It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.

Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.

I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for.

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.

He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.