TODO is one daily thing recommended for you, by us.

Call us shallow (on your blog, every day, like you do already), but we were put off reading this book for years because we couldn't get past the inscrutable title. Even the Edmund White cover blurb — "I can think of no other book that is at once so literary and so highly sexed, with the exception of Lolita and Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers" — (which is dead-on, btw) — wasn't enough to entice us, nor was our fervent admiration of author Alan Hollinghurst's much better-known second fourth (sigh; we should really stick to writing about celeb poon) novel, 2004 bestseller The Line of Beauty. Well, we were dumb to wait so long; The Swimming Pool Library is one of the most intoxicatingly fun reads we've had in years. If you're a fan of books about sex, books about the decadent (in all senses) British ruling class, or even just books in general, you'll like it too. And we'll even explain what the title's about here, just in case you, like us, like to know exactly what you're getting yourself into before you shell out $14.75.

TSPL takes place around 1980 in London, and details the idle days and considerably less-idle nights of 25 year old aristocrat William Beckwith. Will's is a world of easy as a glance pickups, conducted on the Tube or in the showers of the the shabby, subterranean world of the Corinthian Club. In fact, much of the book takes place at the "Corry," a place where men of all ages and classes meet to work out and, incidentally, have remarkably casual sex. Untouched as yet by the threat of AIDS, and menaced only slightly by the danger of scandal (which later in the novel becomes a much more prominent theme), Will's wildly promiscuous sexual exploits have a radically innocent quality: as he describes the romps that took place after lights-out at his boarding school years earlier (in the swimming pool, to which, as "swimming pool librarian," 13 year old Will had keys), it becomes clear that this kind of Edenic free-for-all is what the adult Will is straining to recapture nightly.

For fans of subtext-heavy books about gay Brits at school, these scenes have a satisfying filling-in-the-blanks quality, as if, say, Brideshead Revisited was re-revisited as erotica. And Will is one of the great narcissistic narrators: maddening, yet somehow endearing. The loving, sensual way he describes his own body, especially in the context of his sexual exploits, makes him too ridiculous to resent. And his complete lack of gravity makes the tragic undercurrent that haunts the novel (the reader's inevitable knowledge that Will's lifestyle, by the book's end, is only days or months away from becoming untenable and obsolete forever after — as is Will's life itself, most likely) even more poignant. Writing from the vantage of 1988, Hollinghurst created an elegy for an idiosyncratic, imperfect world that would never be imperfect in quite the same unserious way again.

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