'Sexy' Classics We Say We've Read

They're not trashy, but they're still page-turners

(NEWSER) - Looking for a page-turner to read on the beach, but just can’t bring yourself to buy a trashy supermarket romance novel? Allow Sadie Stein to introduce you to 10 respectable summer reads “that you can show with pride—but will devour like a tween guilty pleasure,” on Jezebel :

• Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace: “Stop putting it off! You'll enjoy it, we swear!” Plus, it’s long enough to last any length of plane ride.
• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov: “How can something so utterly artful and disturbing be so completely, deliciously addictive? Probably one of the best reads of all time.”

This list might be enough to make your head hurt

(NEWSER) - Great books can bring great joy—and, in a few cases, great big headaches. Listverse compiles the 10 toughest reads in literature:

• Finnegans Wake, James Joyce: If you thought Joyce would ride his way onto this list compliments of Ulysses, think again. Written partially in a made-up language of mindbendingly convoluted puns, this novel is often considered unreadable.

Remembering the writer, not the myth

(NEWSER) - The myth of JD Salinger the withdrawn man doesn't match Salinger the writer, Adam Gopnik writes. On the page, Salinger was charming, expansive, and relentlessly engaged with the world. "No American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart," Gopnik writes in the New Yorker . "A self-enclosed writer doesn’t listen, and Salinger was a peerless listener: page after page of pure talk flowed out of him, moving and true and, above all, funny." More»

Misfits like JD Salinger, smart geeks like JK Rowling ...

(NEWSER) - If you don’t want to waste the time really getting to know someone, just ask about his or her favorite author. That tells you all you need to know, Lauren Leto suggests, before running down the stereotypes:

• JD Salinger: Kids who don’t fit in (duh).
• Stephenie Meyer: People who type like this: OMG. Mah fAvvv <3 <3.
• JK Rowling: Smart geeks.

Sex, ghosts, long-lost twins, baby monkeys inhabit Salon's picks

(NEWSER) - The frankly subjective list of the year's best fiction from Salon avoids the obvious Wolff Hall, Hillary Mantel's latest and the Man Booker Prize winner. Laura Miller names five others that, too, offered “a sojourn, however brief, into another world”:

• The Children’s Book by AS Byatt: “This is a classic Byatt fusion of fact and uncannily luscious imagery, mixed in the ideal proportions: not too hot, not too cold—just right.”