I think we may be whittling our list down to manageable size. Thus far, I am hearing a small chime of interest in Melville's Moby-Dick, alongside a Cooperish regret. Mr. Hill (who, by the way, wins this week's grand prize in the Best Agro-Literary Comment category) has mentioned Dickens's Great Expectations. I have also received email mention of E. L. Doctorow's The March, William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage.

Because Melville and Dickens appear to be our current front runners, I will give them the Cooper treatment and quote from The Cambridge Guide.

Melville has hardly a rival (Conrad, perhaps) as a writer of the sea and on that level alone the book is magnificent. The ship and the seamen; the living and eternally moving oceans; the tiny creatures in small vessels who brave the element's surface to hunt one of its noblest creatures--all this is brought as close as a breath on the reader's face. The whales themselves are realized superbly; the great creatures have never been depicted with such care or the economics of the hunt in the 19th century examined so coolly. . . .

But Moby-Dick is more than a fine maritime adventure story, just as Ahab is more than a glowering monomaniac. . . . Ahab is a surprisingly humorous character, many-sided, like the book. He is aware of his obsession yet cannot defeat it; he is fond of Pip but refuses to accept the idea that the boy is fond of him because he cannot allow affection to interfere.

For some reason, the Great Expectations entry is merely a boring plot summary. Suffice it to say, however, that the novel's main character is named Pip. You hear that? Pip. Two novels with characters named Pip. The Spooky Book Fates are at it again. Anyway, this what the Cambridge Guide has to say about Dickens more generally:

There is no one like [Dickens], and we shall be fortunate indeed if we ever find his like again . . . . The mountains of published commentary are a tribute to [his] genius, . . . a genius rooted in English common life. He has a wonderful ear for dialogue, his prose embraces a great range of effects, and his unerring touch of fantasy gives life, in a vivid and memorable way, to characters who are sometimes a considerable distance from reality. His sentimentality can be quite repellent; but one must remember that Dickens was writing at a time when bathos was not easily recognized as pathos out of control [not like the 1980s, when people knew better. Give me a break. Wait, I'm not supposed to be talking.]. He went awry, sometimes, in his exposure of the social inhumanities of his time; but he saw those inhumanities clearly and, at his best, wrote about them to devastating effect.

But leaving aside late-20th-century-literary-criticism-in-a-nutshell (Melville is purely great versus Dickens is sort of dismissable), which book would you rather read?