It's funny! Not a spinach book.

I only made it about 20 pages in. I'm sure it was supposed to be funny, but I just couldn't get into the writing style.

Jess is me.

I read it for A Boy. Good thing I liked the book. I always do that...I think if I read their books I'll know what they're thinking, and...bang. I'm widely read and single at thirty-two. Possibly, next time, tighter blouses instead?

Slacker idealogue raging impotently against the State of Affairs while enduring a surreal job search doesn't appeal to me that much - I had a roommate who lived that story, and it wasn't funny to watch.

but sometimes the canon thing makes me twitch

It never bugs me because I always see it as fluid. A kind of cultural conversation rather than a definitive list. There's no definitive list, but the exercise forces people to think about what they value and why. Who cares what the ranking is? But I love to hear the cases being made and disputed.

Speaking of Zadie Smith, she has an interesting piece on Kafka here.

I'm mulling over her claim here:

All novelists who are worth anything at all resist a version of life as it has been presented to them. What Flaubert meant by bourgeois life is not what his age meant by bourgeois life, and what Austen meant by the word "woman" was subtly at odds with the usage of that word in her time.

Slacker idealogue raging impotently against the State of Affairs while enduring a surreal job search doesn't appeal to me that much

It's not so much about the plot as the tone and the characters and the place.

I'll go out on a limb and suggest that you might really enjoy Marilynne Robinson's books. She has a lovely way with language and a stateliness that indicates (to me, natch) that her books will last.

Thanks Corwood.

The list has got me thinking, too, about the modern writers of non-genre fiction that I DO like, who don't really make any of these lists, and what they are considered-- John Irving, Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Hoffman and Tom Robbins. I also like Toni Morrison. Perhaps it is a class thing-- I don't know.

The list has got me thinking, too, about the modern writers of non-genre fiction that I DO like, who don't really make any of these lists, and what they are considered-- John Irving, Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Hoffman and Tom Robbins. I also like Toni Morrison. Perhaps it is a class thing-- I don't know.

I noticed that Irving wasn't anywhere on the list, and I'm wondering if he's lost critical cachet by being too popular/readable/something?

Alice Hoffman is also an interesting case to me. There's always been some critical resistance to her, and I do think it's because she floats in her own space that's sorta genre and plot driven and sorta literary. I do enjoy her books, though.

Alice Walker and Tom Robbins get no literary respect for differing reasons. Alice is seen as too woo woo and stridently dogmatic. Robbins is seen as sub-Pynchon for pot-heads.

You say that like it's a bad thing! I know...you don't. They do.

Robbins is seen as sub-Pynchon for pot-heads

which is funny to me because Pychon is also on my "don't like" list. Although I do tend to get him mixed up with Thomas Tryon, who wrote this really creepy book called "The Other"

Alice Hoffman strikes me as a more accessible Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Which I know is weird, but that is who her writing reminds me of.

I can't say enough good things about John Irving, and can't pinpoint why his work touches me while the others don't.