Oh, that price is worth it. They're good popcorn books.

Okay, so now I have to ask--what are the Kim Harrison books?

The Dead Witch Walking series. Which are my usual go-to popcorn paranormal urban fantasy books.

Oh, I know how to explain the Dante Valentine books! Early Anita Blake (when there was a plot), but grittier and more violent, and in a vaguely SF/near future setting.

I think you'd like the Dante Valentine books, ita ! Popcorn with grit.

I also like Harrison, quite a lot. She gets stuck sometime.

You know what's good reading?

The syllabus for the literature class that David Foster Wallace taught.

I particularly like the bits on class participation, Presentation of the papers (I'm not sure why I like that part except that I sense a writer's satisfaction with a finished MS along with a professor's need to be able to read it easily), the actual works to be read (he liked to teach Silence of the Lambs) and the Caveat Emptor at the end:

"If you are used to whipping off papers the night before they’re due, running them quickly through the computer’s Spellchecker, handing them in full of high-school errors and sentences that make no sense and having the professor accept them ‘because the ideas are good’ or something, please be informed that I draw no distinction between the quality of one’s ideas and the quality of those ideas’ verbal expression, and I will not accept sloppy, rough-draftish, or semiliterate college writing. Again, I am absolutely not kidding.”"

From an earlier Syllabus he notes about Classroom Discussion:

Anybody gets to ask any question about any fiction-related subject she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself from asking a question or making a comment because you fear it will sound obvious or unsophisticated or lame or stupid. Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to study, a stupid-seeming question can end up being valuable, even profound. I am deadly serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machine-gunning, or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other students in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of the class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.

Steven Gould (Jumper, 7th Sigma) let me pester him into an interview - it's up over here.

x-posted with GWW.

Wow- David Foster Wallace must not have had to have his syllabi approved by a curriculum committee!

I just realized that I've been conflating David Foster Wallace and Daniel Wallace. Oopsies.

I'm torn between thinking those were the best suggestions ever, and thinking those were the high standards that made him too good for this world.

and thinking those were the high standards that made him too good for this world.

I was definitely thinking that too. I don't know if I'd say "too good for this world" but so sensitive and constantly self-conscious that he couldn't last long in this world.

Ok, "too good for this world," is a bit of a maudlin flourish, but you feel me, right? Part of what I learned in college is to believe that my ideas were strong enough to stand up past Jerkoff Hands(TM) It was only a partial process then, that the internet has helped me complete, and it would have seemed like a blessing to the shy, blush-prone undergraduate that I was then if my instructor had been so fiercely anti-JOH, but I learned to persevere past them, which I think has greater real-life implications.