Greg — I picked a copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan whatever I’m tired of typing this title out of a dumpster once. Mainly just because I think that throwing books in a dumpster is wrong. I would’ve left it if the book had been coated in grossness, but it was just sitting on top of some cardboard. It’s been sitting on a shelf ever since. Totally not interested in reading it.

I might disagree with you about all Russian literature. I might be willing to give Dostoevsky a pass. You know who is totally not hot though? TOLSTOY. I HATE TOLSTOY. Reading Anna Karenina made me want to throw MYSELF under a train.

Second, I wouldn’t have lost my infatuation for her quite so suddenly had she been reading the first book of the Left Behind series. I figure at some point I’ll read that book my ownself, just to see what the fuss is/was about. But it was one of the later books, which suggests to me she was either a True Believer or one of those compulsive people who insist on reading every book in a series in order, even if they’re horrible.

Finally, although I’m not an authority on hotness of any sort, I would suggest that Russian literature is not hot. I’d rather have my stomach pumped than read Russian literature. I swear, it’s like each individual word in Russian literature weighs more than the same word written by a non-Russian. I can barely pick up a book of Russian literature, the words weigh so much. And that’s in translation; imagine how much ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ would weigh in the original Russian.

I’m willing to bet nobody ever made a carp mouth while reading Solzhenitsyn.

Andy — Yay, I win!

On the other hand, I fear disagreeing with you, because you’ll write another of those long sentences at me.

I dunno. I love his style. I liken him to Hemingway. Great style, but sometimes they really bore me.

Bah, I need a new book anyway because Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon is boring the hell out of me. That dude uses way, way too many words.

Andy — You know, considering how much conduct literature from that era I have actually read (never let it be said that I don’t know how to have a good time), it may almost be surprising that I never came across Pamela. In regards to that list of novels bearing the claim of being the first novel in English, Robinson Crusoe clearly pre-dates Pamela, but now I’m thinking about Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (which I happen to have read twice… once for the class in which I was forced to read Robinson Crusoe, and once just because… I don’t know, I hate myself?), because Oroonoko is also on the list of first novels, and yet I’m pretty sure it was in this class where I thought I learned that Robinson Crusoe was the first English novel; furthermore, that class was all about race and gender in the 18th century (though a somewhat loosely-defined 18th century, which began with the tail end of the interregnum/beginning of the Restoration and ended with Jane Austen and I told you that I know how to have a good time) so it seems odd that we wouldn’t have given Aphra Behn her due, unless we were defining a novel by length, in which case Oroonoko is clearly a novella. Was that not a hell of a sentence? My goodness, yes. I’m tired now.

Dave — Interesting point regarding the ending of American Psycho. I guess I always just assumed that it was real and everyone was so shallow that nobody gave a shit that Bateman was a murderer. I will admit that my problem with Ellis isn’t his writing ability, but rather the fact that I just didn’t like anybody in the book so by the time I got to the end, I also didn’t give a shit. But again, I sort of wonder if that wasn’t exactly the way I was supposed to feel.

Tom — Hi. I can’t believe that I am no longer the world’s only living authority on the hotness of reading material. My reign was so brief. Maybe I can live with being America’s only living authority on the hotness of reading material. I’ll have to think about that.

Anyway, in regards to your (as yet unpublished) novel, I can agree that both The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera are hot. I think Kundera and Marquez are hot, at least in terms of reading material, which reminds me that I need to stop being daunted by my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish and just read it. Also, once, back when I was first reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, some guy approached me and said “Oh, that’s a great book,” and I barely looked up and said “Yep.” It wasn’t until hours later that I realized that maybe he was trying to start a conversation with me and I AM SO HOPELESS.

Alas. At least I have all of Jane Austen’s books.

And finally, because I have been going on for quite awhile, reading Rimbaud (in translation, of course) made me wish I could read French. Haven’t gotten around to learning French, though, because I have enough other languages rattling around my head as it is.

The result of my research (which admittedly dates from almost twenty years ago, and therefore excludes some of the writers and texts cited above) was used (by me) in a(n as yet unpublished) novel in which the protagonists cruised the London underground system ostentatiously reading “hot” texts in order to pick people up. The two texts which proved the most successful (with both sexes) were “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Love in the Time of Cholera”. In a delightfully self-referential twist, a man reading “Anna Karenina” also appealed particularly to women.

I can also confirm that reading Samuel Beckett is hot, though that is based not on scientific research, but on the fact that my ex-wife was reading “Molloy” when I first spied her.

I’m not sure about “location, location, location” as far as Neruda goes, but I was (metaphorically, then, shortly afterwards, literally) seduced by someone on Flickr whose stream first caught my attention when she posted an image of a page of one of his love poems.

Finally, I can guarantee that I would have hit on you had I spotted you reading French Symbolist poetry in Denny’s, or anywhere else for that matter. This is because the doctoral thesis I never wrote (a story for another day) was on, well, French Symbolist poetry, and as you can imagine, having not written my thesis, I have a lot of unwritten thoughts I would like to share with someone one day.

That is all.