Anyway, most modern fiction is so boring to me. I can’t read Crichton, for example. I loved Lost World, and read it non-stop, but I got about 15 pages into Timeline before I took it back tothe library. Just soul-less, no style. Unless the ideas expressed are darkly innovative (Greg Bear comes to mind, along with William Gibson) or really visceral w/o being exploitative (a thin line, that), or funny w/o being goofy, I’d just as soon read older fiction, when writers had style. Chandler, Hemingway, Vonnegut, Runyon, Robert Penn Warren, Bradbury (too purple now), Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber… and all these guys had their own imitators. Old-time idea guys were Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Clarke and such, but even they read a little stilted. I was disappointed by the Foundation trilogy; brilliant concept, but I found I could skip 40 pages at a time and miss nothing of consequence. And I’ve still never read any Tolkien beyond the Hobbit: boh-ring! (Lloyd Alexander’s juvie fantasy series is much better.) I also wish to try C.S. Lewis again.

Off topic, another quote you could use is, “By Grabthar’s Hammer… what a savings.”