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.

my rec would probably be Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.

Okay. Wanna tell me why?

Not Sean, but my reasons would be: Funny. Sad. Very easily accessible. Great descriptions that take you right inside what it feels to be 9 or 10 and rambling around a small dusty town in the middle of summer. A wonderful portrait of the child Truman Capote. A great portrait of grace and courage in the face of contempt and humiliation. Boo Radley. Atticus Finch, the greatest father in the history of literary fathers (a friend of mine whose father abandoned the family when he was seven said he found Mockingbird when he was ten, ran out and bought a copy, and read three more copies to pieces by the time he was 18, promising himself that someday he'd be a father and he would be Atticus, not his own father -- and he grew up and did it, too).

Interesting things said by author Brad Meltzer, which I was uncertain if I should put here or in comics, but I figure hell, works either place.

Curse his flexible and spicy brains.

Which, to me, is not that different than rolling your eyes forever when people talk about how cute their cats are. Our community standard is that if you don't want to participate in a conversation you do not try to undermine it either.

If you're going to make a statement like this, for the love of Mike, separate your two points. Inline comments about specific works, which happens anytime there's a focused discussion about anything from cars to grammar to cheese (like: swiss; hate: brie, which is raunch) != a dislike of critical discussion, so while both may have been stated, conflating them just makes you seem like you're lecturing people about the wrongness of personal tastes, be that your intent or no.

JZ, that makes me cry.

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

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

There are parts of it I found really, really tedious, and his take on the modern Goth subculture was ... charmingly off-base. But other parts I found interesting, and I'm enough of a Snobby ElderGoth that I'll re-read it so I have ammo when other Snobby ElderGoths start getting a little *too* pretentious.

English muffins with peanut butter (eta - or, you know, not):

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.

Dude, they're totally there. I was quoting from memory, including the neighborhoods that I know, but they are all there. The City is constantly growing.

(a friend of mine whose father abandoned the family when he was seven said he found Mockingbird when he was ten, ran out and bought a copy, and read three more copies to pieces by the time he was 18, promising himself that someday he'd be a father and he would be Atticus, not his own father -- and he grew up and did it, too).

Not male, but yeah. If I ever parent, I want to be Atticus.

Thanks for the recs, Jen. Your post is bookmarked, and will go with me to the library tomorrow.

Si vous comprenez francais, lirez Le Petit Prince en francais.

Q'uest-ce que si je comprends Francais seulement assez au lire ces mots?

_Cowboys Are My Weakness_ by Pam Houston.

Is that the one where, in an early story in the collection, a character walks something like 80 miles in one night to get water? I could not get past the fact she walked too far too fast for a human to enjoy the literary values of the story. (I know the point of the story is not how far she walks, but I get hung up on things like that.)

I was wondering why no one mentioned Copperfield or Oliver Twist in re: Dickens. Is "Oliver Twist" worth reading or simply over-exposed?

Also, it occurred to me over my double cheesburger at lunch that we had a kurfuffle over, of all things, anti-intellectualism and the value of litcrit. Others, possibly some here, have kerfuffles over American Idol voting and sports scores and such. If we argue about the definition of intellectualism, doesn't that, by default, make us intellectuals, therefore not anti-intellectual?

It made sense while eating a double cheesburger.