Well, I agree with your disagreement with me, Guest. I really overstated my point. I just meant some healthy skepticism, too.

But I keep hoping someday to meet up with anyone else who was partly formed by all that superfiction stuff. I got into it right in the transition between my juvenile mode, and reading (as you nicely put it) to see things through someone else's eyes. A lot of my favorite writers just don't come up much. Nobody seems to have ever liked Nabokov. Nor do many aspects of reading that seem to relate to those stylistic concerns. It seems to be a 70's trend like striped bell-bottoms, platform shoes, or big collars--things people prefer to forget. Fine, y'all, laugh if you will. But it affected me, and it seems to have dulled my taste for many books that come up much more often.

Maybe it's a short story thing. A lot of short stories have affected me and stayed with me much more than most novels. I'd usually mention Salinger's Laughing Man, or others, before The Catcher occurred to me. I can quote from many of John Updike's stories but hardly at all from his novels. I can re-tell most of Raymond Carver's stories off the top of my head, and I have, to explain the mush Robert Altman's movie Shortcuts made of them, dropping all the significant endings, cramming them together. Short stories don't come up as much as they really should, they're good stuff.