Good line: "If Thomas Pynchon wrote a book about someone like me, her name would be Nixhip Squareberger, and she would probably be working for the Feds."

Not sure if I'm more embarrassed about not making it through Swann's Way or for having zero familiarity with most of these contemporary authors.

authors piss me off.

also, it bothers me that these people would list "Harry Potter" books as "important books" that they haven't read.

i'm POSITIVE that they could come up with ACTUALLY IMPORTANT BOOKS that they haven't read.

I would call the HP series a guilty pleasure rather than a great book/series. Something about it is like crack, but I have to admit it could be better written.

I feel no shame about not having read -- here, Myla Goldberg said it: "I've discovered that unless a book has a throbbing heart as well as a sexy brain, I feel like the story is a specimen in a sealed glass jar and not a living, breathing creature I want to take by the hand and talk to for hours on end." Amen. So few "great" authors really combine those qualities.

I hate when they do something like this and fail to tell me what these authors, most whom I have never heard of, have written themselves. While I understand all of them are published, that does not make them talented or good or someone I should want to hear from regarding what they have or have not read.

And the two books that I have tried to read and couldn't are Finnegan's Wake and Naked Lunch. I think I will make through Naked Lunch one day, but I don't think anyone has read Finnegan's Wake. And those that said they did are liars. Liars!

I've tried Gravity's Rainbow twice now, several years apart. I just can't do it and I probably never will.

I have a terrible habit of finishing books that I've started, the few exceptions at this point being Naked Lunch and On the Road.

I've read Moby Dick and Gravity's Rainbow, and I plan to read both again sometime later in my life. (I liked both, but didn't fully get all I could out of either.)

No attempts have been made on Proust, Ulysses, War and Peace (the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation is out!) or Bleak House, although I did just purchase the last one.

Yeah, I couldn't finish On The Road either. As for Moby Dick, I've read it not once, not twice, but thrice. Two for classes, once on my own. And I'd do it again.

Bleak House ROCKS, best Dickens EVER...seriously, they should have had us read that instead of...what was that Pip nonsense...oh, yes, Great Expectations...

i've started catch 22 seven times. part of the reason i keep retrying is that it's short and it seems like i would be able to get through it. i just can't.

i finished catch22 in record time, in part out of guilt for being stuck in the middle of gravity's rainbow for two years now and seeing catch22 as GR-lite. a mild sense of accomplishment ensued, which tells you how often i finish a book these days.

Catch 22 is a fantastic book. It was my favorite book in high school and for long time thereafter. I can see how its circular structure could be exceedingly frustrating, but it really is worth it. Go for eight.

Some favorite quotes:

"He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt."
"You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions."
"The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them."

Naked Lunch is totally worth finishing. GR rocks my world in every way, including the part about how there's a lot there that I didn't get.

btw, that was said in lieu of being able to access slate, which for some reason is currently inaccessible to me.