This first Misc. Midsummer Reading List is a totally random collection of titles, recommended for fun value and in some cases for insights into the writerly craft. I started it after two different people asked for recommended reading matter. Within the next few weeks, a regular book-briefs section will appear in The Stranger, featuring various staffers’ recommendations of tomes new and old. But here’s some of mine (and yours). (Book links provided in association with Amazon.com.)

• Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. A half-million of the funniest, saddest words ever written about digital filmmaking, Quebec separatism, addictions (alcohol, media, sex), boarding schools, teen athletics, environmental catastrophe, and advertising. Reader Chris Niccoli (writing to recommend Wallace’s essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) calls Wallace “whip-smart, funny, wildly imaginative, and neurotic as Hell.” Maximalism at its finest.
• The Sadness of Sex, Barry Yourgrau. Eighty-nine short-short stories of desire, longing, confusion, betrayal, more confusion, and more desire. Minimalism at its finest.
• The Last Days of Mankind, Karl Kraus. The horrors of WWI, as written during the war (but published after it) by an antiwar Austrian intellectual, in the form of a Ring Cycle-length avant-garde play script. Minimalism to the max.
• Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics, Cris Mazza, Jeffrey DeShell, and Elizabeth Sheffield, eds. Feminist (or “post-feminist”) stories with no victims, survivors, or avengers? It’s not only possible, but the break from formula makes the contributors create proactive heroines and antiheroines who don’t just take shit and react against it, they get up and do things–even bad things.
• Let’s Fall in Love, Carol de Chellis Hill. Precursor to Chick-Lit, this 1973 tongue-in-cheek thriller about the sassy female leader of an international crime ring might have then been the most sexually explicit above-ground novel by an American woman.
• The Great American Bathroom Book, Vols. 1-3, Stevens Anderson, ed. Dozens of 2,000-word summaries of classic and contemporary lit, plus fun quotations, obscure-word lists, and valuable reference stuff mixed in.
• Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness, Suellen Hoy. The next time your out-of-town aunt remarks about how “clean” Seattle appears, read this and learn how looking clean wasn’t always a priority. We’ve come a long way from Huck Finn boasting of the benefits of drinking muddy river water to today’s kitchens with Brita filters and antibacterial cutting boards.
• The Art of Fiction, David Lodge. Lessons in writing, disguised as lessons in reading.
• A Void, Georges Perec. Not much for plot or characters, but Perec and translator Gilbert Adair have tons-O-fun with the simple premise: A whole novel completely without the letter “e.” The convoluted prose constructions employed to get around this self-imposed discipline are hilarious. (Perec also wrote more serious (even melancholy) tales, such as Things and Life, A User’s Manual.)
• Wildmen, Wobblies, and Whistle Punks, Stewart H. Holbrook. Northwest history the way we love it: Anarchists, labor agitators, frontier bordellos and saloons, religious cults, weird criminals, hoaxers, bombastic rail barons, and raging forest fires. In his later years, the prolific Holbrook (1893-1964) founded a tongue-in-cheek regional anti-development movement, the James G. Blaine Society (acknowledged inspiration for Times columnist Emmett Watson’s “Lesser Seattle”).
• Dictionary of the Khazars, Milorad Pavic. In 1988, this Serbian surrealist novel about fragmentations of religion, politics, history, and memory seemed an amusing fantasy. Now, it’s more like prophecy.
• The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, Marshall McLuhan. His first (1950) pop-cult criticism collection, still imitated (knowingly or not) by all who’ve followed in the topic. Every exploitive sociocultural trait people now blame on TV, McLuhan found already entrenched in the media-ted environment of movies, radio, newspapers, and magazines.
• Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector. Forget your images of Samba Land: Young Brazilians, this novel asserts, can be as awkward, shy, and frustratedly virginal as young adults anywhere.
• Pale Fire, Vladmir Nabokov. Everybody nowadays likes to snicker at the excesses of literary criticism, but the funniest Russian emigré novelist of all time did it best: A narrative poem, followed by a line-by-line “commentary” that tells an almost completely different narrative.

Online Extras

• Lisa Roosen-Runge recommended Doris Lessing’s Love Again: “It is very modern, and one would not guess Lessing was in her mid-to-late 70s when she wrote this. It was gripping, surprising and very well-written.”
• Michael Peskura wanted to promote Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, a “hard” science fiction tale (first of a series, natch) about Earth scientists trying to turn Mars into a human-habitable place: “The appropriate choice for summer reading in the season of the Pathfinder.”
• Another reader, whose name I mistakenly neglected to take down, entered a vote for the Hunter S. Thompson collection The Great Shark Hunt; for the record, I personally believe the screechingly self-hyping Thompson to be the single worst influence on young writers today, but that’s my opinion–I could be wrong.
• And Red Diamond of Olympia wanted to use the Reading List to plug his self-published poetry collection, R.I.P. Muthafucker. Its selections include “July Is a Good Time for Revolution,” “Existential Sparkplug,” and “I Am Thinking About My Dick.”