Anyway, I just wanted to say that I’m so glad you liked my first person narrative post!

For instance, I try to keep my distance for the most part on author guest blogs (especially so if there’s a contest involved). I feel it gives the author more chance to interact with readers.

An opinion, ramble, funny, list or similar post I try to comment back a lot. I tend to save comments and direct personal responses back in bulk, (like Tumperkin.) Even so I don’t respond to everything.

I sort of feel how Sarah from SBTB does about comments. I like reading others and seeing their interactions and how they develop the conversation. That’s not to say I could resist commenting entirely. It just depends. I want to feel I’m adding to the conversation not hogging the mic as it were…

I agree with Kate about getting annoyed if I ask someone (aka the blogger or the guest blogger that day not say another commenter) a direct question in a comment and am left hanging. That seems rude.

I don’ t feel obliged to comment on comments on my blog. However, if I’m responding to the majority of comments, I’ll tend to try to cover off everyone so no-one feels left out! Having said that, my top numbers of comments are not that large so it’s not been a huge burden.

I love Maurice and it was one of the first books I reviewed on my blog. I count it firmly as a romance because Forster made a very deliberate decision to write a gay love story with a happy ending. E M Forster wrote of the novel that ‘a happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write it otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.’

Highly recommended.

I would also repeat Carolyn’s James Lear recc – he’s someone else I’ve reviewed in the past. In all honestly, there’s not much romance in his books – but just enough to qualify for my purposes!

Despite a slavish devotion to the movie version of A Room With a View my first year in college (yeah, I had the poster and everything) I have only read one Forster, A Passage to India, which I did not particularly enjoy. Did you like Maurice?

I liked it much better than A Room With a View. But that could be because I was a bit annoyed with the anti-glasses-wearer sentiment in ARWaV. No, I think it’s that Maurice, as a character, seemed very real to me. I felt one really got to know and understand him, so I was happier for him when he finally got his HEA. It takes a long time, poor man.

This makes me very happy – and I really hope you enjoy it.

Glad that Wicked Gentlemen made the list!

Alison Bechdel’s memoir Funhome: A Family Tragicomic. It’s incredible. A great story, great art, I love the literary allusiveness of it. She does the Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip (also great).

My husband (who teaches some graphic novels/memoirs in his Coming of Age Narrative class) also recommends La Perdida by Jessica Abel, and Jason Lutes’ Berlin trilogy (two so far)–set during the Weimar Republic, I think. I couldn’t get into the Lutes (maybe your husband would like them) though I admired the art.

I am about the same age as you, I think; I find I have to learn to read graphic narratives (what I mean is that it’s not that we’re too old but that it’s a different kind of reading). I tend to read the words and rush through too quickly, and not pay enough attention to the images and how they interact with the text.