Summer Reading List

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