgrim is the best 23-year-old ever. Like Proust's Swann, he has a story that takes multiple volumes to unfold, except Pilgrim is even more awesome because he's in a comic book. In love with the exquisite Ramona Flowers, he must win her heart by fighting her seven evil ex-boyfriends. Scott is lazy, self-centered, immature and ultimately a winning hero. Drawing on manga, Bollywood, video games, rock music — and probably things that went over my head because I'm 45 — the series is wildly enjoyable for its absurdist humor, its indelible characters and its growing, inevitable sense of melancholy as Pilgrim becomes that most terrifying of things: 24 years old.

Gold is the author of the novels Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside, which was published this spring

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