>>>>I don't like books where dialogue is written with an accent or some pronunciation.
>>>
>>>Just had an ugly flashback to English Lit 201 in college when somebody laid Faulkner on us. Aaargh!
>>
>>He may have been a bit beyond you, who knows?
>
>I may just have low-brow literary tastes. Probably why I wasn't an English major. Just couldn't take James Joyce seriously either. I frequently find books winning the Booker prize or some such thing that I find unreadable.

I know what you mean. The Booker Prize has been a fairly reliable indicator for me, much more so than the Nobel. That seems completely political.

What did you major in? I thought it was English. History?

My two favorite college classes, by a long shot, were miles away from my major. On a lark I took a Tolstoy class one spring. 4000 pages of reading, and I am not joking. In the spring! You know what college was like in the late 70s in the spring. I was distracted and bollixed a finance class but did manage the Tolstoy one. The classI liked even better was Dostoyevsky. To this day if I had to choose a favorite writer it would be between him and Graham Greene. If I didn't have such a backlog I would reread everything he wrote. Maybe I will anyway.