I WORSHIP Lorrie Moore. Tried Remains of the Day in high school and didn't like it, but maybe I would now.

I'm drawing a blank on describing what I want to read, except "fiction" and "not too boring." I like Charlotte Bronte, Haruki Murakami, Barbara Gowdy and Shirley Jackson, if that helps at all.

I can't believe people have been talking Dickens and no one mentioned "David Copperfield." It's got a sweeping story, a great portrait of a marriage which is still wrong, even though both parties truly love each other, and Mr. Micawber! It's also the most autobiographical of Dickens' books.

I don't have aproblem with mawkish, weak, overly noble, sentimental protagonists in older books. Sure, I see that they would be simps if they were around now, but they're NOT. If they're well-written, I don't mind them following outdated, even painful, social mores. I like trying to wrap my mind around world views so radically different than my own--it's my form of time travel. The very core values of Victorian or Jacobean or Elizabethan or Russian society are not my values and books give me a glimpse into that world. I often feel deeply grateful I didn't live back then, but glad for the insight.

I usually have two or three books going, plus the poetry books in the bathroom. When I'm multi-booking, it's usually a non-fiction or two, a new fiction, and maybe an old "comfort book," either fiction or non.

Right now I'm reading a book on the Canadian maritimes, a Tanya Huff vampire mystery (old comfort book), and I'm between new fics. I have a couple new fiction works from the library that I'll probably start this weekend. The bathroom poetry is a collection of Walt Whitman's stuff at the moment. "Song of Myself" sure does go on. I see what the fuss is about, but the last two poetry books were sonnet collections. Still, I'm looking forward to "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking," which is one of my favorites.

Occasionally I'll stumble on one of those books I just can't put down, and the multi-booking gets sidelined for a while. The Lovely Bones was like that.

I WORSHIP Lorrie Moore.

Eeeeeeee! Me too. I heard her read. I met her. I have her autograph. Eeee.

Tried Remains of the Day in high school and didn't like it, but maybe I would now.

I read it two or three times in high school (Ac Dec book again) and discovered something new each time.

I like Charlotte Bronte, Haruki Murakami, Barbara Gowdy and Shirley Jackson, if that helps at all.

Hm. Maybe we should both read Wuthering Heights this weekend.

JZ, weren't you going to post a literature-something something?

I don't have aproblem with mawkish, weak, overly noble, sentimental protagonists in older books.

Then may I recommend the Gospel According to John?

Another reader of 2 or 3 books at a time here. Usually (but not always) they break down into one new non-fiction, one new fiction, and one old favourite or re-read. Right now the three are The Ringed Castle (fiction re-read), These Old Shades (fiction new to me), and The Two Income Trap (new non-fiction), which I am about to abandon as it has absolutely no relevance for anyone living outside the States AFAICT. Actually, I should bring it up in Natter, because I'm intensely curious whether the situation the authors describe is really that bad down there.

ETA: Lyra Jane, if you like Barbara Gowdy, have you already read her latest ( The Romantic )? What else, hmm... maybe you'd like The Englishman's Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe.

If I had a favorite Dickens, it would be Copperfield, Robin.(I don't, exactly, but that is the one I wanted to understand the most, and no, not because of Holden's "David Copperfield kind of crap" although I giggled when I read that.)

Oooh. Please do!

JZ, weren't you going to post a literature-something something?

Tep, yeah, but I'm all swamped with work and such. In short form, though, Hec and I had a talk last night branching out from this thread in which I mentioned Fay Weldon's marvelous concept of the City of Invention, upon which she expands in the most memorable chapter of Letters to Alice Upon First Reading Jane Austen, a book which everyone ought to run out and read right now.

In short, she posits the world of Western literature as a vast city on a hill. The city has been built and rebuilt many many times over the millenia. It has pretty neighborhoods of snug little bungalows like E. Nesbit and Burnett and Terhune and less gorgeously crafted but still fun-for-a-lark complexes and co-ops like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown and all the books you read as a kid, both grand and shabby, that pulled you into the universe of the reader. There are shoddy bestseller neighborhoods, 90% of which fall over in a stiff wind but a small handful of which endure and endure. There are pulpy trailer parks; there's the porny red-light district, with the very unnerving De Sade alleyway.

There are the stately gated neighborhoods full of superbly crafted classics like Richardson and Scott that everyone admires and no one really lives in anymore; there are the nearly identical but somehow not mansions of George Eliot, which seem like they ought to be dead inside but actually see quite a bit of foot traffic. The Trollope cul-de-sac, which had fallen into dreadful disrepair, has been extensively renovated in the last few decades and is now quite the lively neighborhood. There are the sprawling ramshackle Winchester Mystery Houses of Dickens, where there's a party 24/7.

There are increasing numbers of shuttle buses and express trains to the South American, African, Carib, Near East and Far East districts, which used to be considered the boondocks, then interesting suburbs, and are gradually coming to be understood as rightly belonging within the boundaries of the City proper.

High on a hill in the center of the City is the Castle Shakespeare. It is visible from virtually every point in the City. Its architecture is a mad merry theft of almost everything that came before it, and there is no corner of the City built afterward that doesn't fall at least a little bit under its shadow. If you visit the City and ignore the Castle, you're likely to find yourself hopelessly lost. You don't have to like the Castle; you may hate and abhor it; but you ignore it at your peril. (The only addition I'd make to her metaphor here is that if Castle Will is the defining feature of the City's horizon, the streets and sidewalks are paved with the Bible and Greek and Roman mythology; you don't have to love 'em, but if you enter the City you are walking on them and building on them all the same.)

And anyone, at any time, is free to tour the City, any neighborhood you like--and, more, you're free at any time to start building and add your own home to the City.

It's my very favorite booky metaphor ever, followed by the world of literature as a great ongoing conversation existing outside of time, to which anyone who writes and puts that writing out for someone, anyone, else to read, is adding her voice.