Sheeeeit, this is making me feel uncultured. Re. Chabon: Telegraph Avenue. Started it, never had time to get into it, regret having dropped it. Probably worth picking up, I've heard it said that it's even better than Cavalier and Clay.

Got this for my birthday, making my way through it. Beautiful. But. I feel like a hallmark of the modern cartoonist I mean Graphic Novelist is to make sure that everybody knows the work is SERIOUS by way of making all characters very very sad and conflicted. Would it kill you to put a dude slipping on a banana peel every few pages? No, as long as he's very contemplative about the results afterward.

There's plenty of good modern fantasy, just gotta know where to look. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is one of my favorite books ever. Read it maybe five times now, get something new out of it every time. The Magician series by Lev Grossman is great, very tongue-in-cheek, a must-read for anybody just out of school. Added perk, the final one in the trilogy just came out. The Name of the Wind series is only two books in right now, but it's great. Not as heavy as Jonathan Strange, not as smart as Grossman, but good clean fun. Oh, and speaking of magicians, Gene Wolfe's "Wizard Knight" duo is great. Dense, hallucinatory. Also not really a fantasy, I don't think.

Making my way through The Fatal Shore right now, which should count as two or three books. Keep meaning to quote it on the quote thread, but I could easily quote the whole thing, which would take a while.

Kudos, this is an impressive list.