The other day I scanned an interview with an English professor who admitted that he had never finished George Eliot's Middlemarch "because it was too long," and my temper started to fray. It's funny how possessive we can be about the writers who matter to us. I've picked many an argument over Dickens.

So as I sit here this morning, wondering what I ought to say to you, my thoughts have turned to the names of writers whose writing I avoid reading. Off the top of my head, I can name Dostoyevsky, Poe, Proust, Lessing, Pound, and there are many more out there--including a passel of contemporary novelists and poets whose names I won't even bring up because they probably Google their names every day, and I'll just make them depressed.

I feel sad about avoiding these writers. I ought to be more broad-minded and flexible, but sometimes I think my John Milton project wore me out in that regard. Today I feel some sympathy with Jane Welsh Carlyle, who wrote in her diary on November 1, 1855, "Mr. C presented me today with a novel of [James Fenimore] Cooper's (Lionel Lincoln) which he had picked up on a stall for ninepence--Dear I should say. But in spite of its badness I have read at it till flesh and blood can stand no more."