He once had a threesome with Eartha Kitt and James Dean. You can think about threesomes what you like, but that just makes sense.

I get slightly jealous of talking heads who are providing expertise on some historical context, because I can't help going "Look, that's someone who did something with their liberal arts education". Strangely, I don't get that effect when I'm just reading things. Also, my discipline wasn't history.

I wrote my diploma thesis on constructive/protective irony. In the end, I decided to cut the David Foster Wallace chapter. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be done yet.

Not a single good person around? And what is Garfield? Chopped liver?

But hopefully no longer ill-advised expressions of self-loathing!

I feel like that's a different topic entirely. Yeah, sometimes "mis"matched couples happen in real life, and more power to them. But Hollywood has a way of reenforcing a very particular mismatch forever and ever and I was also positively surprised to not find that here.

This. My guess is the main appeal lies in the triumph of getting someone else to do something that seems counterintuitive.

Sounds like copy-and-past from a Coffeeshop AU on ArchivesOfOurOwn. You're sure that actually happened?

What's in a name? Serious business, I guess. I once started an e-mail with the wrong name - it was a very innocuous chatty "What's up with you? This is what's up with me"-e-mail, but I had addressed it to the wrong penfriend. That friendship petered out for various reasons but I wouldn't be surprised at all if that…

That's useful, but I still don't see the sex appeal. Exchanging favours builds friendships, not sexual chemistry.

I read the blurb and some pages when browsing in a bookshop; just awful. The protagonist seems like your standard nice guy nerd neckbeard without an ounce of self-awareness or emotional intelligence and he never seems to develop some either (I've read the blurb for the second novel as well in a…

well, it did make me feel better about misspending my youth buried under books as a pathologically over-achieving homebody.

Yeah, that would be my reading as well, but I guess, I'm an optimist. At any rate, I now understand a bit better what got Hoat's goat about this comment. Historically, it has been difficult to be too paranoid about people being paranoid about Jewish conspiracies.

okay, I kinda missed that aspect on first reading.

To be fair, the review doesn't make it sound like the attraction's particularly mutual in this instance.

This was written in reply to five paragraphs of baseless armchair psychologizing. Can hardly be any less pertinent to the discussion. Interesting where you chose to draw the line.

But that's the point: You don't have to speak Atticus free of racism to acknowledge that he had some admireable quality as well. You can acknowledge both his racism and his integrity when it came to certain principles he held dear.

Fair enough. Just wanted to stress that any appreciation of it is not necessarily based on misreading, but you can absolutely argue about whether it deserves its exact level of hype.

You know what, I'm actually pretty thrilled about those 15-20 pages about Scout's first period. I feel it's a motiv that is actually pretty underexplored (at least I can't think of any other novel where period concerns feature prominently on the top of my head).

They have already been written long before that book was published, and I found some of them quite convincing, to be honest.