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I don't think that should be much of a problem with Desolation Angels. But, you are exactly right about the rants. Usually what gets me is when he gets away from the narrative structure and starts playing with words, gets too jazzy in his writing. I guess if you are a writer, you have to love...

Luckily, I never watched Married with Children. I was just getting Leela and Lena all mixed up in my head. Having just finished the 6th Harry Potter, I would add Ginny Weasley to my list if she just 10 years older - and Tonks sounds like the kind of girl I would definitely be interested in.

It isn't so much, in my opinion, that the book requires a dictionary to be read, as it is that the text is very dense. In any event, don't get caught up in such details. Read it first, then go back and look up any words you haven't figured out.

Yeah, yeah. Her name is Harley Quinn. Poison Ivy wasn't bad, either, and a red head. Though, of the Futurama gang, I'd vote for the other girl, even if she is a cyclops.

Perhaps it is a measure of the state of my life outside of books, but I will gladly confess, as a man, that i have been smitten with several female characters. Lena from Joseph Conrad's novel Victory - a waif lost in the South Seas with long, dark hair who traipses around Axel's private island...

I don't know of you'll be able to find them (sadly, they're out of print), but Chuck Rosenthal's Loop Trilogy (Loop's Progress, Experiments with Life and Deaf, and Loop's End) would make a nice addition. Instead of taking the approach of merely reciting or retelling childhood traumas, Rosenthal...

I have to say that I come down squarely on the side of the old-fashioned snail mailers. I have been a compulsive letter writer for the last 21 years. I used to think that getting a computer would cause my correspondence to greatly increase, but it's been just the opposite. I thought that all...

That is a very subjective kind of question. Of course, off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone who reminds me a lot of Kerouac. However, you might want to try T.R. Pearson's A Short History of a Small Place. It has the same primacy of voice, and is probably the kind of book Kerouac...

For a taste of the off-beat, I'd also highly recommend Eric Garcia's Rex series. His characters seem a lot more human, even though they are dinosaurs, than others I've encountered.

I heartily second the recommendation of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. They are surprisingly sophisticated and complex books, though they needn't be read that way in order to be enjoyable.

Some of my favorites: Rex Stout A. Conan Doyle John Dunning Jonathan Gash I'm sure I'll think of more later.

Not at all. Frankly, I'm rather inclined to agree with you. I read The Alienist just to see what all the hub-bub was about, and thought the book terribly cynical. I mean, in the sense that it read like someone went to a writer, any writer, with the bare bones of a very tired plot, a list of...

For books similar in "feel" to Catcher, I would suggest: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig On the Road - Jack Kerouac Short History of a Small Place - T.R. Pearson For a blend of adventure, drama and romance: King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard Victory -...

If it helps, chapbooks, at least in my mind, are also usually "paperback" and bound by being stitched down through the gutter and out through the spine. During the Victorian era here in the States outfits like the American Tract Society produced them in prodigious numbers. They are also...

Sar, You shouldn't have too much trouble tracking down new authors. The success of Silence of the Lambs created a whole cottage industry of folks trying to shape stories around ever more twisted serial killer types. Not my cup of tea, to be sure, but Caleb Carr is quite popular. Harold...

Jim, I hope that you get the chance to read all of those. Frankly, reading Dharma Bums very nearly put me off of Kerouac. It's a very subjective thing, of course, but Kerouac's books are very uneven. In some ways, it's like have a conversation with a drunk. At times they can be very moving...

You might like William Least-Heat Moon's PrairyErth. He describes the book as a "deep" map of a county in Kansas. It takes a little while to get going, but there is something about it . . . When I finished it, I felt like I had sort of awakened from a spell or something.

The first one that comes to mind for me is the Volkswagon "Pink Moon" commercial. I also remember one for tabasco sauce, during the Super Bowl a couple of years back. It involved a mosquito bursting into a giant fireball when it hit the bug zapper.

I always thought of On the Road as being, primarily, a novel of voice. If you don't hear the voice, you don't get it. The same with Catcher. But, it took me a lot of living to be able to "get" some of the other aspects of each (especially On the Road).

Yeah, thanks. I think I will, at some point, read more of her books. Looking over your list, I must have read The Passion. I couldn't remember, and didn't have all of my books unpacked after the move (and still don't).