Top 100 Novels

Parents Face Sticker Shock at Enrollment–in Public Schools

On top of hefty charges for textbooks, technology, bus rides, sports and clubs, school districts are hitting up parents to pay fees for hundreds of individual courses, from French I to American literature, history, foods and furniture-making.

The so-called course or lab fees can range from $10 or $20 to more than $100 per class, depending on the school, records show, pumping up parents' bills and adding to the rising cost of a public school education in the Chicago region.

"This is like private school," said parent Gio Chavez, who walked out of Oak Lawn Community High School's registration this week shellshocked. The final tally for her...

Top 100 Novels #34: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ...

Author:  Michael Chabon Rank:  #34 Published:  2000 Publisher:  Random House Pages:  639 First Line:  “In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.” Last Line:  “When Rosa and Joe picked it up they saw that Sammy had taken a pen and, bearing down, crossed out the name of the never-more-than-theoretical family that was printed above the address, and in its place written, sealed in a neat black rectangle, knotted by the stout cord of an ampersand, the words KAVALIER & CLAY.” Acclaim:  Pulitzer Prize; National Book Critics Circle Finalist; PEN/Faulkner Finalist ML Edition:  none Film:  in production hell First Read:  Fall, 2000 reminded me how much I wanted to be a writer and how much I felt I could accomplish.  In a way, Kavalier & Clay took that away from me.  It’s not that it’s so brilliantly written, though it is:  “He didn’t tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons.  Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains – walled in, sewn up in layers of batting.  For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.”  It’s that this is the novel I wish I had written.  And it has already been written.

I grew up as a comic book geek.  I wasn’t content, like in those long-ago days described in the novel, content to pop down to the local store and see what I could discover in the spinners.  I did that at first, but I couldn’t always find what I wanted.  So I would take longer and longer bike trips, all the way across the city, to the comic shops, every Friday to try and find the series I was collecting at the time.  And I loved the Golden Age.  I collected All-Star Squadron and anything having to do with the Justice Society.  The lore of comic books was what I loved so much – the lore that is approached with love and care throughout the novel.  You don’t have to love comics; hell you don’t even need to like comics, in order to appreciate the depths and wonders of this novel:  “And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation, and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.”  But, if you like comics, if you love comics, if the words The Golden Age say something to you, then this is your War and Peace, the great epic story of how it all happened and what became of those boys who created legends:  “Both titles had, as Sammy had once predicted, killed; and Joe had soon found himself responsible every month for more than two hundred pages of art and wholesale imaginary slaughter on a scale that, many years later, could still horrify the good Dr. Fredric Wertham when he set about to probe at the violent foundations of the comics.

RT @: So much stress on OPENING lines, but what about LAST lines? Top 100 closing lines of famous novels:

Top 100 Graphic Novels for July 2011

RT @: So much stress on OPENING lines, but what about LAST lines? Top 100 closing lines of famous novels: ...

So much stress on OPENING lines, but what about LAST lines? Top 100 closing lines of famous novels:

I need to stop finding lists of top 100 novels of all time. I'm never going to get to all of them...

The Crown crime companion, the top 100 mystery novels of all time

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