I don't know about all the social attitudes in Heinlein, I just read one book and it didn't do anything for me. I don't read much sci-fi, I guess I usually can't tell what the reality-average is, and am too lazy to learn. I did love a book called The Artificial Man when I was a kid, don't know who wrote it.

   I made it through Moby Dick last year, but it seemed just like one of those "great" books. I love Hawthorne's short stories, not the ones that are usually anthologised, but things like Wakefield, scraps and stuff.

   Proust. until the fourth volume or so.
   
   I keep promising myself to read Cervantes just so I can read Nabokov's lecture. Nabokov is my only real favorite, in the sense that I like his flaws as much as his gifts--I love it that someone so clever, stagey, florid, etc. can be convincing at all. The way my mother loves Mondrian, who was a pretty bad candidate for the office of an artist.

   There are lots of writers I just don't get--Murder In The Cathedral reminded me of Monty Python. My favorite thing Mann wrote was that Hamlet was "almost certainly" an artistic failure. I love that--"almost certainly". Almost is my favorite word.