Heh, I read my first books of theirs in a class, and then continued alone and felt really, well, lonely for the experience. The Faulkner I read back to back with Toni Morrison in a Race, Place, and History literature course. I was lucky, though, because I had great classmates.

Jeremy is jackshoegazer, and he is currently in the middle of a writing-basd epiphany. His traditional tastes run towards surrealism and absurdity (he loves Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut, for example, with sprinkings of Terry Pratchett), and a lot of his earlier writing (prose and poetry) was in that vein. His recent reading list (I've introduced him to John Irving, with whom he's in literary love) and general development is steering him out of that direction, however, and last night he announced to me that he's "giving it up," so to speak, and that his future writing will likely not reflect that style at all. I've noticed it in the pieces he's been crafting lately, which are much better (exponentially so) than any of his more surreal writings. His best work really is more literal, more "Irving," if you will. I'm trying to corrupt him by feeding him books. :)