July 28, 2008

• 1. I guess there's a reason for not reading the ones I haven't read, so there's no shame. 2. I got talked into reading Mitch Albom's Five People You Meet in Heaven by someone I'll never listen to again.
• I've read plenty of Nabokov, and I love him to death, but I've never picked up Lolita. In the take-back-my-diploma vein, on the English-lit side, I've never read any of the Brontes, Hemingway, or Paradise Lost. The Romantics were largely skimmed, with heavy reliance on Coles Notes. On the philosophy side, Aristotle bored me out of my fucking mind with his 'shopping list' philosophy, so I've barely read anything of his. No Aquinas. Plenty of the moderns were left out, too -- Quine, Putnam, etc. I excuse myself on the grounds that they were complete and utter crap, arguing about the various ways we can't know anything. I think Camus' The Plague was the first book I ever not let myself finish -- "ok, people are dying -- I GET IT. Get ON with it, already." Plenty remains on the Reading List, being that I have every intention of picking them up at some point, in a magical set of circumstances which will no doubt never reveal themselves.
• And I've never seen the attraction of Catcher in the Rye. Didn't think much of it at all. Didn't hate it, just thought it fairly mediocre. I am ashamed not to have read Ellison's Invisible Man yet.
• The only shame is not reading THE BOOK OF LOVE. Thank you.
• I'm writing 'bout the book I read I have to sing about the book I read I'm embarassed to admit it hit the soft spot in my heart when I found out you wrote the book I read!
• I never read Doing Things For Yourself, but I had someone read it to me.
• I never read The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, but they threw me into Room 101 anyway.
• I never read Brave New World, but I amma gonna do it soma time soon.
• OK...true story: I've owned a copy of Do It Now: Break the Procrastination Habit for three years and I haven't read it yet. These should be some shame associated with that.
• I've never been to heaven. But I've been to Oklahoma. People tell me I was born there. Lord I really don't remember. In Oklahoma or Arizona, what does it matter?
• I've started Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow three times and haven't made it to a third of it. Can't crack it. I regret reading Scott Card's Xenocide. Took it right after Ender's Game (which I read just to see what the buzz about it was) and it was a chore to end it.
• What books are you ashamed to have indeed read? The road to Hell is paved with all the bodice-rippers I've read in the bathroom. There was some book of (I think) Spanish poetry a really cute, smart guy once told me he couldn't believe I hadn't read. It had a lovely Faulkneresque title; I think it had the word "thousand" in it. I had heard of it at the time, but bugger if I can remember it now. I always regretted not looking it up at the time.
• "The DaVinci Code." God himself will make me answer for the time I wasted reading that. On the should-have-but-never-will list: Pretty much anything by a Russian except "Lolita," most of Faulkner... yeah, OK, probably 75 percent of the Western canon.
• i couldn't finish Teh Hobbit... or A Confederacy of Dunces or anything by Joyce.
• i am also proud that i have never read any Steven King.
• I read Stephen King's On Writing. He uses 250 telling us that the answer is to sit and write. Duh! I haven't read every one of Shakespeare's plays. Nor all of Ibsen. But I am trying to get through Harry Stephen Keeler's works, though there are rather many of them.
• Pages, for preview's sake. 250 pages.
• Oh, yes, Gravity's Rainbow. *gags* Lot 49, so so. Joyce. No. Just...no. Ain't agonna do it. Did the crib notes. That's enough. Lolita sucked, but I finished it. Read most of Atlas Shrugged, and thought I'd puke. That's the book that taught me how to fake reading something I hatedhatedhatedhated. Still got A's on papers, mainly because most college kids can't write fer shite, and the younger ones have no life experience to draw on, so their papers lacked depth. (not that mine were that great, but hey, got an A, so who cares.) I've read the Gulag Archipelago but not the recommended Ivan Denisovich Read lots of Atwood and some Munro, but not Surfacing or Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You. Tom Sawyer, Watership Down, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Portnoy's Complaint, a lot of Hemingway are time sensitive--I think you need to read them at a certain age to have them resonate. All I enjoyed at the time, but can't re-read them now. There were books I had to read for classes that I didn't like. Some I detested at first, then learned to love. I believe that there is a Western canon that everyone should be familiar with, as well as many Eastern writings, but being 'familiar with' isn't necessarily having read cover to cover. If I look at Bloom's list, I'm certainly heavy on the Democratic and Chaotic ages, especially Chaotic Brit and American, (as I bet 90% of us are) and there's a royal pot-load of stuff I think is important, but I've never read, as well as many that I know I'll never read or for which I have no interest. Other writers out there may not be classics, but reading them tunes you into the culture of our times. Off the top of my head: Doug Adams, Kerouak, Hunter Thompson, C.S. Lewis, Asimov, Arthur Clark, Kesey, Tolkien, Christie, Doyle. How many girls here read Little Women or Nancy Drew? Even reading Clancy, von Daniken, Grishom or Steven King clues you into today's mindset. (Although I refuse to read Danielle Steele or Nicholas Sparks) So many good books, so little time. Give something a chance, and then if you hate it, pick up something else. Read for pleasure. Read to learn. Relax sometimes. Strain your brain occasionally. No shame, as long as you're reading.
• I preferred Cherry Ames to Nancy Drew.
• There are so many books which I think you have to have been in the right time and emotional place to love. The sad thing is that it may be tough to get so involved years later. When I was 16 or so Catcher in the Rye was startling and eye-opening, but I wouldn't want to re-read it now, since I'd probably hate it. In the 1960s, we waited on tenterhooks for the recently unbanned books to be issued in paperback. I really loved Lawrence Durrell's Black Book and Alexandrian Quartet. I tried re-reading the latter a few years ano and found it not no enchanting, and my GenX daughter hated it. During the same period, I read every Henry Miller thing available. That's another one I'm afraid to retry. The one thing I've reread lately that did stand up was Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but that's just because it brought back pine scented memories and some angst that I can still identify with. I should probably be embarrassed to not like Huckleberry Finn, but attempts to reproduce dialect make my teeth hurt. The one thing I can think of that I wished for years is the MeFi link to Boswell's biography of Samuel Johnson,The guy could writw!!!!
• You didn't like "Lolita," GramMa? Why not? (I'm genuinely curious -- I thought it was beautifully written. Creepy and revolting, sure, but beautifully written.) And yeah, I loved Nancy Drew. Still have all my books from 25 years ago. I know what you mean about cultural mindset. There are some books and movies that are such icons of their times and I read/watch them and think, seriously? Y'all didn't know that already?
• Hillbilly: Humbert Humbert was truly obsessed, and like any obsessive, went on and on and on.... For every engaging sentence, there were 10 that left me uninvolved. I didn't expect a book about a pedophile and child nymphomaniac to be boring.
• embarrassed to say I have read most of Ayn Rand's output (I was 18, and I didn't like it!). I've also read lots n lots of trash, but I'm not embarrassed about that. some what bemused to admit I've never read any Jane Austen.
• BH - that's what I liked about Lolita: the lyrical outpouring of stream after stream of beautiful, evocative words. The imagery, oh, the imagery! Sure, he could have told the story in 25% of the words, but Chagall could have just taken a picture, too! HBS - I came to Faulkner late in life, and I'm glad I did. I think it takes a certain amount of world-weariness to see the world through the eyes of Quentin Compson or Darl Bundren. I probably would have hated it as a young woman.
• Oddly enough, I've thought Nabokov and Austen to be very similar writers. Dainty writers. Exceptionally fine wordsmithery. The stories themselves I could take or leave. (Wordsmithery?)
• (A bit embarrassed to admit that I wrote part of my dissertation on Lolita...) I should be embarrassed about all of the chick lit and romances in my collection, given that I'm an academic. But... they're far outweighed by all the sci-fi and fantasy, and when I read for fun, I read for *fun*. I have a weakness for old children's lit, so I've read *everything* by L.M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott (ok, all of her stuff for kids), and Frances Hodgson Burnett. I even read the Elsie books, though they were awful.
• (I'm not embarrassed because it's Lolita, but because I'm a little embarrassed to be obsessed with anything.)
• TUM, could that have been Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair? I'm not ashamed of books I haven't read. There are plenty of classics I've tried to read, but disliked. (That's okay - no book can please everyone.) There are even more books that I plan to read one day, but haven't gotten to yet. (That's alright - there are only so many hours in a day.) I'm also not ashamed of anything I have read. To my mind, it's better to have read something - even the worst trash - than to not read. To my mind, the only shame is to not have read anything. Even people who read only serialized novels based on TV shows are ahead of the people who never read. (And oh, there are many people who never read.)
• It's okay to not like Lolita! It may be his best-known book, but personally I prefer Pale Fire. Others think that Ada or Ardor is his best work. Similarly, those who disliked Moby Dick might want to try White Jacket. I liked White Jacket a lot more than Moby Dick. And there are always the ever-popular crossword puzzle answers, Omoo and Typee.
• Could've been, mech. I'll put that on my list!
• TUM, sounds like it might have been Pablo Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets.
• TUM, I will adore you forever for mentioning "Cherry Ames!" One of my favorite secret shame books is "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand. I don't know why, but I love it, even though I don't at all subscribe to Objectivism. However, I tried to get through "Atlas Shrugs" and thought it was simply awful and boring. But if you like Ayn Rand, that's the one to like, right? So I've heard. I'm very confused, and ashamed to admit that I love an Ayn Rand book. Someone help me. As for "ashamed to have not read," I will cop to the fact that I've never read one single classic philosophy book. People throw around the names of philosophers and I nod mutely & smile, pretending I know of which they speak. Inside, however, I'm humming Monty Python's "The Philosopher's Song" (or whatever it's called). Really truly, I ask the group, are there any philosophers that, at the age of 40, I should read?
• If nothing else, the trial of Socrates. Even just the Apology. Everything beyond that is just a bonus.
• It's really useful to read Pale Fire before Lolita. That way you get a good sense of Nabokov's treatment of the anti-hero. So then it's possible to be entertained by Humbert, rather than just grossed out. I'm really embarrassed about Catcher in the Rye. I read it when I was 16 and when you get to the part where you find out what the title means (which, arguably, is the climax of the book) it's just the stupidest, most juvenile thing. The three books I'm embarrassed about not having read are Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, and You Can't Go Home Again. And the reason I'm particularly bothered is that these novels contain my three favorite chapters in all of literature -- The Whiteness of the Whale, The Grand Inquisitor, and The Microscopic Gentleman From Japan, respectively. Every time, and it's been a long time now, I pick up one of those to read I just skip to the really amazing part and read it a dozen times.
• And you gotta read Fear and Trembling. And some Chuang Tzu. Magic, all of it.
• You Nabakov story lovers--here ya go: June's New Yaker Rag Munro story there, too Loved The English Patient--Michael Ondaatje
• I read Cherry Ames too! And Trixie Belden, I was obsessed with her from about age 7-12. Never did like Nancy Drew much, though. I don't know right now that I'm embarrassed about not reading any particular books. I read what I like, I try to extend my reading, and I'm generally easily bored with anything flowery or old-fashioned. (Despite that I did love Vanity Fair.) The only book I've ever given up on partway through was Gormenghast -- so very boring!
• Cherry Ames was sool - I mean, she fought Nazis and everything!
• Ashamed of failing with Dostoevsky, somewhat ashamed of failing with Pynchon, puzzled about failing with Lem. On paper I should have loved them all. Not proud of having read The Da Vinci Code, slightly embarassed about having read Kane and Abel. But my mother made me. On philosophy, the Captain's right that some bits of Plato are a good read, but to be honest very little heavyweight philosophy is. If you want a quick idea of who thought what, you could do worse than Russell's ever-popular History of Western Philosophy. It's a bit idiosyncratic, but highly amusing and readable.
• BTW I've never come across anyone from this side of the Atlantic who's even heard of Ayn Rand so far as I can tell. Is that a good thing or are we missing out?
• > Is that a good thing Yes. I read The Fountainhead to see what all the fuss was about, but it's dreadful claptrap.
• I enjoyed We, the Living, but I couldn't get past the first chapter of any other ones.
• I read anything that grabs my attention. Bought Atlas Shrugged, read two pages, had a mental vomit and stopped right there. It's on the bookshelf. I'm avoiding it. Ayn Rand claptrap, right on roryk. I'm not ashamed to have read anything, from the touted and recommended to total junk and comics but Judge Dread was a bit off my key. Loathe the existentialist writers. Agree with BlueHorse, Lolita sucked. I've similar interests, BH. Read Little Women, Nancy Drew and will not read Danielle Steele. O, wait, I have a copy of Madonna Sex and read it too. Should I be ashamed to have that? :) It's pretentious crap by the way.
• I've read a lot of books, and I don't regret a single one of them. Even the ones I disliked. Even the crap. They all go into the churning brain vat to help strange things emerge. It always amuses me a bit when people feel the strong urge to denounce a book now that they're clearly so far beyond it. And I can't feel too badly about any I haven't read. I either haven't gotten to them yet (there's only SO much time) or they don't appeal to me. But, wait...only girls can read Nancy Drew? Oops. What about The Bobbsey Twins and The Happy Hollisters?
• People hate DaVinci Code solely because it was so popular. It's not worthy of the hype for sure, but it was far from a terrible read. I've read far, far worse.
• Plegs, you're not missing A THING! She rabidly pushes capitalism in Atlas. Bigger is better; money is all. If I remember, her philosophy is objectivism, where the only moral stance is pursuit of your own happiness and fulfillment--in a capitalist setting, of course. IMHO, it's a book that could have only made it big in the US during the late '50s. I think it's interesting that her books that have been published overseas have been We, the Living & Anthem both written before she took the strong objectiveist and capitalist stances. OK, I'm getting flashbacks to that English class. Gotta stop now.
• Rush - LOVEd the Bobbsey Twins! And the Five Little Peppers! There are books I regret having wasted time on, since the older I get the more valuable time seems.
• omg I'd forgotten the Bobbsey Twins! Wasn't the eldest boy called Bert? And Freddie and Flora or something? /googles Oh yes, and the stereotyped black servants!
• I remember absolutely hating The Golden Compass series, or whatever it was called. (Not as much for the (anti-)religious parts, but for the general muddle it became.) I also hate Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, which my sister thinks should embarrass me. But Bella's such a doormat! Yeah, you gotta read the Apologia, if only for the part where Socrates says (and I paraphrase) "Don't kill me! Give me free dinners in town square because I'm awesome!"
• Kittenhead - Re: the philosophy thing. Second Plegmund on Russell. But if you're not interested in the historical survey, and just want to dive into the issues cut to the chase and read his short collection called Unpopular Essays: 12 Adventures in Argument. There's a more recent edition but the cover of this one is great. Lively, controversial and fun to read. Also should mention that Russell is one of the few (only?) philosophers who also won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
• Allow me to put in a plug for my homeperv Wilkie Collins. I prefer The Moonstone to The WOman in White, but purely for sentimental reasons.
• Ayn Rand's work is great comedy. Essential reading for anyone likely to be engaged in heated arguments with Randroids about the greatness of Ayn Rand.
• StoryBored: also Camus. I think that's it.
• Well, Sartre, but he turned it down.
• Because he's smartre!
• "Jean-Paul quand sera-t-il libre?"
• Forgot about Bergson. He won, too.
• Okay, but aside from Sartre, Bergson, Camus, what did philosophers ever do for us?
• Philosophers win fiction contest shock horror.
• >> "what did philosophers ever do for us?" Philosophy is where they put all the stuff that doesn't have a science yet. The business of a philosopher is to futz around with those things until somebody gets a good idea and figures how to wrap some numbers around one or another. Aristotle kept himself busy with biology and astrophysics and gerontology in addition to all the ethics and metaphysics. None of the answers were any good but laying out the questions was real important. Newton thought he was doing philosophy when he published the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.
• Wow, Kev, that really does tell me a lot. Thanks!
• Well. After about two years of faithfully reading MoFi (and yes, I know, rarely contributing - hush!) I just figured out why I love it so much. Because my instant reaction to this question was "God, I can't believe I slogged through The Fountainhead, it was such a load of crap, and I wonder how many people are going to carry on about how great it is?". And then I read the comments and discover that Monkeys are NOT Ayn Rand fans. Proof positive that there IS intelligent life out there, and it's all monkeys. So yeah, I'm embarrassed I finished The Fountainhead. And in the mid 80's, I realized that every time I read a quote somewhere and really liked it, it was Thoreau. So I bought a paperback with Walden Pond and Civil Disobedience. It took me ten years to read Civil Disobedience, and I never have made it very far into Walden. Can't figure out why - I should love it. But I just can't seem to stick with it. On a semi-related note: I don't remember who said it, and I'm not quoting it exactly, but one of my favorite bits of wisdom is something about how when you're in your twenties, you buy War and Peace because you want to be the kind of person who reads War and Peace. But by the time you hit your forties, you realize that not only are you not the kind of person who reads War and Peace, but furthermore, you don't even care that you're not.
• Any monkey in their twenties want to buy my copy of War and Peace? Great condition, as new. Highly recommended. *blinks*
• fairywench: Keep at it. Walden is a good read. Slow in spots, where he gets too into the minutiae, but there's a money quote on every second page, on average (don't just read every second page...it's more confusing).
• This reminds me of two other books I still have on my bookshelf, which I know I'll never read: Synergetics by R.Buckminister Fuller. Finnegan's Wake by Joyce. (And I like Joyce!) But then again, how does one know? Maybe, twenty years from now they'll invent the smart pill and you'll have to read Synergetics to keep from falling asleep during the day.
• I couldn't stand Walden. Much of that has to do with an incompetent instructor whose final seminar was held out by a shady spot off the campus parking lot, so we could commune with nature while discussing the work. I think the high estimation of Walden is an American thing. Ouside critics and anthologies don't tend to rely on it as much, I find. I could be wrong.
• And SB -- read the Buckminster! Dude's C-R-A-Z-Y, in the best possible way.
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is a particularly fine piece of dingbattery. Highly enjoyable.
• Cap'n, thanks for the link! Gave it a quick look and saw this awesome sentence: "There were very few of these top power men. But as they went on their sea ventures they gradually found that the waters interconnected all the world's people and lands. They learned this unbeknownst to their illiterate sailors, who, often as not, having been hit over the head in a saloon and dragged aboard to wake up at sea, saw only a lot of water and, without navigational knowledge, had no idea where they had traveled." I want to be a top power man!
• See...Walden isn't about communing with nature. It's about living simply and rejecting the consumerist, artificial, and superficial society of the 1850's. It's about being more than just a cynical blowhard and actually putting your philosophies to the test by living them.
• Teh Wiki, on Operating Manual, for a quick synopsis of the glorious madness, and a description of the Great Pirates aboard Spaceship Earth.
• OMG, I just got to the part about the pirates! "The Great Pirates realized that the only people who could possibly contrive to displace them were the truly bright people. For this reason their number-one strategy was secrecy. If the other powerful pirates did not know where you were going, nor when you had gone, nor when you were coming back, they would not know how to waylay you. If anyone knew when you were coming home, "small-timers" could come out in small boats and waylay you in the dark and take you over-just before you got home tiredly after a two-year treasure-harvesting voyage." Whenever I've been waylaid, it's always been by small-timers. Why didn't i see this before?
• Critical Path by Fuller is quite good.
• Dude's poetry is just disconcerting.
• "I have owned successively, since boyhood, fifty-four automobiles. I will never own another. I have not given up driving. I began to leave my cars at airports-never or only infrequently getting back to them. My new pattern requires renting new cars at the airports as needed. I am progressively ceasing to own things, not on a political-schism basis, as for instance Henry George's ideology, but simply on a practical basis. Possession is becoming progressively burdensome and wasteful and therefore obsolete." Sweet Mothra -- I need to reread this book... Abandoning his cars at airports and going with rentals instead, on the basis of 'possession' being 'obsolete'.
• Monkeyfilter: Proof positive that there IS intelligent life out there, and it's all monkeys.
• fairywench: great comment, do it more often! Maybe you're picking upon what a bunch of BS the mystique surrounding Thoreau is. People think he lived there most of his life and practiced being a non-consumerist hermit. Not true. It all sounds good, and what he's saying IS beautifully written and a wonderful philosophy, but as far as his practicing the simple life, he's writing fiction. His life on Walden was a two year 'experiment.' Sort of a 'working vacation.' When he says he's lucky to be able to live that life and write, so at least he was aware of the realities. Thoreau said in Walden that he really was working only about six weeks a year in order to 'simplify' his life and how this had been his goal for a while to look for the time and a place to write. By then he was established, and his pencil manufacturing factory was running itself. A quote of his has an ironic twist: “The order of things should be somewhat reversed – the seventh should be a man’s day of toil…and the other six his Sabbath…”, especially when you consider the average person had to work six days a week, 14-16 hours a day. Yah, it's great to talk about one chair and home-grown beans for dinner when you have buckos in the bank from owning a business, can go home and have mom cook you dinner as well as do your laundry (with the requisite starched collar) and then attend sparkling social events in the evening with your good bud Emerson. Thoreau had a nifty little cabin in the woods with the luxury to relax, grow a garden (for pleasure) contemplate, and write--something few of the people living in that era had, as they were out there actually living that 'lovely' simple life, divested of worldly goods, mainly because they were more interested in buying the necessities and praying their garden wasn't ruined because that was the winter food supply for the family. His cabin was approx. 10'x15', which sounds impossibly small in our era when two people live in a 4500 sq. foot house, but there were whole families of 6-8 people living in houses not much bigger. Below is where he grew up: --a much larger than the average house in that time period. For some reason it was called Texas House. He was able to attend Harvard--albeit with some sacrifice on the part of his family--but how many average Joes had ANY secondary education? After taking over the family pencil business, he lived in this house: This was called Wayside, the adult home of Henry David Thoreau. Not knocking the fact he was a wonderful lyrical writer, and his ideas are something everyone should think about. But idolizing the man as somehow personifying the simple life is ridiculous.
• I have a soft spot in my heart for Thoreau because of Civil Disobedience, but I acknowledge that he lived a far different life than the one he described in Walden (which I've never been able to finish). (You can also tell that Louisa May Alcott had a crush on Thoreau when you read all of the books in the Little Women series, and that's fun too.)
• Ahhh, Civil Disobedience is a whole different ballgame. That's some good stuff there. Anybody remember what a trip Plato was the first time you read about the Cave and the Forms? That blew my mind as a teen.
• I dunno, I kind of felt like Plato was unnecessarily talking down to me. Maybe it was the translator, though.
• That blew my mind as a teen. The Republic having come out earlier that year. I'm sorry, GranMa. You know I don't mean it. Please don't hit me.
• I think with Toreau, why he did it is more important than how he did it. Unfortunately, the book spends too much time describing (however exaggeratedly) the how.
• Oy, GramMa would never hit her darling ziskeit. However, I'm very, very disappointed in you, Capt. that you would say such things about your GramMa in front of everyone. But that's OK, I'm sure you weren't thinking about breaking my heart. I'll be sitting here in the dark by the phone, waiting for my bubeleh to call, as as always. Come home soon, darling, eat the kishke.
• I read the Republic as a freshman in college (I had to read M. Z. Bradley's Mists of Avalon in the middle to clear my mind). I'll admit that I had to draw a diagram to fully get the idea of the cave, but being excited about it when it finally clicked. Now I use the idea with students to talk about why learning new concepts is hard, but ultimately worth it.
• Um, minor correction if I may? I don't think Thoreau lived in the Wayside. That was the home of the Alcotts, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and at some point Margaret Sidney, who wrote the above-mentioned Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Although I've spent a lot of time around and in Walden pond, Thoreau absolutely bores me to sleep. Emerson, on the other hand, now there's some nice writing.
• ACK, you're right. Looked at my notes jotted in the back of my book, and it was Yellow House. disregard dumb statement
• Civil Dis blew my mind and put me in a state of agitation for days. I suppose I should be embarrassed to add that I have not read Walden. (nor have I read the little women books, started the first one, found it boring...)
• Again, Little Women is a book that has to be read at a certain age, in a certain frame of mind. Jo is the only one that's worth a hoot, though, the rest are ninnies.
• I think I've just read Little Women too many times to have any sort of distance. It's one of those books that I have to re-read every year or so (along with Persuasion by Austen and Jane Eyre). But I probably only like it so much because my Bobo (grandmother) got it for me when I was ten or eleven, and I was in the right place, right time for it like GramMa says. Jo is my favorite. I always wanted to be Jo as a kid. (And be friends with Anne of Green Gables. I'm super dorky.)
• The academic side of my mind likes Little Women because you can see the tension in the narrative regarding gender roles. Alcott (especially as defined by the character Jo) wants to escape traditional Victorian gender roles, but her father (as defined by Mr. March) keeps reining her in, trying to make her a better "Little Woman." It's interesting to see the tug-of-war. In fact, Mr. Alcott *made* L. M. Alcott write the book as an exercise in something "proper" for a young lady to write (rather than the crime novels she'd been writing -- again, like Jo.) See? I *AM* super dorky! And I like it!
• Meredithea, I do a roughly annual reading of the Sherlock Hoimes stories, too. I always pick up on new things.