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For what it is worth, I don't think that accessibility is essential. Indeed, there are some great books which qualify by virtue of their relative in-accessibility. Things like In the Labyrinth or Jealousy by Robbe-Grillet, or Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch. I mean, turn the argument on it's...

You might want to check out William Gibson's trilogy - Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. They are generally regarded as the beginning of cyberpunk. I have heard good things about Kim Stanley Robinson's series Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars. I haven't read SF in a while...

I think I may have all the Disney fans beat. Once, the movie Ernest Saves Christmas moved me to tears. (And, being drunk at 10:00 am explains why I watched the darn thing, but maybe not the tears.)

I've never thought of this as a genre before, so I'll have to give it some thought. Off the top of my head, you might want to check out Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, or maybe T.R. Pearson.

I'll be happy to hear your reaction to Shackleton's "adventures" - without giving anything away, I can tell you that the survival of any of his expedition depended on accomplishing not one, but two feats which would, even today, be regarded as suicidal. I am not overly ashamed to admit that...

I have admitted elsewhere on this board that I am something of a degenerate book-buyer. Sometimes I am actively searching for certain titles or categories or authors, but I've also been in shops and thrift stores where I'll buy the "best" available book for a "fix". Of course, price is a major...

I read it a few years ago, and have to admit that parts of it were truly harrowing. If you liked it, you might want to hunt up a copy of Alfred Lansing's book about the ill-fated Shackleton expedition called Endurance. I think it makes Krakauer's book read like Mary Poppins by comparison -...

I prob'ly should give it a little more thought, but the name that comes to mind is Jonathan Gash - his Lovejoy series usually involves some sort of grift or fraud in the antique world. There is also a guy named Gerald Browne who wrote a number of books about gem thieves.

I've been meaning to read this one for years. I read it a long time ago and remember it as a real classic.

I usually am willing to forgive a mistake or two, but lately, especially in pocket book (now I guess they call them "mass market") paperbacks, I've noticed loads of errors. Some of them are so bad that you can tell where the proofer just gave up, or started checking every third or fifth page...

The first that came to mind is a biography of Moe Berg called The Catcher Was a Spy. I'm not even sure what it was about the book, except that Berg was a true American original.

Hermione, I'm not familiar with the book you mention, but if you liked it, you might also want to check out Simon Singh's The Code Book or David Kahn's The Code Breakers. Or, if you are more in the mood for fiction, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon has a great deal to do with codes and...

It's many years since I read Kierkegaard, but I would have said that Fear and Trembling (like many of his other books) were more about the problem of faith. That is, how hard it is to really believe, to make the requisite "leap of faith".

Reading for fun: Dead Beat by Jim Butcher - I've read a number of these modern day "dark creatures are among us" books and Butcher's are the best. They have a nice noir feel. Serious reading: Carter Beats the Devil by Glen Gold - The story of a magician in 1920's San Francisco, but it's...

On average, more people are eaten per year in the US by pigs than by sharks.

I know I've posted this info before, but it must have been years ago, so why not post it again. I am from Pennsylvania, which is on the East coast (sort of) of the United States. That's the easy bit. What I do is a little harder to explain. Primarily, though, I'm in the antique business.

For prose, I would recommend Post Office. For poetry, I would recommend Love is a Dog from Hell. For anything else, I would recommend Screams from the Balcony.

Feast, I would suggest Jonathan Crowley's Little, Big. It's a very tangled and complicated book with a very different take, in my opinion, on traditional fantasy elements. However, it is just as much a love story which takes place over the course of a couple of generations.

Looking over this thread, I doubt more than ever that the Agatha Christie is really what you're looking for. It really is just a variation on the English drawing-room mystery. There is nothing "horror-tinged" about it. You might want to take a look at Jim Butcher's "Harry Dresden" series, or...

As far as I know, the all-time example that would fall into this category would prob'ly by Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, but I doubt that it would be exactly what you're looking for. I'll have to give it some more thought.