Very very funny.

You must always discover your sexuality for the first time under the hero's manly control.

One of my critique partners wants me to cut out what I think is a perfectly tasteful and discreet masturbation scene for this very reason. I nodded, smiled, and left it in. I am following the cliche of having a widow from a bad marriage who never had good sex with her husband, so I thought it was more believable for her to fall into bed with the hero quickly if she wasn't completely sexually unawakened--especially since, if anything, she's the aggressor.

Hey! I could still be right. I have nothing left to debate, but I could still be right.

I think Marmee is most likely a mother name, whether it's meant as a phonetic form of "mommy" or just something Louisa May Alcott thought seemed whimsical and appealing. Having her called it as a nickname from childhood, to me, feels like trying too hard on the part of the author of the book Sumi is reading.

(Is she ever called anything in the books other than Marmee or Mrs. March?)

I can't remember.

I need to reread the parts where Mr. March comes home.

At lunch yesterday I browsed through Larry McMurtry's book Folly and Glory which is his fourth book in the Berrybender series. (The Berrybenders being a family, and the stories are set in the earlier days of western exploration, as opposed to the End o' the West Lonesome Dove novels.)

Anybody read Larry McMurtry? I only read him occasionally though I do find him a fine storyteller and I trust his research about the old west. The notable thing though was he makes Joss look like an amateur when it comes to offing loveable characters. He kills off toddlers left and right.

I've read some of the Lonesome Dove novels -- but none of the Barrybender books.

Having a poor understanding of the word "epic," I read Lonesome Dove in high school and found it irritatingly meandering and pointless. It wasn't that the characters weren't likable and interesting, it was that the story didn't seem to have much point beyond "They set out, they traveled for a long time, they got there, and then some of them went home."

I wanted more of a classic dramatic action, I guess. No, I've never read James Michener, either, although I got about 400 years into Sarum, the Edward Rutherfurd novel about primordial Britain, before crapping out with the annoyingness of Late Neandertal interclan marriage.

I loved Sarum, absurd multigenerational incestuousness nonwithstanding.

His other England book Forest, lost me about 40 pages in, right after the deer sex scene told from the pov of a stag.

right after the deer sex scene told from the pov of a stag.

You prefer to look at things from a more doe-like angle?

I prefer my reading material to be sans animal-pov-sex-scenes entirely.