The Pigeon Wants a Puppy is his newest and it is LOVE.

I'll have to get it soon. Especially because I think The Annabel wants a puppy. We regularly drive by a cat adoption center and often admire the kitties while waiting at the red light, but AB knows her daddy is severely allergic and therefore we're not getting a cat.

Saturday they had a poster on their door with a picture of a dog and a cat. AB noted it and said, "DOGGIES don't make Daddy sneeze." And she was all for getting him a puppy for Father's Day.

Mo Willems is a favorite at our house, too. Li'l Sphere's into the Elephant and Piggie books, now, which are fun because they're quick and comic book-y. He also loves Knuffle Bunny, Too.

Also, I agree that the digressions in Moby-Dick are essential to the story, which is all I'll say on the subject.

Oh we love Kuffle Bunny.

Jessica - tell me a little about Glasshouse?

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.

We read that too. It was a VERY intensive Melville class - almost an immersion rather than a clase. We read:

Mardi
Pierre (that one was absolutely of-the-rails lunatic; almost a parody of a Wuthering Heights type of novel, but I'm not sure Melville was kidding)
Moby Dick
A volume of short stories (including Bartleby and Billy Budd) and
The Confidence Man

Which I really need to dig up my copy of and re-read. I really enjoyed it, but I'm sure I didn't get close to a quarter of what's in that book.

tell me a little about Glasshouse?

Robin wakes up from memory surgery not entirely sure who he is or what he was trying to forget, but pretty quickly works out that someone is still trying to kill him. Decides to sign up for a social experiment that will have him locked in a closed habitat for three years recreating a "dark ages" (approximately 1950-2050) society with hundreds of other volunteers. (Figures he'll be safe in there - he won't be able to get out, but they (whoever they are) won't be able to get in either.) Wakes up inside the experiment as a woman (not exactly what he was expecting, but oh well!) and has to learn to live as a dark ages female while his memories start to come back as dreams, all the while slowly realizing that there's more going on with this "social experiment" than he was led to believe when he signed up.

It's one of the best-realized post-singularity societies I've ever read, and Stross' POV of a modern posthuman trapped inside the body of a 20th century woman is amazingly dead-on. I just loved every second of it.

That sounds pretty awesome.

cool. it's on my list now

Pierre

Never read it, but I just bought a copy at the library sale, so it's on the list.

That does sound good. I've read some others of his, but I'm memfaulting as to what.

I love The Confidence Man. This is the list of Melville I don't love: Billy Budd.

I suggest that people also read Typee, which was hugely popular. Tropical paradise! Sex! Naked girls! What's not to like? It does help you understand why there was such a negative contemporary reaction to Moby Dick. People were expecting Harold Robbins and they got James Joyce.