while Irving just flies by.

I find Irving very easy to read also. But then I feel that way about Roth. And there are certainly other novelists (like Pynchon) that I find to be sloggy.

In Jesse's provocatively equable maxim: Different people like different shit.

I think I got about halfway through Confederacy of Dunces and then got distracted and never felt like giving it another try.

I liked the first Irving I read, felt meh about the second, and after the third I hated him violently because I felt like it was the same damn thing every time.

And to echo Corwood, I think there's a difference between "the action is internal" and "nothing happens." But YThingsHappenMV.

I don't know why I don't care more for Irving. There's other novelists who have as few notes in their repertoire that really work for me, like, well, I can't think of any American minimalist novelists I like (short stories are another matter, though), but there's Jose Saramago and Beckett from the European side.

Different people like different shit.

True and poetic.

True and poetic.

It makes me laugh at myself every time I think of Jesse's maxim because in the face of such wisdom I still instinctively rail, "Nuh uh! The shit I like is the BEST!"

My wife nearly broke my nose yesterday when we were arguing La Jetee vs. 12 Monkeys. I kept saying that La Jetee was clearly better than the Gilliam movie, trying to get her goat as much as everything with the leading law-talkin' stuff, but jeez, can you imagine being married to an asshole like me? She finally reached the point of "not funny anymore" about 5 minutes before I figured it out.

I read a fair amount of Irving in high school, all at once, and then stopped completely. I liked a fair amount of what he wrote (up to that point), but was never blown away by it or felt it had the kind of significance it ought to have to me.

Actually, although it's not what people usually mean when they say "beach reading," Irving is the kind of author I would read on a beach. He passes the time and has reasonably involving characters and themes, and I forget him entirely when I go home.

Oh, I'm entirely prepared to accept totally being in a phase of looking for a drug deal or a fallen body every couple pages...Irving and I may get involved again once the smoke clears from all the fictional gage.

I read a fair amount of Irving in high school, all at once, and then stopped completely.

Nutty is me. Now that I'm almost 20 years older than I was when I first read Irving, a lot of his writing strikes me as so so SO self-conscious, as though it has an undercurrent of "I *know* you're reading this -- isn't it clever and moving? Go on -- keep reading!"

I don't like my fiction to be more self-aware than I am.

This had me giggling madly: Feedback From James Joyce's Submission of Ulysses to His Creative-Writing Workshop.

This had me giggling madly

AWESOME.