Mark Young mentions reading Cape Cod by Thoreau, accent on 1st syllable, like I for one pronounce thorough. well 1st he mentions the US writers he aint never read, which brings the thought of assumptions of canon. he mentions never having read Faulkner, who I like tho don't entirely trust. Faulkner's viewpoint and milieu are foreign enough for me, perhaps moreso for non-American. Young said he came to Hawthorne (and Poe) by way of his taste for fantasy. that would be considered the backdoor. I remember reading The Scarlet Letter in high school, offical front door. the teaching itself seemed to be a dour puritanical rite. I suspect a school reading in other parts of the country, let alone the world, might focus differently. The House of Seven Gables reads like a fantasy or ghost story tho it really has no fantasy in it. the death of the antagonist at the end brings to mind the death at the end of Buddenbrooks, a long morbid consideration. sure I'm rambling here. I'm enjoying the chance to write on some writers to whom I feel close, and who, luckily, I didn't turn against in school. the Cape that Thoreau writes of has much in common with the present place, and much not. Provincetown still is a spit of sand well into the ocean, but the terraforming effort to vitalize that sand with trees and gardens, and a congestion of buildings has given an almost illusory effect to the place. as if erosion didn't exist, and the sands of time are staying put. on Memorial Day every year we used to drive down to Provincetown and tend the family cemetery plots. in those days, the Cape had no tourist trade between september and june. now the place is full to the brim at all times, a great place to study traffic and its effects. it is interesting to note, as Mark does, such great, canonical works that one has not read. Don Quixote is my downfall. it's nice to pass by the condensed version, Thoreau the hermit (given all the conversations with friends and strangers that he notes, obviously was quite chummy), Hawthorne the puritanical moralist (he flaired with the fantastical), and so on. and Dickinson was not a tender poet of delicate flowers, she was in her way ferocious and ambitious. and so forth. anyway, pondering on this. a couple years ago, I read Walden in class (adult learners). a large schism between those who loved it and those who plainly and vociferously hated it. a commenter to Mark's post associates with that latter category. the magnetic opposition iof those 2 views interests me.