Boosh!

Man, the reissue doesn't include the bonus tracks on vinyl—that's amateur hour, Merge, though I love you dearly. 

@avclub-0f0d67e214f9fef69b278e3d08114da9:disqus , blergh, yeah—"Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," some kind of metafictional rebuttal/appraisal of Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" that I was way too overhung and undereducated to appreciate. "Small Expressionless Animals" is great, though—"Jeopardy" and those…

@avclub-b81b91432eb4e240bd6b4380bf251a26:disqus  , the first book has what's very much a Stephenson protagonist (physics-obsessed son of a preacher), but once you get to the pirates and swindlers and politicians, it picks up.

Thanks—I just picked up a copy! This thread has got me excited to check it out.

That collection is so underrated—title story, "Lyndon," and "John Boy" are some of my favorite short stories.

Not far, really—about a hundred pages in, so I'm glad you mentioned that it's kind of front-loaded. I'm with you on the world creation v. expression in Stephenson—so dense and thought-out, but sometimes that doesn't leave much room for characters. That might explain why I liked The Baroque Cycle so much—over-the-top…

She's just so good and her world is so tightly-wound and terrifying. I'm loving binge-ing on it!

The Fault in Our Stars was one of the most surprising reading experience I've had. It's a pretty easy book to dismiss ("teenagers struggling to create a relationship while dealing with the fallout of their illnesses!"), until I read it, and saw it was an incredibly charming, empathetic book about self-creation and…

Reading Flannery O'Connor's collected stories, which I've read in collections before, but never as a burly chunk. It's a very different experience. Cutting it with Tenth of December, about which all praise proves accurate, and rounding it out with Neal Stephenson's Anathem when I need something more speculative and…

I dug Sisters Brothers, but it's very different from your other westerns (and I'd note here that Blood Meridian is one of my G.O.A.T. novels, so grain of salt)—way more picaresque and modern. It may either be a nice aperitif after the heavier cowboy books, or it may be frustratingly light.

The Illustrated Man is fantastic—some of the social reflection's pretty out-of-date, but those stories hold up every sixty years later. "The Visitor" and "The Fire Balloons" particularly have that weird Bradbury sense of, like, melancholic hope.

With plug-guy as the most overpowered character possible.

Totally—but it's going to be a hot pop-culture flotsamizdat in a couple of years here.

He did say "fool" a lot!

*Audience 'whooos!'*

As someone who doesn't watch Downton Abbey and fears the coming of the worms, I needed this more than I thought I did.

Perfect comment-avatar synergy. 

Not sure, but there's a new doctor I'll be cetacean soon. 

Call me a dolphin, because I'm pumped.