I've never been able to get through Walden. It has the Sominex effect on me. I guess I should work, huh. I miss dropping in on Buffistas and hanging out, then going to visit Van Gogh or Renoir. sigh.

I did love The Turn of the Screw. But then again, I'm all for ghost stories.

I love Henry James. When I want to immerse myself in beautiful prose for hours and hours he's just the ticket. Ethan Frome, never appealed. I've been around a bunch of depressed people stuck in a cold climate. Don't need to read about it, thanks.

Ethan Frome is no "Age of Innocence". But I'm afraid these days I'm too impatient for the 19th century thing...it's me, I know. But I've got "Kavalier and Klay" coming soon...

So, I've almost finished a re-read of Pynchon's Vineland, which, while not his best book, is criminally underrated. Although it's his most linear book (despite the fact that it switches back-and-forth through time and across perspectives with slippery ease), it's a dead-on prescient parody of Ashcroft's concepts of justice and a sharp look at the fascism of desire and the legacy of the 1960s.

Oh completely. Not deep, but much witty breadth. And after the WAIT (I should have made that 28 type or something), what could have lived up to the exectations it built up? And, as Angus' and your posts pointed out, fucking hysterically funny. Pynchon's always had his funny bits and pieces, but this was practically a standup act about the sixties and seventies. In some ways, he was sending himself up without getting explicit about it.

And just randome details: I mean, the Japanese insurance investigator and the assassain who came to love him? Great stuff!

I love Henry James, Ethan Frome, and Bartleby. I usually like what others consider boring or slow or too depressing.

I liked it when I read it. My patience is short now...I like patter(So I just bought "Infinite Jest"...ok, that makes sense. In Bizzarro World.)

Has anybody read Cassandra French's Finishing School for Boys by Eric Garcia? It caught my attention as I was leaving the bookstore tonight, but I didn't have the chance to take a good look at it.

Read several books in the last couple days..."My Sister's Keeper", which was an interesting book about a girl who was conceived in an attempt to get cord blood cells for her sister with leukemia, and is now 13 and they're trying to get her to donate a kidney. So she sues her parents for medical emancipation. It was interesting, but not quite what I had in mind from the teaser. Plus the ending was LAME.

Also tried to read a book about Mendeleev and the periodic table, but it was all bound up in how it was a metaphor about Russia and revolutions too, or something, and I couldn't read it all.

A book about the Thomas Jefferson High School (a science and tech magnet in Northern Virginia) class of 1993, "Where are they now" kind of thing. I thought it would be interesting in a "hey, they graduated two years before me, will they make my life feel lame?". I was skimming the intro and realized I actually knew one of the people profiled. It was vaguely interesting, bits of it (wow, I'm so not a rhodes scholar like some of these people, but neither am I a dumpster-diving rail-riding anarchist...). But I think it only would've been truly interesting if it were written about my high school class, and people *I* wonder what happened to.

A young adult book about a girl whose dad is a rockstar. It was lame.

And another young adult book (I think it was called "Luna") about a trans teen, written from the point of his (her) younger sister. Which was interesting, in many ways, but also just rang false for me, somehow, how mature the characters were in a few places. It felt kind of superficial somehow, too. Which was a shame, becuase I enjoyed the author's other book, and I really want to support topics like this.

meara, is that the same Eric Garcia who wrote Anonymous Rex? 'Cause I like that book, and didn't know he'd written any non-dinosaur-realted books.