Huh. I did not like Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, and never even got around to trying Fierce Invalids.
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
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."
I liked *both* Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas and Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, but wasn't crazy about Villa Incognito. I think that's his latest one, right?
Anne Tyler, Georgette Heyer, Mark Helprin
Villa Incognito is his latest novel. He also has a collection of short stories out now (I looked it up.)
Mark Helprin, Elizabeth Bishop, Flannery O'Connor, with a side of occasional Chesterton, especially The Man Who Was Thursday, of which I shall never tire.
Big Bill Faulkner, Doubtin' Tommy Pynchon, and Vlad "The Impaler" Nabokov for me.
Mmmmm, Elizabeth Bishop.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
Oh, Corwood! That's the first poem that ever made me sit up and gasp, "So that's what a poem is!" Not that I hadn't liked poetry before, because I had, very much... but I can remember being nine or ten, in the car on a road trip to Tahoe, coming across it for the millionth time in a big Golden Treasury of Poetry or some such, and getting absolutely stoned on it. The homely fish, his eyes all backed and packed, his beard of hooks and snapped-off lines... oh.
Ooh, Nabokov. Maybe I'll bump Heyer off the list. If we are doing read the most, I might have to put SJ Perelman on there. I would also have to say Laurie Colwin.
Wow, I can't even imagine grasping how great Elizabeth Bishop was when only 9 or 10. JZ = of the smart.
I'm ashamed to say that I've never read any Perelman. And I don't even know who many of the other favorites being mentioned are, so I've got to make some additions to my library list.