Bellow or Updike? It might a close call as to who is more pompous, but when it comes to heart, Bellow beats Updike hands down.

Although the "Teenworthy" quote may accurately sum up publishing these days, I think most school reading lists are more influenced by parental pressure groups and PC-dominated schoolboards-for instance, Bram Stoker's "Dracula" holds up much better than Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", but the latter always makes reading lists because "Dracula" is too Catholic and/or Satanic for the Christian kids and too reverent for the atheists. (and we don't want to give the goth kids ideas) Apply this logic to all books and you'd hate reading too...

I love Joseph Epstein after his indignant response to Arnold Rampersad's hatchet job on Ralph Ellison ("The Artist as Hero" in the Weekly Standard) which includes this classic line: "So what looked from the distance to be a charmed life was, viewed from closer up, a complicated, in some ways even a quite sad, life. But possibly the saddest thing to have happened to Ralph Ellison came after he died, when the assignment of writing his biography was given to Arnold Rampersad." *Snicker* But although I liked "Empire Falls" and can see why he might say that it has "more heart" than "The Corrections," I don't think it's a better book. I think Franzen's book is a classic.

Interesting, Mike... I know I prefer to read books with "heart" overall, but I also know that I don't necessarily consider 'War and Peace' superior to 'Madame Bovary.' One has a surfeit of heart, the other a surfeit of head, if you will. I maintain that the book combining those two things best was, is, and remains my beloved 'Middlemarch' -- but I'm sure many disagree.