erika, if you read one LKH, read Obsidian Butterfly. It's later in the series, and you might not understand some of the back story, but it's outside Anita's regular world and is a remarkably straight forward police procedural in a world where supernatural things are common. It's the last gasp of what might have been for the series.

Obsidian Butterfly IS really good. And very gory.

Debet, I was also intrigued by the strange nature of Clare and Henry's relationship-- weird for Clare, but almost stranger for Henry, the time-flipping part of whose body seems to have decided, once he's met Clare, that it must ensure that Clare never loves somebody else.

Besides that, I wished that the possibility of alternative timelines had been explored. Especially in going forward, shouldn't Henry occassionally find himself in a time which, because some random event alters the course of events, doesn't actually come to pass? That not being the case, we're forced to conclude that they're living in an entirely predestined world, which makes it potentially much darker-- if Clare was entirely predestined to be with Henry, he could have (for example) taken advantage of her in as a teenager, and she wouldn't have been able to leave him.

In that respect, I'd love to know what happened to some alternative versions of Clare and Henry.

I don't think Henry is the one who decides that for Claire. I'm not really sure that anyone does (the visit list being a self-fulfilling prophecy), but she's at least complicit in it, to the extent someone for whom this has been the defining through-line of her life from a very young age can be complicit. It would be interesting to ask her if she would change it, if she could. Somehow, I don't think she would. It's so key to her identity that, however much she might hate parts of it, her world would fall apart if Henry were normal.

It is a very pre-destined Universe. It's because of that that Henry can't change anything that happened before "now" (What I call a Closed-Loop Time Travel Story, where everything resolves to the same point, rather than and Open-Loop, where you change the past to change the present. I don't want to talk about the amount of time I spend thinking about these things.). I think he said something about the feeling of being impelled to actions in the Past.

It is interesting, to me, that it takes very little tweaking to turn it into a very unhealthy relationship, which I hadn't thought about before. If you make either of them less complicit in the relationship, it gets downright creepy real fast.

So I'm about a third of the way through Moby Dick . It's very good, and gives me that jolt you get when you read/hear something which has been widely imitated. Pynchon, in particular, seems to have copped huge amounts of his digressive multi-voice style from Melville

Any Buffistas read it?

I know Hayden has. I, however, have not.

I justify this lapse by the fact that I live in and around Melville's environs, know a fair amount about the whaling business, and could probably mark out the parts where he is making stuff up.

Ironically, I have read the first chapter, aloud -- on a beach. My mother has some strange ideas about beach reading.

Never read it, passed the test on it in high school with flying colors. Our English teacher wrote each test individually based on what we talked about in class, and he filled out the test with questions about the footnotes. All I did was listen to the talks about metaphors and characterization and read all the footnotes.

I've read Moby Dick three times and I'm thinking it's about time to read it again. It's great.

I don't know that Melville made much stuff up, at least in terms of day-to-day whaling. He did work as a seaman for about four years, much of that on whaling ships.

I read it -- kinda -- for a AmLit class, but didn't pay that much attention to it. I was too busy skipping class and getting high, and I was all a BritLit snob.

I read Moby Dick a few years ago. I was amazed at how funny it was. No one had ever told me it was enjoyable and amusing, just important and long.