See, and I read it like a total academic and flipped back and forth between the main text and the notes on the first reading. Catch-22 is also excellent. I think of it more as popular literature than classic literature, but probably just because it was never assigned to me in class.

Yeah, maybe it's only classic in the sense of like Vonnegut, in that it's survived a few decades at least and people still think it's pretty worthwhile.

The first two episodes of Heroes. The writing is pretty dang hokey, but I still want to see how it turns out

The writing becomes steadily more consistent as the show progresses; it feels very rough near the beginning since they have to open so many threads at once. It begins to converge noticeably around ep 5 or 6. Stay the course; the show is delicious.

Thanks for mentioning when in starts to pull together. I skipped the show when it first came out due to the writing reviews, but a friend got me hooked on episode 13 or so (whenever Claude first appeared). I've been meaning to go back & watch the beginning during the hiatus.

(I'm not sure what it is about the 5-6 ep mark, but that's when I felt Veronica Mars pulled together, also.)

Heroes gets *a lot* better. The last couple episodes have been incredible.

Before you start reading the commentary in Pale Fire try to do a little analysis of the poem itself. I read the poem concurrent with the commentary and I think it would have been more fun to read the poem first and form some opinions about it. Also, ++Catch 22.

Heroes for teh win! I first read Catch-22 in middle school. I forget if it was assigned to the whole class, or if we got a list where we could choose to read it from. My friends and I liked it so much that we read the sequel for a history class in high school. That was a bit awkward, because the sequel had very little historical value and wasn't particularly good.