Toddson, I'm sure that's what Dickens intended in mid-19th century England. Plus he may have intended a class distinction because Smike is so subservient to Nicholas, who is so clearly Smike's protector.

But an early 21st-century gay man can easily read Smike's emotions as not just gratitude. (Which is not to say that Nicholas can be read to have felt the same way by any means.)

Paradise Lost

Love Paradise Lost. But I am fascinated by Milton. Also love and adore Merchant of Venice. I hope I love Lear as much this year as I am teaching it.

There's lots of the traditional canon that I love (bits of Canterbury Tales, tons of poetry, Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde's stuff, Dante), but I love the new canon more (Margaret Atwood and Richard Wright for example).

What I struggle with though and can't seem to finish? Toni Morrison.

I was skimming through Boxed Set and it struck me - you could have a Moby Dick/Battlestar Galactica crossover - with Starbuck!

Love Paradise Lost, too! Actually, I should pick up a copy and do a reread--I haven't looked at it since college. (All the Miltonesque angels are why The Prophecy is one of my favorite horror movies of recent vintage.)

Tess is the one book I tossed across the room in disgust after reading it for school. The book itself is all right, but I couldn't get over my reaction to Tess herself--yes, your life sucks, just get on with it already!!

Oh, and Kat, I hope you love Lear as much as I do. When we read it in college, it was the one Shakespeare play my freshman lit prof had us read out loud in class (the entire play). We female students were always up for reading Regan or Goneril--I love playing the evil sisters!

I was skimming through Boxed Set and it struck me - you could have a Moby Dick/Battlestar Galactica crossover - with Starbuck!

Or Gaeta.

I love teaching Toni Morrison! I didn't grow to love it until I'd learned a hell of a lot about African American lit from my friend who I was developing the course with, though. Bluest Eye in particular is fascinating to me. Tell you what: you teach my kids the victorians and I'll teach yours Morrison. No?

I'm surprised at the R&J dissing. What do you guys think is inferior about it?

R&J are Too Stupid To Live, and I hate plots that are basically driven by idiocy.

Err. That's the short form. The comedy-gone-wrong is something I've heard often in my studies of the play. Sadly, it's the kind of comedy that drives me bonkers.

Could we think of them as the original winners of the Darwin Award?

Yeah, I mean it is not like they were not intentionally stupid characters. Hormone fueled teenage crushes among spoiled aristocrats. "Too stupid to live" is absolutely plausible, and I think one of the points.

"Too stupid to live" is absolutely plausible, and I think one of the points.

For me, it works beautifully because, at their age, everybody is too stupid to live. And for most of us, what we get in the long run is comedies gone right. R&J were young and afire with hormones and their first taste of Huge Grown-Up Emotions and, in their too-stupidness, exactly like everyone who manages to squeak through and live to tell the tale...except that they don't.

There were a lot of things about Luhrman's R+J that irritated me, but I loved the way he staged their deaths (loved in the sense that I found the entire scene physically unbearable): the comedy-gone-wrongness of it was ratcheted up to a ridiculous pitch, with that inevitable sum depending on split-second bad timing. One glance down, one glance up, literally one second could have saved them both at three or four different points in the scene. People in the theater I saw it in were actually pounding their armrests in frustration, and I wasn't the only one who started blubbing when that last bad number slid into the equation and the last trapdoor out of death slammed shut.

Dombey is so very much my favorite Dickens. I love the main story (which Mervyn Peake must have had in the back of his mind when he wrote Titus Groan), and it also contains possibly his greatest ever secondary characters. I mean, I love almost everyone in almost all his novels, but if I could be any one of them when I grow up, it'd be Susan Nipper.

Trollope: I still slightly favor Framley Parsonage because of the excellent, big-hearted and snarky Lucy Robarts, but I really love them all. (Small side note: Trollope himself was considered a mild oddity in his time: a big blustery hunt-and-smoking-and-strong-liquor-loving manly man who genuinely preferred the company of women, not for the sex (or not just, anyway) but for the conversation--and, damn, he writes great women.)