I've thought about reading it, but in the end I didn't have the nerve. After the book is over, maybe.

FWIW, I've read Moby Dick too. I recall enjoying it, but couldn't say much more than that. I've also read 100 Years of Solitude, and loved it. One of my favourite books.

Heh. I'm the un-bt. Greatly enjoyed 100 Years... but remember little of it other than a general lucid-dream kind of atmosphere. Moby Dick, though, is vividly lovable to me in exactly the way -t describes: I read it in high school because it was on a list of stuff we were supposed to have read by the time we graduated, picked it up dreading it, and found myself frequently weeping with laughter and wondering who the assholes were who'd covered it with Important Literature warnings and spoiled it for everyone else.

Of course, I also loved Tom Jones (and a novel by Fielding's lesser-known but apparently equally snarkful and sex-comic sister is presently near the top of my to be read list) and Tristram Shandy and have adored the bits and pieces of Ulysses I've nibbled at, so my taste is clearly antiquarian, eccentric and likely suspect in the extreme.

Joe, that was a splendid recommendation for Moby-Dick; it made me want to try reading the book.

Speaking of Tristram Shandy, have you read the comic version yet? How is it?

who the assholes were who'd covered it with Important Literature warnings and spoiled it for everyone else

This is why I wish more people would get past the Middle English and actually read Chaucer--he's hilarious!! I would be sitting in my dorm common room reading the Nun's Priest Tale and cracking up, and have non-English majors give me the "what do you find so funny in him?" look.

I was reading The Odyssey on the bus once, snickering over irony and Penelope. Someone said, sounding perplexed, "Are you reading that for a class?" "Huh?" I said, annoyed at the interruption, "um, no, I'm just reading it." I swear, the person edged away from me.

I posted this in my LJ a few weeks ago, but it seems vaguely appropriate now:

So I'm at Borders (or, more accurately, the Seattle's Best Coffee in Borders) reading Rats Saw God when a couple begins hemming and hawing over where to sit. The man vocalizes a plan to get me to move so they can have adjacent seats, and before he can ask me directly, I get up and move. The woman asks if it's okay with me, and the man answers that it's okay, I'm a good man. I am.

The woman begins talking about the coming of 826 to Ann Arbor, the writing workshop that uses a pirate store for a front in San Francisco and a superhero store for a front in New York. I tell her I've heard about the pirate store. The existence of this discussion serves to highlight the terms I am on with these people.

Later on, as I sit down with my Javakula (which does not hold a candle to a frappuccino), the man noticed what I am reading.

"So you're reading a teen book?" he says. Because there's a little sticker saying "Teen" on the spine.

"Yeah, have you heard of Veronica Mars?"

He shakes his head no. Of course he hasn't. Because no one has.

"It's a television show, and the creator wrote a bunch of young adult novels, so I'm reading them this summer."

"I was asking, because you look a bit beyond the teen stage." Because teen books are only to be read by teens.

"Yeah, I'm twenty-three. But just because they're written for a younger audience doesn't mean they're not good books."

"Do you want to be a teacher?" Because that's the only reason one would read a book for teens.

"...No. Well, I guess I could be one."

"You've read Catcher in the Rye?" Because that is the only book about teenagers that is acceptable to be read by twenty-three-year-olds.

"Yeah."

See if I give up my seat for you ever again, Mr. Judgmental O'Philistine.

We won't even go into the weird looks I get when I'm immersed in Tale of Two Cities. I know you're supposed to feel charitable towards the less-fortunate, but, dammit, this stuff is at the library! For free! Books don't bite!

These anecdotes are reasons I'm glad that Oprah and Salon are doing "Revisit the Classics" book clubs. A local radio station's mid-morning show hosts have a "Radio Readers' Club," and even though they use mostly newer books (because a big part of the club is that they talk to the author some six weeks after they announce the assigned book), they did have 1984 once about a year ago. I think that they spoke with a Lit prof from Loyola or the UofChicago. I was just pleased that they had their listeners reading a classic. (They've also read books like The Kite Runner, Devil in the White City, and Bee Season.)

JZ is, once again, me. And Chaucer is very funny. Sometimes you want to remind people that many of the classics were, in their day, the equivalent of American Idol or the latest Stephen King. People mobbed the ships to get the latest installment of Dickens and cried in the streets when they learned Little Nell had died.