The dictionary was among the sundry “fun” presents/stocking stuffers; the huge box, wrapped so beautifully and beckoning to me as I descended the stairs, was full of clothes. I was 7, but for some reason, she didn’t understand why I didn’t take this very well. Then on a family trip, my baby cousin vomited on the Guess…

I wanted a goddamn Super Nintendo. No lie, that Christmas ruined my childhood.

A corollary to my mom’s “look it up” whenever I asked what a word meant.

Got you. That’s certainly an issue, but that has to do with more savvy shoppers, not necessarily a flaw in the sale itself. It was a sale. No one was guaranteed anything, no one had to participate in it. You missed out on one deal, that sucks. Maybe you can find a better one elsewhere on the internet? And if you…

Got you. That’s certainly an issue, but that has to do with more savvy shoppers, not necessarily a flaw in the sale…

Cool. And the way time works is that is something lasts for 2 minutes, then arriving at minute 5 makes you 3 minutes late.

Cool. And the way time works is that is something lasts for 2 minutes, then arriving at minute 5 makes you 3 minutes…

I was 3 minutes late. hope you got it.

I was 3 minutes late. hope you got it.

Thankfully Magary and the readers are here for Why Your Team Sucks every year, but then everyone immediately forgets about that as soon as there is an easy joke to make at our fans’ expense.

What do you mean? Words and presentation have no effect on how I perceive media at all. Only naturally athletic thugs would worry about something like that.

That was brilliant.

And that’s completely fair. I think it would be interesting to see what the original idea was, because I like seeing how the sausage gets made (especially with real sausage...mmm delicious rendering). Execution may be off, but so it goes with many young writers. Wide Sargasso Sea was not a favorite, but I still…

Sure. So, read it like one would read the notebooks of an author, published posthumously in a publisher/estate cash grab, and not as a novel. It won’t kill your nostalgia, because that’s not a thing that can happen. There are whole fields of literature where new authors take existing narratives and reshape them from…

The success of Catcher in the Rye meant Salinger could have published anything he wanted. He chose not to. I don’t know why authors choose to stop working.

Exactly :) First reading is all about “Is this interesting? Do I want to follow this character/narrative?” Second reading is like “Well, that was awesome, how did the author accomplish that? Oh, I didn’t realize he/she used this word instead of that synonym. Perhaps that implies/foreshadows...” Third reading is when…

But was that Lee’s decision or the original publisher? If we’re going to speak on author’s intent without acknowledging the hand of the publisher/editor who suggested rewrites, there’s a whole murky area there.

How can we be sure? If this new book was actually her first draft, then this is EXACTLY what she wanted Atticus to be. Maybe as a little girl, Scout thought her father was a paragon of moral virtue, defending the outcast (as paralleled in her own relationship with Boo Radley), and as she grew up she realized Atticus…

It’s a signature of AB’s/Deadspin/Gawker Media’s work. I can get down with it when I agree, but when I disagree, it can be grating.

I agree wholeheartedly; in fact, I can argue that what this book does is expand on a character, who in the eyes of a little girl was a paragon of moral virtue, but as an adult, she realized he was maybe different than that purehearted person she believed him to be.

It makes sense that this “new” book might not be the “real” Atticus. Authors go through drafts and, from what I have gathered, this was a first draft that was rejected, so Lee refined it into the classic book we all remember, one that had a feel-good message we can stand by. Not that social justice was the publisher’s…

I am, but I took a lot of critical theory classes. Sometimes it helps to see underlying messages and connections in the text, when the author is introducing elements you are unfamiliar with. Sometimes it ruins suspending disbelief when you see the author’s deliberation. For instance, the novel Snow Crash has a…

Ouch, even I got burned by that one.