I have a weakness for books about books, and I just picked up Books to Die For, a collection of writing by contemporary fiction writers about the most important or best mystery novel of roughly each year from 1841 to 2008. The early years skip because the mystery novel had not yet become a genre; there is nearly a ten-year gap between the first entry, Edgar Allen Poe's Murder in the Rue Morgue and the second entry, Charles Dickens' Bleak House.
Because, of course, I don't have enough reading to do, I am going to try to read them all in order, except for the ones I've already read, and perhaps revisiting some of those.
That means I started out with Poe, who is IMO unreadable except for poetry. I have large bits of The Raven memorized because as a poem it is awesome-gnarly and I love it. His prose leaves me cold, and much as I wanted to like the Auguste Dupin stories, I didn't. They were tedious and turgid, and I am glad to be done with them and scratch that particular book off the list. I doubt I will have such trouble with Dickens, whom I've always liked.
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