Mal ,'Serenity'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Jess, thanks for the recs! Press Here looks fantastic, and we actually got the pop-up nursery rhyme book as a Christmas present, though I haven't looked at it yet.
I'm having fun reading a Jeeves & Wooster collection in my spare time these days -- it's just the right level of light & funny and can be put down after 2 or 3 pages without interrupting the flow of the story at all.
Two other great short story masters: Dorothy Parker and Flannery O'Connor. Both of whom I've devoured in quantity, but never for a class and I always kind of wished some teacher had actually assigned them, because they are both just bristling with stuff (both ideas and style) that's great to talk and argue about.
My freshman English professor leaned heavily on Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. I remember them fondly -- a touch of Southern Gothic, but not enough to be inaccessible.
You know who's short stories should be assigned in school? Saki's. Full of wit, snark, style, and all sorts of class issues to discuss.
I am lucky enough to have a taped (a friend taped it from her record back in the mid 1990s for me) copy of Parker reading many of her poems. But the highlight is a complete recording of her reading "Horsie". It's spectacular. And will gut you.
Oh, the glories of the teh interwebs: [link]
A ha this is what Jane taped for me: [link]
ooh ... I had a ollection of Saki's stories when I was young - I remembe loving them. I didn't understand some of them, but I enjoyed the twists.
And for those who like mysteries but don't care of Agatha Christie, there's Dorothy Sayers. For many, the Wimsey crush is inevitable.
The Bunter crush rules all.
edit: And the Dowager Duchess.
Oh, yes!
ooh ... I had a ollection of Saki's stories when I was young - I remembe loving them. I didn't understand some of them, but I enjoyed the twists.
Clovis was named after a Saki character. My dad read "The Open Window" to me when I was ... four? Five? Old enough to read it on my own, but unwilling to give up having a bedtime story read to me.
Get Lord Peter and you get Bunter and the Dowager Duchess. There's no bad there.
I was thinking about Dorothy Sayers when we were talking earlier, and I think it would have been great to have read Sayers at 12, except that I would have started comparing every man to Lord Peter earlier.