But the responses to the critical discussion that happened today were so defensive, resentful and derailing that it pissed me off.

t Little voice in my head saying leave it alone, but I'm not.

I get that, but I also get how the first post caused some people to feel defensive and resentful. And, last I checked, we are all pretty much adults who can carry on a hard but honest debate about pretty much anything. If the conversation others were having pissed you off, then either: go away, have another conversation backchannel, or have one inthread, parallel to the one being had. But don't shit on the rest of us and the conversation we were having because you don't like "the tone".

I think Melville and Mann definitely have that in common. I have to confess that I read and enjoyed Moby Dick at 12. And I'm at the shallow end of the pool when it comes to literary insight on this board. I think I've just always had a weakness for encyclopediac writers. And hec, your comment just make me realize that it relates to my love of good world building; I never realized until now that I love Melville and Heinlien on similar grounds.

[Edited a typo reversing the meaning of the second sentence.]

You know what's good readin'?

The Destroyer series. Remo Wiliams RAWKS!

...

What?

There's a novelisation of Chronicles Of Riddick in the stores. I suppose they'll novelise anything. But if I can't see him and hear him? I'm a little detached from the premise.

t makes note to ita's Christmas list: Chronicles of Riddick on tape with Vin reading.

I'm about to duck out. As it happens, I need to go to the library to pick up some holds that expire today*, and need to leave in the next ten minutes or so if I'm to be back before I expect Annabel to be hungry again.

Putting on my detached hat, I do wonder if the high school teachers of the world are doing the canon a disservice by what bits of it are taught and how. Looking back at what I had to read for school, I feel like whatever committee selected it was more concerned with getting everyone to read a certain set of Important Works, regardless of whether or not they were accessible or enjoyable to the average 15-year-old, than with picking those parts of the canon most likely to engage high school students and inspire a lifelong love of reading and desire to learn. And some of the assignments we had--yeesh, I can appreciate that students need to be taught the right way to do a term paper before we start taking inevitable shortcuts, but I'm not sure I'd still love even Pride & Prejudice or The Screwtape Letters if I'd had to do anything as nitpicky as the color term paper we were assigned for The Red Badge of Courage. (We had to turn in an individual note card for each use of color in the entire book before we could start writing our papers.)

*FWIW, I'm picking up the following:
Treason's Harbour, by Patrick O'Brian
It Had to Be You, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Medalon, by Jennifer Fallon
The Safe-Keeper's Secret, by Sharon Shinn
Smart Love: The Compassionate Alternative to Discipline that Will Make You a Better Parent and Your Child a Better Person, by Martha Pieper

I hope I like Medalon, because I haven't fallen in love with a fantasy series since the Kushiel books, and I'm homesick for it.

But, for the record, I was not seeing the conversation trending towards "Oh poor me, deep thinking is TOO HARD", but rather into one of those vague, woolly, "I liked or disliked X" themes.

Also FTR, my objection was to Hayden's characterization of the conversation as the former; the question of the existence/value/definition of canon is a separate issue, IME.

As far as critical analysis goes - I can agree with Hec that there honestly isn't a great deal of that here, most of the time. But I don't think that's confined to the weightier tomes - Crusie, et al, get chatted up, recommended, etc., but it's not as though there's a lot of textual analysis going on. Why that is, I don't know; I have a hunch though, that something about the nature of the thread discourages it, not the specific reading preferences of the denizens.

Personally, I'm reading two books right now. One is a recently published fantasy novel by a fairly popular author. The other is Thomas Paine. I've mentioned the first here, in passing rather than as part of any discussion or analysis. I haven't brought up the second. Why? Couldn't tell you.

Am I wrong in thinking there was a certain amount of discussion of Joyce recently? There was a flurry of HP talk recently, too, though not having read the books I pretty much skipped that one. But for outside reasons, these were novels that were occupying the thoughts of a large enough group of people here that a conversation could be sustained. Maybe we need to find a way to encourage that with other works of significance, however you define that category.

But knowing what I know about the people here, their interests, abilities, and personalities, I can't help but think that there's something structurally lacking more than intellectually.

Hec, do you have an issue with identification? How much is too much? And I include woobie-fication in this question too. I've seen you be snappish in Jossverse when it felt like posters were getting close to a fictional character.

Do you think it's a in/less valid way to approach fiction? Do you think it precludes your way?

To my mind, you are suis generis and beyond comparison or generalization.

I'm not beyond comparison or generalisation, at least not any more than anyone else here is. But I appreciate the sentiment.

In re exposure to the classics at a young age? I can speak to this, and will. I was, by a country mile, the afterthought baby of my family; the nearest sibling to me in age is nine years my senior, the oldest 17 years my senior. I was also very sickly as a kid: one stint in an iron lung for polio, again for the resultant pneumonia. In there was also scarlet fever and a few other things.

Result of that was that I was read to, a lot. My brother - a member of AFI in those days, stationed in Berlin, and fluent in, count 'em, eleven languages - would come home on rare occasions, and he'd read to me: clearest memory was Cymbeline in German. I spoke not one word of the language, but the flow of it was staggering. My cousin Felicia then read it to me in English. There was no crit possible, or needed, or desired. I was six. No idea in hell what the play was about, but I damn well surfed on the rhythm of the language. Totally visceral, first genuine reaction I had, and it stayed with me.

My sister Alice - she of the French PhD - would read to me, as well. Her favourite, obviously, was Lewis Carroll. She's made cutout dolls of all the characters, a la Tenniel, and we'd act them out, verbatim, on my bed. Loving the characters, loving the journey they were on, wondering what would happen if I could someday write my own, and send characters like that down a left fork in that road. Is that anti-intellectual? I don't know. I don't think so. I just know I loved it.

Then my cousin Donny, reading to me from The Odyssey. I fell in love with it: Circe, Polyphemus, Calypso, the entire journey. Years later, at school, I was astonished at how much of it I remembered.

Somewhere in there, before I healthied up and people stopped reading to me, I heard The Wind in the Willows, a truckload of Shakespeare (The Tempest is the most clear in my memory), my first Michael Drayton (that remains my favourite poem by anyone, ever), William Blake, John Milton (I thought he was a poopy old girlhater and never changed my opinion on that), Edna St. Vincent Millay, Milne, some Russians in Russian (they were teaching me the language, which I never used and promptly forgot), and Aristophanes.

But in 1968, my sisters' college buddies made it very clear that, while they were amused as hell by her prodigal sister, said sister couldn't possibly be taken seriously because she didn't like (insert following Serious Writers here). They then managed to ruin a couple of my favourite pieces - I can't read Kenneth Grahame anymore because they killed it - by dissecting them.

So, yeah, I get defensive.

I can't help but think that there's something structurally lacking more than intellectually.

will not mention the book club idea again.