Yeah, plus the problem is that it's the books you want to read at that moment in your life, and those desires change pretty quickly.

I love when bookstores separate "literature" from "fiction."

I wanted better things for Seth Green as an actor.

American or British?

Jane Eyre is just weird in general. The movie with Michael Fassbender was surprisingly good, because it basically calls bullshit on the "epic romance" and shows it for what it is: a twisted, controlling man and a sad, ugly girl who goes along with his shit.

It's not quite that simple — it's more that I can tell they haven't read it if they say, like, "Oh, yeah — Man vs. Whale, etc." because 89% of that book isn't about the whale.

Yeah — slow and steady with lots of contextual notes is the only way to go.

she'd gotten her English degree from a superior university and had no idea who Melville was.

Pip and Ahab made me cry like a baby.

The next best thing to a class setting are Norton Critical editions, but the Moby-Dick one was written by big-time Melville critic Hershel Parker who is legitimately insane and basically starts preaching his own theories instead of properly annotating the book, so... it's a mixed bag.

Ah, I misunderstood your post. I thought you meant that it was a list of books you should read if you are currently frowning on the type of people who read those books.

My gay Catholic anglophile friend loooovvveeeeddd it, so maybe it needs to have some kind of personal resonance?

My favorite British-ism is using the word "scheme" to mean plan, because it's clearly just as benign as "plan" and yet I always hear "The Tory job scheme" and chuckle imagining some 19th Century top-hatted politician rubbing his hands together and cackling at a chimney sweep.

I have a bad habit of buying an armful of books, reading one and then buying another armful. Rinse, repeat.

I'm going to be an even bigger snob and say that Brave New World is far more on the money in terms of scarily-accurate predictions of the future.

Yuuuup.

Wait — is it fashionable to shit on The Sound and the Fury now?

A quick note for people who haven't read Moby-Dick on encountering someone who just took a 3-month course on the book, wrote three papers and a final Honors thesis on it:

Famous in the sense that they (used to) make the papers every year for their "engineering pranks," but trust me — if my brother was a "brother," I'm well aware it wasn't cool.

Well, Vancouver is majority asian but I think there's more of a tradition among "white people" to form or participate in frats. My sister's in a UBC sorority and it's maybe 10% asian but otherwise entirely white.