**** more great stories

**** more great stories; echoes of joyce

* mostly predictable choices, except for a few scandinavians

**** especially liked "brad carrigan, american"

***** pure genius

**** this guy has a perfect ear; he's profoundly humble...and funny

** Cleverly constructed, but often precious in a bad writing-seminar way: “spoors of grease” “Vesuvius reposed benignly” “pizza draped in buffalo mozzarella” “mosquito-flecked summers” “a skein of backstreets” “churches blistered with grime” “moldering palazzi” Some details rang false: I can believe an art historian who wants to write about Fragonard, but not one who wants to write about “art.” And the epigraphs from Proust are pompous.

**** nice variety; "victory lap" borrows from "nausicaa" in ulysses; liked "sticks" best.

* quite dated, though arguments still pertain; gets much better towards the end

***** senilità (as a man grows older): an amusing novel of ambivalence and self deception in love, along the lines of un amour de swann

** Some funny moments (he's very good on driveways) but most of the book is outdated since it was written over thirty years ago. There is so much great new material for class analysis (phones, email addresses, etc.) "Category X" was an interesting appendix...perhaps the source of Brooks' bourgeois bohemian "idea."