In my opinion, it is never not a good idea to read the book. The experience is never ever going to be exactly the same.

This right here. What the author is describing is an overskirt.

Vanity Fair, and I did actually throw it across the room when I finished it. It was assigned reading for a college class, so I didn't have the option of just not reading it. If I had, I would have just put it down and gotten on with my life.

Why did I hate it? Well, this was a long time ago, but as I recall --

• I was studying 19th century British fiction at the time, and my reading list included Dickens, the Brontes, etc. In my humble opinion, Thackeray is a second-tier writer compared to [at least some of] his contemporaries, and he was just suffering by comparison. You can't read Bleak House one week, Vanity Fair the next, and not notice a difference.
• Becky Sharp sucks. Period, the end.
• I didn't like anyone else, either.

You sure picked a great weekend to try to joke around about this.

I don't have a copy of it near at hand, so I can't tell you exactly which chapter it is, but in Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate there is a chapter in which one of the main characters >!attends an anti-nuke protest, and at the protest a priest gets up and makes an impassioned speech that just takes my breath away every time I read it.!< (You said no spoilers, although the chapter I'm talking about here is not key to moving the book's plot forward so there's no harm in peeking).

Fiction:

• Bleak House - Charles Dickens (I'd choose this over Great Expectations)
• If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino
• The Shipping News - Annie Proulx
• Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf (I'd choose this over A Room of One's Own)
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bronte
• The Golden Gate - Vikram Seth
• I, Claudius - Robert Graves

Non-fiction:

• The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
• Annals of the Former World - John McPhee

Plays:

• Travesties - Tom Stoppard
• Angels in America - Tony Kushner
• Faith Healer - Brian Friel

Poetry:

• Complete Poems of W. B. Yeats
• Complete Poems of W. H. Auden

With all due respect to The Hunger Games and The Help - they aren't classics.

I have been around cats my whole life and I have never known one to be attracted to the smell of bleach.

Thank you for this! I didn't know it existed. Now it's bookmarked.

These book cover trends bug me. I walk through a bookstore and the NYT paperback top seller section is just one book after another with covers that all look alike. And in a year or two they'll be different from this year, but they will still all look alike. It's annoying.

What could possibly go wrong

I think I, Claudius is the better of the two, but I really like them both.