That man really must dislike speaking engagements. His fee is $50K for one night. Plus first class airfare

I suspect it's more that he has NO free time, and the high fee is to keep his schedule as clear as it possibly can be.

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It's a mixture of Stardust and Coraline, so of course I'm going to find it perfect.

Hm. Now I am worried. Because I was somewhat underwhelmed by both those books, although I liked them okay. I prefer American Gods and Anansi Boys, or even Neverwhere. I'm hot-and-lukewarm when it comes to Gaiman.

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I suspect it's more that he has NO free time, and the high fee is to keep his schedule as clear as it possibly can be.

Yep, that's what I figured. I still cried and cried. The speaker series coordinator dangled a very shiny bauble in front of me and then snatched it away.

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Now I am worried. Because I was somewhat underwhelmed by both those books, although I liked them okay. I prefer American Gods and Anansi Boys, or even Neverwhere. I'm hot-and-lukewarm when it comes to Gaiman.

Yeah, then The Graveyard Book may not be to your taste. It isn't like American Gods at all. When I said it was a love note to Ray Bradbury, I wasn't kidding.

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I also haven't read much Ray Bradbury. I think all I've read is "All Summer in a Day." I recall wanting to read Something Wicked This Way Comes, but I'm not sure whether I ever checked it out, or whether I tried to start and didn't finish, or what happened, really. I know I held the book in my hands and everything.

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Bradbury has a very cool book called "Zen and (in?) the Art of Writing"--a title he hated--and there's a chilling essay about his sources of inspiration. His description of the overgrown gorge outside of the town he grew up gives me goose bumps.

It's too bad the world has changed so that boys (and girls) can no longer head out their doors and terrify themselves with what they imagine is in the woods. Instead of wonderful books of imagination, we get true crime.

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we get true crime and abridged/bowlderized classics that have had all the conflict, beauty, and drama stripped out

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Bartelby the Scrivener I always got, but that's because I was an absurdist/existentialist fan from a very young age, and Herman was ahead of the curve with that one.

You should try The Confidence-Man sometime. It reads more like late-60s John Barth than the work of a writer in the late 1850s.

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So, I get back from staff meeting and senior staff meeting, log on, and think "70 new messages in Literary? WTF?"

I do love our literary kerfuffles, especially reading them after the fact...

Hmm, let's see, some hopefully noncontroversial literary opinions:

1. Annabel is a big fan of the Don't Let the Pigeon series by whatshisname who did Knuffle Bunny, and I approve her budding literary taste.

2. I liked the new Sharing Knife book and wish Bujold wrote faster.

3. The Charterhouse of Parma and Bill Bryson's Shakespeare book are awaiting me on the holds shelf at my local library, and I can hardly wait to pick them up. (ETA checked my account again--Fields of Fire, by Jim Webb, is also there!)

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I am amused by the fact that this discussion includes Ulysses, Moby Dick and Bradbury, since all three are related. Bradbury lived in Dublin while writing the screenplay for John Huston's Moby Dick.

I enjoyed Ulysses in grad school, but I haven't felt any impulse to read it again on my own. On the other hand, I've read Moby Dick three times, and I'm thinking it's time to read it again. I remember being irritated by all the pages devoted to "how to cook a whale" the first time I read it, but I later came to think that's an important part of the book. I'm still not sure he needed to describe whales quite as much as he did, though.

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