This week, we shine the spotlight on first-person narratives: A young backpacker’s life unravels on a trip to China; a novelist traipses around Italy in search of adventure; a girl grows up with a white dad who wants her to act black; a movie star helps a sensitive young woman make it through a turbulent childhood and a “mean little deaf queer” comes out (and grows up) with honesty and good humor.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

By Susan Jane Gilman

It was a plan inspired by a paper placemat at a Rhode Island IHOP, but Susan Jane Gilman and her friend Claire, newly minted Brown graduates, were too young and romantic to see this as inauspicious. They decided to team up for an around-the-world backpacking tour, beginning in China. They didn’t know each other that well, and they made something of an odd couple: Gilman a funny, voluble New Yorker from a family of modest means, and Claire (a pseudonym, for reasons that soon become clear) a wealthy WASP determined to prove to her overprotective father that she was “not some pampered little princess.” “Let’s be Don Quixote, Huck Finn and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one — except with lip gloss,” was what they told themselves.

Since the year was 1986 and the People’s Republic of China had been open to independent travelers for “all of about 10 minutes,” it took only about 10 more minutes before squalid guest houses, sweltering heat, weird food, the impenetrability of the Chinese language and the sudden realization that “we didn’t know one soul in the entire hemisphere” began to batter their resolve. Gilman found herself wondering how famous travelers like Hemingway and Captain Cook had managed it. “Then it dawned on me,” she writes. “Most of them had been completely drunk all the time.”

“Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven” is a frequently hilarious and ultimately moving coming-age-story disguised as a classic backpacker’s memoir. There are the homesick collect calls to relatives (“You’ve got three thousand dollars, an Ivy League education, and an enormous pair of bazooms,” Gilman’s grandmother told her. “The world should have your problems, bubeleh.“), the hellish wrangling with the Chinese bureaucracy, the intense yet fleeting alliances with people met on trains or in hostels, the unexpected and overwhelming moments of exhilaration, and of course the irritable sniping inevitable between any two people who spend most of the day together under stressful circumstances. Gilman, for example, bridled at what she regarded as Claire’s melodramatic “playacting” — the superimportant “reports” she went off to write at times, her insistence that people they met on boats and restaurants were “contacts” sent by her father and his associates, the fear she professed whenever she saw anyone who looked Middle Eastern.

The reader will recognize the true nature of Claire’s difficulties much earlier than Gilman did. When her friend disappeared in Guilin and their great adventure dissolved into a frantic search followed by nightmarish negotiations with Communist officials and police, Gilman got a growth experience far more transformative than the average Lonely Planet itinerary can offer. It’s a page-turner ripe with odd little ironies — the water purifier the women carried went unused, but that 900-page copy of “Linda Goodman’s Love Signs”? That wound up saving the day — and finished off with midlife update at once wistful, gratifying and wise. Which, when you think about it, is more than you can say of “On the Road.” — Laura Miller

The Last Supper

By Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk’s engaging memoir of three months spent roaming Italy begins with a desire to escape — not from anything specific, but from the dull, familiar feeling of familiarity. She is weary of Bristol, the British city where she and her husband are raising their daughters, and more than that, she despises the gnawing feeling of dissatisfaction that has crept over her. As anyone who’s read a bit of E.M. Forster knows, the English have long used Italy as an exotic escape valve. (“In novels I read, people were forever disappearing off to Italy at a moment’s notice, to wait out unpropitious seasons of life in warm and cultured surroundings. It was a cure for everything.”) As the family speeds along the French coastline she feels the dark clutter of her English world flutter away in the sunlight. And yet once they settle into their Italian farmhouse, she is frustrated to find that the family has not undergone a magical Mediterranean transformation. “Did we come all the way here to behave exactly as we do at home, while dogs bark at the wire fences and the mist hangs sodden on the hills?”

“The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy” is not your typical rosemary-scented, ready-for-cable ode to renovating a rustic house and rubbing shoulders with jolly peasants. A very talented novelist and observer, Cusk has a knack for drilling down into the thick of things and finding strangeness in even the most ordinary experiences. (Her autobiographical “A Life’s Work” is one of the most bracing, dark books ever written about new motherhood.) Rather than looking for a sensual vacation, Cusk has in mind nothing less than a rearrangement of her senses. Once in Italy, she dedicates herself to a twofold process: making herself at home with the locals (particularly the Scottish-Italian taxi driver who takes the family under his wing and forces them to play endless games of tennis in the staggering heat) and pursuing aesthetic enthrallment. As she writes self-mockingly, “We will learn to fillet an Italian city of its artworks with the ruthless efficiency of an English aristocrat deboning a Dover sole.”

Madonnas and altarpieces and relics fly by, as Cusk (and her remarkably patient, art-appreciative young daughters) traipse the Piero della Francesca trail and chase Raphaels and elbow their way through the museums of Florence. The author approaches everything she sees through the prism of history and literature, allowing herself to be captivated by her surroundings even while she is trying desperately to detach herself from the tourists all around. Cusk may hate tourists — her descriptions of them are usually hilarious and sometimes cruel — but she makes a passionate, sharp-tongued tour guide in this book about fleeing the ordinary in search of something beautiful. — Joy Press

 I’m Down

By Mishna Wolff

If you’re going to spin a tale about your impoverished, racially conflicted childhood, you might as well be funny about it. How else could Mishna Wolff explain to the reader of “I’m Down” that she grew up with a white dad who lived life as if he were black and expected her to do the same?

Wolff’s dad — who styled himself in a short perm, “a Cosby-esque sweater, gold chains and a Kangol” — divorced her lily-white hippie mom when she was a kid, and took custody of Wolff and her younger sister. While her mom is laying one kind of politically correct guilt on her (“Honey, oppressed people of the world make Barbie so a big corporation can get rich. Now is it really worth that kind of karma for a doll?”), Dad is unleashing another kind of guilt — about skin color and privilege. He pressures her to fit in with their African-American neighborhood, goading her to toughen up and demand respect when kids call her names like “marshmallow turd.” It isn’t until Mishna learns the art of capping — throwing insults — that she starts to thrive and transform into the humorist she is today.

But just as Mishna is relaxing into her new role as ghetto smartass, her mother yanks her into an upscale white school on the other side of town where the unspoken rules couldn’t be more different. Getting into a fight isn’t a power play here; it’s a sign that you’ve lost self-control. And playing dumb is uncool among the angsty rich girls who sit around drawing horses (and later listening to the Cure). Wherever she is, Mishna is never quite at home: At school she is always a little too rough around the edges, and at their broken-down house, her father and his string of African-American girlfriends warn Mishna against getting too uppity.

“I’m Down” is full of funny incidents that probably weren’t so funny at the time — like when Mishna’s dad punished her for taking part in a faux-satanic ritual at a slumber party by forcing her to … join the local basketball team, populated entirely by African-American amazons hoping to get to college on a scholarship. That would teach her a lesson! Of course, it actually does teach her a lesson, as do so many other semi-traumatic events along the way. Although the book sometimes relies so heavily on wit that it’s hard to separate emotional turmoil from comedic setpiece, Wolff’s affection for her family and friends — and for the prickly, clueless honky girl she once was — makes “I’m Down” more than just a joke. — Joy Press

My Judy Garland Life: A Memoir

By Susie Boyt

Great movie stars are our magnifiers. They take some precious morsel of our humanity, a chip of diamond, and blow it up to the size of the MGM Grand, making it magnificent. Yet because they exist in a realm where ordinary people seem irrelevant, hardly anyone ever talks about how a star can change the way you feel about yourself. Susie Boyt, who became obsessed with Judy Garland after seeing “The Wizard of Oz” at the age of 3, does just that in her memoir, “My Judy Garland Life.” Her book is an unusual mixture of appreciation, biography and autobiography, but its most fascinating aspect, is, paradoxically, not the shimmer of the star, but the portrait that emerges, via a tantalizing trail of revelations, of the author herself.

“That girl should work two hours and then be taken home in an ambulance,” the actress Ina Claire once said of Garland; “how she gives of herself!” For Boyt, growing up in Britain as the conventional youngest child in a family of unflappable bohemians, Garland “proves something I’ve all my life believed, that nobody else in the world thinks is true.” The Judy Garland credo, as Boyt sees it, is that “to be the person with the strongest feelings in life is to be the best.” Garland’s determination to strip herself bare, to funnel every modicum of her energy into her performances and to sing with all of her engulfing emotions utterly exposed to her audience, communicated to Boyt that her own “highly sensitive” temperament was more than OK. It was heroic.

The daughter of painter Lucien Freud (whose grandfather was Sigmund), Boyt was raised by her mother, the sort of woman who, upon receiving a modest inheritance, bought a small cargo ship, pulled her four children out of school and set about raising them on the high seas. But this, like her parents’ separation, all happened before Susie was born. She grew up in an environment rather like a Victorian laundry, with pots on the stove boiling the yellow out of old bloomers for the vintage clothing store her mother opened after the ship project went bust.

Boyt portrays herself as an unexciting “old-fashioned girl,” a chubby, stagestruck child turned domestic angel (she likes to bake, wash her father’s dishes and fantasize about being Garland’s faithful housekeeper). But she offers ample hints — a college boyfriend who dies in a tragic accident, rock stars greeting the dawn on her roof — that her life has been anything but drab. Her ruminations on the spiritual cost of dieting, the delicate art of consolation, the dignity of suffering and the importance of hero-worship are unfailingly funny and perceptive. “Do psychoanalysts share their fellow human beings’ desire for a place where there isn’t any suffering?” she writes, wondering what her great-grandfather would have thought of Garland’s rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” “If so, they are very altruistic.” It would be altruistic to wish Boyt had a more comfortable childhood, but without it, we wouldn’t have this thoroughly delightful book. — Laura Miller

“Mean Little deaf Queer”

By Terry Galloway

The most significant moment of Terry Galloway’s life happened before she was even born. During a family stint in post-WWII Germany, her pregnant mother was given the antibiotic mycin to treat a kidney ailment. The drug helped cure the infection, but also led to fetal complications — and Terry’s creeping deafness. In her meandering, beautifully written memoir, Galloway recounts her path from Germany to Texas, from hearing to nonhearing and back to hearing again, and from her chronically insecure youth to a career as a stage performer and writer.

She also makes her way from bed to bed, men to women — having, among other dalliances, a foursome with a classics professor, his wife and her mistress, and an affair with a cocaine smuggler. “Mean Little deaf Queer” manages to be more intriguing and more entertaining than most coming-out memoirs, partly because it tackles the intersection between sex and disability (a sexually inexperienced Galloway can’t hear her early female lovers giving “urgently needed information” during sex) and partly because of the honesty and good humor of her prose (during a sojourn at a “camp for cripples,” she reacts to losing a swimming race by pretending to drown).

Despite the frequent darkness of her story, with trips to a psychiatric hospital and multiple suicide attempts, Galloway never lapses into preachiness or self-pity, and the result is an unusual memoir about an unusual life that is both oddly uplifting and  eminently readable. — Thomas Rogers

URGENT (Do this right now!)

WATCH “Poetry,” directed by Lee Chang-dong. It’s taken some time, but word has gradually spread about this beautiful and moving story of death and life from Korean academic-turned-filmmaker Lee Chang-dong. With apologies to Terrence Malick’s many defenders, “Poetry” is the  movie released so far that has the pure cinematic craft, human appeal and  emotional depth to be called a masterpiece. You almost couldn’t invent a less sexy or less trendy film: “Poetry” is a leisurely character drama about a dotty, girlish 66-year-old woman who may have early-stage Alzheimer’s and her relationship to her rude and lumpish grandson, who may have committed a terrible crime. I won’t mislead you by claiming this is a thriller, but as this silly, vain and resolute grandma struggles to do the right thing and to write the first (and perhaps last) poem of her life, she seems to speak for all of us, caught between birth and death, remembering and forgetting, with only a few precious moments to grasp and then let go. –Andrew O’Hehir

READ “The Pale King,” by David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s third and final novel was unfinished at his death in 2008 and assembled from completed portions and notes by his longtime editor. You’d never know it. In Wallace’s earlier fiction, it could often be hard to pick out the figure in the carpet — and at the same time very easy to enjoy the individual sections. With “The Pale King,” the reader is off the hook, and free to take each part of this funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying and profound book as it comes. As has often been repeated, “The Pale King” is “about boredom,” although that is only where it starts. It’s also about the transformation of America from a stakeholder society in which citizens view themselves as active, responsible participants into a consumer market in which people simply demand value for money. And it’s about existential dread and loneliness, which the main character, “David Foster Wallace,” suspects of being the reason people fear boredom, and drives themselves to distraction, seeking “enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there … Right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size.” — Laura Miller

WATCH “Game of Thrones” (HBO). In retrospect it seems unthinkable that HBO’s lavish adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” debuted around the same time as AMC’s “The Killing,” a remake of a hit Danish procedural, but was taken far less seriously by critics. Why? Maybe because AMC’s series was set in something resembling “reality,” where “Thrones” unfolded along pop culture’s J.R.R. Tolkien/Dungeons and Dragons axis, upon which movies and TV series are still considered zit-inducing ComicCon crap no matter what their artistic pretensions. But where “Thrones” slowly kept a phenomenal number of characters, motivations and plotlines straight, sparking arguments about its sex scenes and narrative density, all the while building and building to a stunning finale, “The Killing” made hash of just one story, and eventually collapsed under the weight of its own bad-faith contrivances. “Thrones,” meanwhile, felt like fantasy fiction’s answer to the first two “Godfather” films, with bleak, often ironic commentary on love, sex, family and power, plus warring kingdoms, barbarian Bacchanals, secret incest, slumbering supernatural menaces, undead stalkers, assassinations, beheadings and dragons’ eggs that were ported about from episode to episode like big green plot grenades. — Matt Zoller Seitz

WATCH Melissa McCarthy in “Bridesmaids.” You’re already not having too shabby a year when you’re the titular costar of a hit sitcom. But with her scene stealing turn in “Bridesmaids,” “Mike and Molly” actress Melissa McCarthy took what could have been a one-note, horny big girl shtick and created a character who runs rings of sanity around Kristin Wiig’s self-loathing flake. No wonder she’s reportedly set to star with Jon Hamm in Judd Apatow and Paul Feig’s next comedy. Bonus: When asked about Maura Kelly’s hateful Marie Claire piece last year on TV “fatties,” she sagely told EW this spring, “I thought, what a sad, troubled person.” Score: match point to McCarthy. — Mary Elizabeth Williams

LISTEN “21,” Adele. The London crooner can seem old beyond her years, and her voice sounds like a tool from some forgotten age of pop music: a real instrument. Say the critics: “Adele … [towers] in the same landscape where some of her contemporaries, beehived or not, have lost all their bearings” (LAT); “Timeless” (EW); “[If] you’re looking for a record that’ll make you wanna trash your beloved’s belongings and have make-up sex amid the ruins, 21′s your jam” (Spin).

MANDATORY (Worth faking a sick day for)

READ “Townie,” by Andre Dubus III. The Avenues, the New England mill town neighborhood where Dubus — a novelist best-known for “The House of Sand and Fog” – grew up, was a domain of swaggering bullies and weak, negligent or absent authority figures. As a boy, he resolved to “get so big I scared people, bad people, people who could hurt you.” Dubus’ memoir, “Townie,” recounts his sojourn in the kingdom of violence, and its counterpoint, the time he spent with his father, Andre Dubus II, an acclaimed author of austerely beautiful short stories about the anguish of working-class life. For Dubus, salvation lay in getting at the stories imprisoned within a reality that at first seemed merely brutal and mindless. This is an unusual story of the making of a writer, and a completely unforgettable one. –LM

WATCH “The Tree of Life,” written and directed by Terrence Malick. From the origins of the universe to the first stirrings of prehistoric reptilian compassion (a phenomenon unknown to paleontologists) to a memorable portrait of a mid-century Texas family presided over by a severe but loving Brad Pitt (giving his greatest acting performance) to an almost alarming vision of the afterlife,  Malick’s long-long-gestating “Tree of Life” offers more to chew on and disagree about and be baffled by than any American film since “Mulholland Dr.” I’ve been publicly on the fence about “Tree of Life” since first seeing it, but I also don’t kid myself that I’ve mastered the film or that I’m done thinking about it or that I know what I’ll make of it in five or 10 years. –AOH

WATCH “These are the decisions that keep you alive”: Coverage of a natural disaster had never been more brutally captured by camera than when the 8.9 earthquake sparked a tsunami that swept into Japan. Perhaps the most mesmerizing video originating from Japanese network JNN, and recrafted by Britain’s TBC Channel 4, that showed the critical ways a news crew — and assorted other survivors including a father and his two small terrified children — managed to escape being swept away to a certain death in Sendai, Japan. — Kerry Lauerman

READ New York Post headlines on Weinergate. Give a Murdoch newspaper an unfortunately named Democrat and a tawdry sex scandal, and it’s like Christmas every day. –MEW

READ “It’s the Inequality, Stupid,” 11 charts by Mother Jones. Nothing fuels awareness of class inequity and the staggering gap between rich and poor than recessionary times. And nothing can fuel your understanding — or your rage — like this illuminating, handy breakdown by Mother Jones. –KL

WATCH “Friday,”  the Bob Dylan-spoof version. When Rebecca Black’s bubblegum pop anthem “Friday” hit YouTube  and became a sensation, parodies were inevitable; the best was surely New York singer-songwriter Mike Bauer’s version, arranged, performed and recorded in the style of Bob Dylan circa 1965. On top of its already formidable bona fides as a fetish object — check out the period-accurate Columbia Records 45 RPM logo! — it inspired what is, without question, the funniest and most imaginative YouTube comments thread of the year to date — an ongoing in-joke between the performer and the listeners, who play along with the ruse and insist that, yes, this really is a Dylan tune.

“I think what Dylan ment by ‘Friday’ was any means people use to escape the reality and avoid seeing the truth. For some it could be booze and for some it may be drugs. What Dylan wants, is us to stop. Do not let your personal ‘Friday’ to come.” “I was contemplating suicide when this version of ‘Friday’ came on the radio. I dropped the razor blades & started crying at the simplistic & awe-inspiring beauty of the lyrics.” “I remember returning from the Grenada war in 1983. This song was playing over the loud speaker at the airfield when the wheels of our C-130 touched˛ down in Homestead Florida. The war had been 2 hours and 28 minutes of sheer horror and all I could think about was those that I loved the most but I didn’twant to go home yet so I called a $5 hooker and enjoyed the beach, this song, and some pretty good ass for 10 days. I was so happy when I made it home to my wife. My sunburn was getting bad.”

–MZS

LISTEN “Anna Calvi,” Anna Calvi. “Sumptuous, seductive and a little bit scary, this velvety debut will stalk your dreams,” (NME).

ESSENTIAL (Skip “family time” if you have to)

WATCH “Southland” (TNT). This tough, smart series about beat cops interacting with the public in Los Angeles debuted on NBC in 2009, then got booted to cable to make room for Jay Leno’s disastrous prime-time talk show. Its large, ethnically diverse cast of beat cops, detectives, top brass, city officials, civilians and perps sparks fond memories of “Hill Street Blues,” the early seasons of “Homicide: Life on the Street” and the novels of Joseph Wambaugh (“The New Centurions,” “The Choirboys”). Granted, there are more altercations and chases than any real police force would ever see in a week, but in every other way, this is the most realistic cop series on American television. Its second season finale was one of most moving, horrifying, bleakly funny hours of TV in a very long time. Catch up now. — MZS

READ “The Tragedy of Arthur,” by Arthur Phillips. Like the narrator of this novel, the real-life Arthur Phillips has written a novel titled “Prague” and has the same editor, agent and publicist as his fictional doppelgänger. Presumably the real Phillips is not also the son of a small-time con man and the reluctant editor of a play that experts have anointed as a long-lost work by Shakespeare. Presented as Phillips’ skeptical introduction to the play, this treat of a book is an elegant tribute to Vladimir Nabokov (whose “Pale Fire” clearly inspired it) as well as the story of a man whose self-inflicted, tragicomic woes are as affecting and wincingly believable as those endured by the hero of any more conventional novel. — LM

READ “Obama’s Young Mother Abroad,” the New York Times Magazine. Janny Scott’s portrait of the president’s late mother (an excerpt from her book, “A Singular Woman”) is not only a story of the woman who gave birth to great hope and a million conspiracists, it’s the distinct story of a woman of her generation charting a fascinating, difficult and previously unimaginable new path for herself. — KL

SEE “The Book of Mormon,” by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. A Broadway musical about America’s favorite homegrown brand of Christianity from the genius misfits of “South Park” and “Team America,” and Robert Lopez, the raunchy composer of “Avenue Q,” could be expected to be irreverent. But in the same season that the star-powered “Spider- Man” became the Great White Way’s biggest punch line, how did “The Book of Mormon” win over not just “South Park” fans, but the matinee-going out-of-towners, the New York Times and, ultimately, the Tonys?  It might mock the arbitrary absurdity of organized religion or the gruesomeness of a place where a cow carcass marks the town square, but it does so with all the abundant sweetness of a Latter Day Saint’s coffee hour. –MEW

READ “The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology,” by Lawrence Wright,  Feb. 14, 2011, the New Yorker.

WATCH “The Lincoln Lawyer,” directed by Brad Furman. A would-be career-relaunch for star and producer Matthew McConaughey, “The Lincoln Lawyer” was a relative flop when it was released in March. But this stylish and gripping L.A. crime drama has steadily grown in the rearview mirror. There are even whispers that (gasp!) McConaughey’s performance as the sleazy, charming Mick Haller might sneak into the Oscar race. (The DVD comes out on July 12.) — AOH

WORTH IT (Neglect your Facebook and/or Twitter)

WATCH Margot Martindale as “Mags Bennet” on “Justified” (FX). FX’s modern western about a Kentucky-born U.S. marshal (Timothy Olyphant) investigating drug trafficking and racketeering in his kudzu-choked home county, is a terrific show in its own right. But the acting puts it over the top, and this season’s scary, lively, narcotics-smuggling bad guys, the Bennet clan, were truly memorable. But they are all overshadowed by their big, bad mama, Mags Bennet. She was a master of multitasking, playing a land-grabbing mining company against an environmentally skittish citizenry, plotting and executing complex criminal schemes, negotiating truces between rival crime organizations and her own squabbling sons, all while doting on her adopted granddaughter, the only child of a man she murdered with poisoned moonshine. As played by Margo Martindale, Mags was the best kind of villain: one who thinks she’s the hero, and conducts herself with a twisted sense of honor that demands wary respect even as it makes your blood run cold. — MZS

READ “State of Wonder,” by Ann Patchett. With audacity and ambition, Patchett has transfigured the story line of “Heart of Darkness” by setting it in the present day and turning both the seeker and the sought-after into women.  “State of Wonder” follows a Midwestern research pharmacologist who is sent up the Amazon to check on a brilliant and imperious doctor developing a fertility drug in a remote village where the women are reputedly able to bear children into old age. As with “Heart of Darkness,” the seductions and corruptions of power haunt this novel, but it is the power of the Bad Mother — in contrast to the Bad Father embodied by Conrad’s Kurtz. Maternity is the awesome totem at the book’s center, the dubious object of Swenson’s research and an elemental power, capable of possessing Patchett’s dueling doctors, compelling them to do terrible things. — LM

WATCH “Beginners,” written and directed by Mike Mills. Mills really did have a gay dad, who came out of the closet with mixed results and then died a few years later (he talked about it in this great “Fresh Air” interview) and that has resulted in the funniest and most loving portrayal of homosexuality ever created by a straight person. It’s rare to encounter a film that’s so formally audacious, so heartfelt and so beautifully acted, but this one’s three-for-three, anchored in hilarious but understated performances from Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer. Don’t even get me started on Mills’ slide show on the history of homosexuality in America, or the moody Jack Russell terrier who communicates with subtitles: “Tell her that the darkness is about to swallow us if we don’t do something.” — AOH

WATCH “Nuclear Boy,” by Kazuhiko Hachiya. A Japanese artist explains nuclear meltdown in the simplest terms possible for his littlest audience members: through poop and farts. — Drew Grant

WATCH “We need to go faster, it’s coming straight at us.” Home video of a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Ala. After watching the awe-inspiring footage taken by two teens in their car when the tornadoes touched down,  you’d be hard-pressed to find a more powerful example of nature’s terrifying thaumaturgy this year. — DG

LISTEN “Bon Iver,” Bon Iver.

EXTRA CREDIT (Better than anything on Bravo)

SEE “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. The unlikeliest hit of the season has already been seen by over 350,000 people who waited up to two hours to say they were there.  The stars? A bunch of dresses. Even before his suicide in 2010, Alexander McQueen could fascinate and exasperate with his provocative, highly charged approach to haute couture. He tattered and splattered his clothes, festooned them with horns and feathers, made them as torturous and romantic as a Byron poem. On display at the Metropolitan with Paul Treacy’s wild haberdashery — and featuring an audio tour that includes Sarah Jessica Parker, Sarah Burton and Naomi Campbell — his defining works prove the art of fashion, and create a glorious tribute to a sartorial one of a kind. — MEW

READ Roseanne Barr’s New York magazine essay on the continued sexism, classism and pure, nauseating awfulness of the TV industry.

WATCH Those twin babies, talking to one another. Seventeen-month-old twins Sam and Ren McEntee became YouTube stars after their parents put up a video of the two holding an intense conversation in baby talk, confirming our deeply held suspicion that babies know more than they are letting on. — DG

WATCH “Natalie Portman Cries a Lot,” Screenrant. This mashup was neck and neck with this year’s other big Natalie Portman viral video: a loop of her odd laugh during the Golden Globes. But ultimately Screenrant’s supercut of tears wins out, because once you watch it, you can never watch a Portman movie again without wondering when the waterworks start. — DG

WATCH “Portlandia,” IFC. The most outstanding Internet success story started as a series of viral videos for ThunderAnt, starring the unlikely duo of “Saturday Night Live’s” Fred Armisen and his friend, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein. IFC picked up “Portlandia” for six episodes. Cult classic from episode one. — DG

View the slide show

Many people swear that, come summer, they’ll finally get around to reading a classic work of literature they missed during their student years; “War and Peace” is a perennial candidate. For some, this is the intellectual equivalent of using a week of paid vacation to finish a big household project, like installing a patio. Others honestly believe that a 900-page Russian novel that seemed too daunting a prospect in November will somehow be easier to scale in a hammock. Too often, these grand plans end in shirking and a vague sense of failure. “Moby-Dick” the novel becomes almost as elusive as the white whale himself.

Here’s a modest proposal: Try listening to it instead. I first turned to audiobooks because I get motion sickness from reading in cars, buses and other moving vehicles. I soon graduated to listening as I cooked, cleaned house, ran errands, worked out and, of course, drove. As someone who reads for a living, I’m eager to get out of my armchair and give my eyes a break after a long day’s work, but with audiobooks I’ve been able to squeeze in a lot of recreational reading around the edges.

Audiobooks are, furthermore, an ideal way to finally get to those bypassed literary classics. I was never going to find the time to sit down and read all 1,072 pages of “Don Quixote,” but I listened to the whole thing over the course of a month’s worth of waiting in post-office lines and doing lat pulls. With the advent of downloadable digital audiobooks and portable MP3 players, it’s possible to keep recordings of several titles on hand at all times, snatching 15 minutes of Balzac here and there. Still, a long car trip accompanied by an audio version of a Dickens or Austen novel may be the most sublime use of the form.

It’s also the most summery. Listening is less work than reading from a page; it feels like a treat rather than an assignment, and treats are what vacations are all about. If your attention goes a little out of focus during a long paragraph of 19th-century landscape description, who’s to know?

There are a few important things to understand about audio recordings of classic novels. First, avoid abridged versions, which publishers seem to be phasing out anyway. Second, be sure to check out a sample of the recording before you buy. Many of the audio classics on the market are older recordings, with poor sound quality and unappealing narrators. (I can’t recommend the Oxbridge toff who read “Don Quixote” to me, for example, though the material did transcend his performance. And whose idea was it to have an American narrate Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” — a biography of the quintessential Londoner, written by a Scot — anyway?)

A talented narrator, however, can enrich your understanding of a novel. My late-blooming passion for the work of Anthony Trollope is partly due to the performances of Simon Vance and Timothy West. Disdained by modernist critics as an uninterestingly bourgeois Victorian novelist with an overly intrusive authorial persona, Trollope is rarely assigned to college students, but he has a devoted cult among common readers. Since driving from New York to Maine, blasting “Barchester Towers” all the way, a few years back, I’ve joined it. Trollope’s novels are primarily about class and, as read aloud by Vance, each character has a voice and accent that instantly conveys his or her social background.

Able, professional actors cost money, and that’s one reason why audiobooks can be pricey. However, there are economical ways to acquire them. Audible.com, which has practically cornered the retail market, offers a tiered membership plan that dispenses a certain number of credits monthly, with each credit good for one book. You can also buy books outright, at discounted member’s prices. It’s not the simplest system in the world, but it means that you can get decent audiobooks for $15 or less. And while the Audible site is not great, especially for browsers, the company is owned by and linked to Amazon, so you can cruise for titles using Amazon’s dense database of tags and customer referrals, then easily check to see if they’re available as audio downloads.

Sites and apps offering free audiobook downloads of public domain titles almost always use recordings made by LibriVox, the audio equivalent of Project Gutenberg. Volunteers record themselves reading chapters and submit them to Librivox, who distributes the files online for free. This is a noble, selfless project, and a boon to readers with visual impairments who want access to more obscure texts. But if you’re accustomed to professional narrators, chances are you’ll find the LibriVox recordings hard to listen to; many of the readers are wooden, others are outright grating. The recordings frequently switch narrators in the course of a book, which means that even when you find a narrator you like, chances are he or she won’t be sticking around for long.

Alternatively, many libraries loan out audiobook downloads as well as CD and cassette tape sets. (There are also software programs for converting CDs to digital audiobook files for MP3 players, but the process is time-consuming and a bit of a hassle.) Libraries use a service called OverDrive which may have the single worst support documentation I’ve ever encountered, so expect to invest some time in getting it set up. The idea is that you download OverDrive’s console software to your hard drive, then you download specific titles from your library’s website and can play them via the console for a limited period of time.

I have squandered hours of my life trying to figure out why so many of the New York Public Library’s downloadable audiobooks wouldn’t transfer to my iPod. I’ll try to save other Mac users the same frustration: Be aware that much of your local library’s collection simply can’t be played on any Apple device unless the file first goes through a Windows PC — presumably due to conflicts involving digital rights management. Only those audiobooks made available in MP3 format can be borrowed by Mac users; files in the WMA format, more than half of what my library carries, will not work. An OverDrive app recently released for the iPhone is affected by similar limitations. (I can’t testify to how smoothly OverDrive works on a Windows PC, so if you’ve tried it, please post a comment and tell us what you think.)

Finally, while the selection of audiobook classics in English is respectable, translation is another matter. Russian novels usually come in the much-derided Edwardian translations by Constance Garnett. With Proust, it’s C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s version from the 1920s. More recent translations are often still under the translator’s copyright, and publishers apparently think most buyers won’t know the difference, so why pay extra for the rights? It’s often impossible even to find out who the translator is from an audiobook’s product page.

That won’t be a concern for my friend, however: The only recording I’ve been able to find of “The Magic Mountain” is abridged and in Spanish, alas. Well, there’s always next summer.

And now for our list:

“Frog and Toad Are Friends” by Arnold Lobel (Ages 4-8)

The thing about Lobel’s Frog and Toad — see also the equally wonderful “Days With Frog and Toad,” “Frog and Toad All Year” and “Frog and Toad Together” — is that, despite the whole amphibian thing, they’re so damn human. Toad is crabby, self-doubting and, let’s face it, somewhat prone to depression. Frog has a sunny, can-do disposition. And they may be an odd couple, of the Oscar and Felix variety, but they are also kind, supportive, considerate, loving friends. And though these stories are, of course, beloved by children of both sexes, the way these two very different fellows take care of each other — and delight in each other’s company — seems like a particularly valuable example for young boys.

“Diary of a Wimpy Kid” by Jeff Kinney (Ages 9-12)

Kinney’s “Wimpy Kid” series may not be writing at its finest, but it has struck a major chord with boys, capturing the attention of even the most reluctant readers. Described as “a novel in cartoons” — with lots of drawn illustrations, a lined-paper format and a font that looks like handwriting — it has an undeniable charm, evoking the misery that is middle school in spare, deft strokes. Its beleaguered narrator, Greg Heffley, isn’t the most sympathetic character, selling out his best friend Rowley when the occasion suits him, but he has a keen eye for demoralizing details. Like the cheese that lies rotting and repulsive on his school blacktop, spawning the terrors of “Cheese Touch.” “It’s basically like the Cooties,” Greg explains. “If you get the Cheese Touch, you’re stuck with it until you pass it on to someone else. The only way to protect yourself from the Cheese Touch is to cross your fingers.” If that doesn’t take you right back to middle school, well, you’re luckier than some of us.

“Danny the Champion of the World” by Roald Dahl (Ages 9-12)

If there is a more moving depiction of the relationship between a son and his father in all of literature than the one in this rollicking adventure tale, we’d sure like to know about it. “It is impossible to tell you how much I loved my father,” Dahl’s narrator, Danny, tells us. “When he was sitting close to me on my bunk I would reach out and slide my hand into his, and then he would fold his long fingers around my fist, holding it tight.” But Danny’s love for his dad — a filling station owner and widower who is raising his only child in a gypsy caravan — is apparent in every line, every moment of this story. Danny’s dad, he tells us, is an “eye-smiler,” whose eyes flash and twinkle when he is amused, but who never much moves his mouth. “I was glad my father was an eye-smiler,” Danny writes, “because it is impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself.” This gentle, funny, genuinely wonderful book will leave boys (and their parents) eye-smiling and deliciously amused.

“The Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan (Ages 9-12)

Start your son on this first book in Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series and watch him read away his summer. When we first meet Percy, he just seems like a troubled kid on the verge of getting kicked out of yet another school. In fact, he’s gone through six schools in six years: Bad things just seem to keep happening to him. It isn’t long before Percy (short for Perseus), and we, learn that those strange things he thinks he’s been hallucinating are actually real. Mythological monsters and gods — satyrs, minotaurs, centaurs — really are populating his life and he himself is a half-blood: His father, whom he never knew and had been told had been “lost at sea,” is, in fact, Poseidon. This popular series is a great read for any myth-minded kid who cut his teeth on “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.” Come to think of it, it’s a great read for any kid. Come to think of it again, it’s just a great read.

“The Giver” by Lois Lowry (Young Adult)

This book about a futuristic world that initially seems utopian (no crime, no poverty, no illness, abundantly good manners), but, as it turns out, is less than ideal (no color, no music, no sunshine), is creepy yet altogether compelling. As it begins, 11-year-old Jonas is apprehensively anticipating his Ceremony of Twelve, when he will receive his adult Assignment from the Committee of Elders. Will he be a Nurturer or a judge, like the parents who are raising him? Will be a Caretaker of the Old, like his friend Fiona? But Jonas does not receive a conventional assignment: He is selected to become the community’s next Receiver of Memory, tasked absorbing the collective recollection of pain and pleasure, which the community has long since eschewed in pursuit of comfort, stability and Sameness. Jonas meets daily with the previous Receiver, now the Giver, and learns to appreciate a world with choice and compassion — and love.

A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.” Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.

According to USA Today, another study, to be published later this year in the journal Reading Psychology, found that simply giving low-income children 12 books (of their own choosing) on the first day of summer vacation “may be as effective as summer school” in preventing “summer slide” — the degree to which lower-income students slip behind their more affluent peers academically every year. An experimental, federally funded program based on this research will be expanded to eight states this summer, aiming to give away 1.5 million books to disadvantaged kids.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the USA Today article comes at the very end, where one Chicago schoolteacher tells the reporter that the importance of getting books into the house “seems so simple, but parents see it differently.” They’re as “excited” as their kids are when the books come in the door. It’s not that the parents are hostile or even indifferent to books. Most likely, books and reading feel like the privilege and practice of an unfamiliar world: a resource that’s out there somewhere, but not entirely accessible.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books — a big outdoor fair held on the UCLA campus every April — is an annual reminder that lots of people are interested in books even if they may not feel at home in a bookstore or library. Over 130,000 attendees turned out for this year’s festival, a mix of races and classes that often astonishes the authors who trek in from out of town. “If only we could get all of them to come to bookstores,” one writer wistfully said to me.

Easier said than done. If you happen to be comfortable in bookstores or libraries — if you’ve been to them many times before and know what to expect, what you want and where to find it, or if you know whom and how to ask and feel entitled to bother the staff with your questions — it can be difficult to appreciate how intimidating these institutions of print culture can seem to someone who has little or no acquaintance with them. I didn’t quite get it until I found myself wheedling a comics-loving friend into picking up issues of a comic book I wanted. “I’m never going to go into the comic book store,” I told him. “They’re confusing and the people who work there are so unfriendly.”

Whether or not I was right about all comics stores, my past experience of them was discouraging enough to put me off. I’ve never even set foot in a gun shop, but it’s equally hard for me to imagine venturing into one. The people who work and shop in such stores may not mean to be unwelcoming, but the same thing that makes these places so inviting to the initiated — the innate clubbishness of human nature — can scare away novices. As homey as a bookstore or local library branch might feel to you or me, they can make other people feel insecure, out-of-place and clueless.

This is, of course, assuming that poor families have bookstores and libraries in their neighborhoods, and that it’s safe and easy for a child to walk to them alone. Furthermore, a single parent working two minimum-wage jobs to keep food on the table may not have the time or energy to make a special trip between shifts. One of the biggest success stories in children’s book publishing, after all, is the Little Golden Books: racks of inexpensive kids’ books cleverly placed near the registers in five-and-dime stores, where the harried working-class parents of the 1940s could pick them up on impulse while running other errands.

Lastly, poor parents may feel that they just can’t afford books. Of course, you don’t have to buy a book to read it, but the act of giving someone a book of his or her own has an undeniable, totemic power. As much as we love libraries, there is something in possessing a book that’s significantly different from borrowing it, especially for a child. You can write your name in it and keep it always. It transforms you into the kind of person who owns books, a member of the club, as well as part of a family that has them around the house. You’re no longer just a visitor to the realm of the written word: You’ve got a passport.

Referred to in this article: This USA Today story by Greg Toppo describes the book giveaway program being rolled out in nine states this summer. An abstract for “Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations” by Evans, Kelley, Sikorac and Treimand in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. This blog post from the Chronicle of Higher Education has a bit more detail on the study.