People, upthread, were talking about O'Brien:

I like most of them but I keep stumbling in parts. Right now Master and Commander is giving me fits because I like the characters and I think I like the story but there's so much about the ships and the time period that I just don't understand that sometimes I feel like I'm flailing.

I've read all of them more times than I'm willing to admit,and I still don't know what 80% of the nautical terms mean. And I was given my first boat at 9, grew up like Raleigh chatting to the retired sailors by the harbour, and used to race dinghys as a kid against 3 olympic yachtsmen. Doesn't matter.

I actually haven't read a Sharpe's book in a while but I remember them being more...well, less...I'm not sure how to describe it but in some ways it seemed easier to read because maybe the narrative style felt a bit more modern. But I'm not sure that means what I think it does.

Without wanting to get into the whole canon thing, you know the phrase "transcending genre" everyone was tossing around? That's the difference between Cornwell and O'Brien. Cornwell is a commercial genre writer, nothing more. His prose exists to tell a story, his characters are functional, and if he gets X number of thrills into the book he's done his job. O'Brien isn't even the same species. Within the structure of the genre he's writing about history, our view of history, the nature of small communities, friendship, Irishness and Englishness, the Enlightenment and a thousand other things. That's literature. It's less easy to read cos it's doing more stuff.

It was giving me fits trying to figure out what kind of man Jack Aubrey is but his beginning friendship with Maturin is what's kept me going.

Aubrey is an English Tory, Maturin an Irish Radical. That's the central point of the two characters.

And was it erika who was reading Infinite Jest? If you don't like the footnotes, give up on it. They're the fun of the book.

I'm just pissed cause he knows things I don't.And I think footnoting fiction is pretentious as fuck. But maybe it's worth it...apart from working my upper body carrying it.

That was a great list of poets upthread, Jen. I'm particularly fond of Lowell, and "Skunk Hour," with its chicken-and-egg relationship to Bishop's "The Armadillo."

A few other more-or-less contemporary poets who I think are important (and capable of powerful verse):

• John Berryman, with his lush Dream Songs (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1058/) about his alter-ego/whipping boy Henry.

• James Wright, the master of turning ordinary events into the stunningly transcendent (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1339/).

• Richard Hugo, Wright's foil, who turns the transcendent into the ordinary (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1468/).

• Robert Creeley, who's funny as hell (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1640/).

• A.R. Ammons, with his scientific approach to language (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/8075/).

Well, there's a lot more, but those are some of my favorites.

I'm also with P-C in the Absolam! Absolam!-loving camp. It's convoluted as hell with its stories within stories within stories, some of which are half-remembered untruths and some of which are outright obfuscation, but it manages to indict the idea of history as an objective truth, indict racism and the Great Man concept, and rain damnation across time, all with some of the most gorgeous language set to paper in English. And, yeah, at the topmost level, the whole action is "guy tells a story to his roommate about his family." It's flat-out engrossing.

I'm particularly fond of Lowell, and "Skunk Hour," with its chicken-and-egg relationship to Bishop's "The Armadillo."

* James Wright, the master of turning ordinary events into the stunningly transcendent (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1339/).

I'm required to note by my alma mater that both Lowell and Wright went to Kenyon College, thankyewvurrymuch.

JZ made me read Stephen Dobyns poetry all morning - great stuff. It made me think of Victor (Dobyns was a reporter in Detroit for a while) and TAL (he tells a lot of stories in his poetry).

Kenyon is kinda Ground Zero for contemporary poetry.

And I think footnoting fiction is pretentious as fuck.

Not a Terry Pratchett fan, then?

I was just coming back to post that, having gotten back into Soul Music.

To me, current "litfic" is the trade paperbacks on the front table at Barnes & Noble.

Also, although I haven't read much Dickens, I lurved Bleak House, and have a strategy for people who are freaked out by the length: read it as it was written. As a serial. Granted, I didn't actually spread it out one chapter a week or whatever, but I did take a couple of breaks. I think I read it over a couple of months. (Usually I finish the kind of book I generally read for fun in a day or two, even work days.)

Oh, and also, this whole discussion reminds me to give another shot to books I only read in high school, because I was generally unimpressed with them at the time, but I was generally unimpressed with anything.

Ooh. Jesse really was too cool for school.