(which should NEVER be split in half. Yes, Mr. Gibson, I'm looking at you):

Oh HELL yeah.

Jilli, if I were to recommend a "classic," my rec would probably be Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.

you're not a poseur unless you acted like you had knowledge you didn't

No, not that; I just thought I had adequate knowledge compared with my peer group, and I hate that I don't. It's totally an ego thing -- I love being a smarty-pants.

if you like Barbara Gowdy, have you already read her latest ( The Romantic )?

Yes. I didn't think it was as good as Mr. Sandman or the one with the three sisters, but it was still an excellent book, though there were parts where I wanted to shake the heroine until her teeth rattled.

Jilli, if I were to recommend a "classic," my rec would probably be Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.

Okay. Wanna tell me why?

(The book that I'm going to use as my 'what Classic to read next' guide is Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Evil, Horror, and Ruin. It's lying around the house, so why not?)

I love being a smarty-pants.

well, I suggest shifting discussion to where you have a base of knowledge. We're all smart about something.

Plus, rubbernecking, it's true.

Hee! Hi all. I was here, eatin' popcorn and wonderin' if somebody was gonna bite another person's ear off.

I noticed in JZ's West Literatureopolis there were no gleaming Condos of the Future of Sci Fi, no brutal shadowed alleys of Cyberpunk. No lush tree-shrouded elven 'burbs, no dirt-street saloons of Western Town.

I need to draw a map.

I'm woefully unread in the classics. I will cop to a "Pfft. BO-ring!" attitude twenty years ago. I'm trying to catch up now, but have to go to the bookstore and not stop at the "Graphic Novels" section.

Hi.

Someone up thread asked for recommendations for the lazy reader. So here's a quick list of short works (or collections of short stories) that I think kick ass:

1. _Notes from Underground_ by Dostoyevsky. The angst train's a-comin' and you're tied to the track, and there's no gallant knight to swoop in and save you, but damned if you aren't fascinated by the chugging rhythm of the train anyway, and the pounding of your own heart.

2. _The Little Prince_ by Antoine de Saint Exupery. Overread? Maybe. Overtaught? Maybe. But surely one of the most touching books I've ever read. Si vous comprenez francais, lirez Le Petit Prince en francais.

3. _The Snows of Kilimanjaro_ by Ernest Hemingway. Worth it if only for "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." Hail nothing, full of nothing. Nothing is with thee.

4. _At the Bottom of the River_ by Jamaica Kincaid. Living in the silent voice, I am at last erased. This one's not a quick read--there's a lot to it and the language isn't usual--but it's lyrical and lovely.

5. _Candide_ by Voltaire. Oh, the sarcasm. Oh, the viciousness. Oh, the funny.

6. _Lust and Other Stories_ by Susan Minot. You begin to feel like a piece of pounded veal. Bitter, so very bitter, but wise and written with a precision of diction that makes me want to go to her house and beg her to write poetry, too.

7. _Cowboys Are My Weakness_ by Pam Houston. I recommend this with hesitation, because honestly I can't ever get over the feeling that all the lead female characters are Pam Houston and that this isn't a work of fiction at all, but the writing is excellent.

8. _Short Shorts_, edited by Irving Howe and Ilana Weiner Howe. A collection of the shortest short stories by some fantastic authors like Tolstoy, Chekov, de Maupassant, Joyce, Lawrence, Kafka, Porter, Borges, Marquez... It's a gem.

9. _The Life to Come_ by E.M. Forster. But only if you like his other stuff (_Howards End_, _A Passage to India_, _Maurice_, etc.). This is Forster at his Forster-est--restrained, understated, and devastating.

10. _A Relative Stranger_ by Charles Baxter. Baxter has a gift for writing about you even when he's writing about a middle-aged man from Michigan. He'll put words in your mouth and you'll find that they fit. He writes about the random collisions of people in life and the far-reaching ramifications those collisions have on everyone.

11. _The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction_, edited by R.V. Cassill and Joyce Carol Oates. A first-rate collection of short fiction. It contains works by Alvarez, Cisneros, Dybek, Mukherjee, Atwood, Beattie, Carver, Marquez... It's single-handedly responsible for getting me to read fiction again after years of reading pretty much only poetry. There's still one story in there that I can't read without crying ("In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel).

12. _The Things They Carried_ by Tim O'Brien. Upsetting, gut-wrenching, and visceral. Set in Vietnam, but it's not a book solely about the war any more than Moby-Dick is a book solely about a whale. A book about the way stories can save lives, and about how subjective the truth is. A book about love. A book about death. A book about keeping the dead alive. These stories pull no punches, and left me gasping. Sometimes crying. Always moved, and grateful I'd read them.

Holy crap! 600 new posts?!? How the heck am I going to read all this before dinner? What happened?

Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Evil, Horror, and Ruin

It's also really really boring. Which is impressive, given the topic.

Jilli, if I were to recommend a "classic," my rec would probably be Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.

Oh, YES. I just read it for the first time last year, and YES. It's so affecting and disarming and simple and true and and and and....

I'll stop now, for fear of overhyping, but yeah, go read TKaM.

I've actually used Norton's anthologies from time to time as a guide of What To Read Next. You can read snippets and decide if you want to pursue that particular reading or not.

Jilli, Mockingbird definitely has Gothic tendencies (of the southern variety).

Come to that, you'd probably enjoy Barbara Gowdy too, esp. Mister Sandman and her short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love featuring the notorious title story.