So people are now adopting a "pictures or it didn't happen" approach to commentary on bestselling books?

I feel mixed about Maurice Sendak -- it's such a loss to all the rest of us, but he had a good long 83-year run, and in all the interviews he'd given over the last decade he sounded increasingly tired and lonely, and the death of his partner never stopped being an ache and a hole in his life. I selfishly want him still around forever and ever (and I hope that if I ever get to visit Dream's library it has a whole annex devoted to everything he never had time to write and draw here), but for his own sake I can't begrudge him letting go once he was well and truly ready.

That is the loveliest and most honest tribute I've heard in a long time. Thank you

Aw, thanks, Cass. I have such a deep soft spot for writers like Sendak and Edward Lear (another writer whose works were anarchic and wild and haunted, and who was himself deeply kind and deeply sad).

ION, OMG the comments on that NYT article. The SPOILER ALERT!!1! comments were actually less physically painful than all the appreciators of Canon-Certified Real Literature getting excessively pompous vapors over Mr. Fish's meditation on the trilogy's themes, which are a clear and stark indicator of the imminent collapse of the entire universe. I swear, I never saw such rampaging self-congratulatorily offended delicate sensibilities in my life. I can't even pick a favorite; they're all so smugly scoldingly overwrought.

The SPOILER ALERT!!1! comments were actually less physically painful than all the appreciators of Canon-Certified Real Literature getting excessively pompous vapors over Mr. Fish's meditation on the trilogy's themes, which are a clear and stark indicator of the imminent collapse of the entire universe.

Although I loved the spoiler!alert guy who said he was trying to recall the article because he forwarded it to his wife who is "in the mist of the 2nd book." She's not the only one in a mist, pal.

Google tells me today is Howard Carter's 138th birthday, which makes me want to read some Amelia Peabody in celebration. (Which is why I posted this in Literary and not Natter.)

I didn't even know where to start on the "we are all doomed because people are reading The Hunger Games instead of Plato in the original Greek" crowd.

I think they are all like Gordon Pratt in Homicide: Big Fakes. Too bad they all don't get busted by Frank Pembleton, who reads Latin and Greek and still enjoys a good taunt-fest.

I didn't even know where to start on the "we are all doomed because people are reading The Hunger Games instead of Plato in the original Greek" crowd.

Pish and tosh. I read The Satyricon in Latin and it's basically 50 Shades of Grey from the Roman era. Does this make me a better person? Bullshit.

Ivory tower types who sneer at genre lit are one of the reasons I didn't pursue a Ph.D in Lit. Besides the fact that the market for English profs sucks ass, and I'd probably have to move to Nome to get a uni job.

As much as I snark about Twilight, the bottom line is that ANYTHING that fosters a love of reading in the public is of the good. Far better that they be reading lowbrow literature for entertainment and thereby putting their imaginations to work rather than playing video games or sitting mesmerized by the TV.

Fish is an overpaid dolt, and my English profs at UNC use to delight in mocking his pretentious ass.