I hope you mean loved @Scrawler2:disqus , I'd hate to think of you as a bitter, middle-aged, foul-mouthed teacher.

Bookshelf space is always at a premium!

There castle!

As far as whole books, only Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair this year. But I have revisited Ken Koch, John Ashberry and Frank O'Hara quite a bit this year. With a soupçon of Seamus Heaney thrown in.

Yep. I was that kid too. Pleasure reading fell off in college and stayed at a low level once the kids moved in - and the non-reader wife hates for me to read in bed with a lamp on. Still, I was able to slowly increase my reading as I got the kids out of diapers (only took eleven years). But the thing that has really…

Where wolf?

Keep on Hijaxing…

Great great great great book. Fucking fantastic.

Can someone kill that fucking black swan? Please. Maybe beat it to death with Malcom Gladwell's lifeless body? I'd love to be free of pseudo-science-pseudo-philosophy bullshit. It's like someone gave Chauncey Gardner a fucking book deal.

Is a hiatus hernia is a fake hernia that you use as an exuse to take sick leave to go to the beach?

I just assumed he was talking about the Mexican restaurant by my house. Shortly after reading their menu I always have plenty of compulsory reading time.

The Bronze Age of Hijacking was fun but really short due to its inferior weapons.

I, too, am a bit mystified for the love for Jonathan Strange. I mean it was fun, but Great Googly Moogly it could have been at least 200 pages shorter.

Yeah but now I really want a novel pairing Gollum and Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie.

I was being arch (which is a higher form of sarcasm). Quentin is a total navel-gazing asshole. Grossman is almost daring us to sympathize with him now that he's totally fucked himself Fillory-wise.

Did he yell at you and call you a Philistine?

Read both Wool and Shift series and loved both. It's certainly not the most polished, but it has a scruffy charm that grows on you. Plus he has a great premise, excellent pacing and airtight plotting. I would argue those three things are more important ot great sci-fi than polish. Plus they're cheap as dirt on kindle…

There's way too many frogs on your list, dude. And I say this as someone who studied at l'Université de Paris (IV) Paris-Sorbonne.

Anathem is an all-time underrated book. If you take the time to really parse what the monks are on about it's gotta be the most mind-blowing book I've ever read (especially given that it is all absolutely grounded in contemporary physics and the philosophy inspired by it). The mind as a quantum engine is great to…

You really need to read The Black Count.