What kind of bookstore owners do you have on the Left Coast of the U.S., anyway? Here in south-central Ontario, they encourage that sort of thing – some stores have to resort to renting a toddler to perform the function.

Something Tolstoy might be a bit ambitious; all I’ve read from Dickens is Tale of Two Cities, so I’m leaning towards some Dickens from Gutenberg, saving Hugo for the holiday season, maybe.

While I’ve been busy not visiting my own blog, a fellow reader over at dy has raised the subject of NaNoReMo and Matthew has nominations and voting open – right now, it looks like Lolita will be the choice this year. What do you think? Should we go in our own direction or follow along with the crew at yeti? I would be happy to designate December as “International Graphic Novel Month” (InGraNoMo – “International” because you’re south of the 49th, I am [figuratively, if not geographically] north of same) and do Hugo Cabret…

What say you?

Alternatively, if it must be classic work, I’m open to exploring something from Dickens, Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy (stipulating that it’s available in English from Project Gutenberg — mainly as a question of opportunity).

Full disclosure: I avoided that one more by good fortune than good management. Truth to be told, I did not know that “enormity” had a pejorative connotation. As for DFW (and NaNoReMo), I would be willing to try to take on Infinite Jest, but everything I’ve heard about the book suggests that it may take us more than a month to get through it (I think it’s something like 1000 pages long). I have a somewhat busy November ahead work-wise, so I doubt I’ll be able to make a lot of time for anything more than a chapter or two a night, so DFW’s master work might not be the right choice for NaNoReMo – maybe we should schedule that one for our own little (?) project in the New Year. That, of course, begs the question of which book we should read for NaNoReMo. I’m open to suggestions…got any?

As for wetting your beak on a little DFW, I would recommend a couple of Wallace’s essays, notably Tense Present or Consider the Lobster. Also not to be missed is DFW’s commencement address to the Kenyon College Class of 2005; this one has gained some notoriety recently as a result of a passage that mentions suicide in passing (which passage has obviously assumed some additional significance in view of Wallace’s own suicide), but it’s a great piece in its own right.

By the way, good on you to manage to keep posting consistently. You are a marvel.

Also: could they be “Great Bowls of Fire”? We lost a neighbor’s iguana to our rear slope at some point, and part of the reason I now refuse to prune it back is not sheer laziness, but the fear of discovering something moldering back there.

theVet ridicules my physical grace (not without cause, as I find myself bleeding inexplicably unreasonably often). Thankfully, figgy seems to have not been cursed like me, though sadly, most of the head-first impact incidents have occured on my watch.

Only the finest haberdashery befits such an auspicious occasion. I quite like wearing mine, actually – it’s warm!

@ Doug:

Be assured that a substantial amount of the woody materials removed from the eastern slopes of Juniorvania have found their way – as recently as last night – into a Bowl of Fire out back. Anything remotely flammable that we didn’t need for last night’s conflagration made its way into the “You Can’t Burn That” pile that Harold started in the woods at the bottom of the driveway – for future Bowls of Fire. That pile just happens to be on the edge of The Gulch; getting the stuff there still posed a bit of a transportation problem, hence the 10p cart. Well that, and I just like to play with toys.