i'm so lost

So the Emmys are coming up in a little over a week and Lost is nominated for six of 'em. It's true. I'm a Lostie. I can't help myself.

I have watched the show and watched it all over again. The first season had me gripping pillows and screaming aloud. Lost is the only TV show I've seen in its totality multiple times.

(Hmm ... That may not be true. I've probably seen all the episodes of Three's Company, though it's not a claim I can validate. My memories are just chock-full of hours spent sitting sort of stupefied, eating cheese, drinking Shirley Temples, and laughing at Jack Tripper. Come to think of it, if Three's Company qualifies (I hated missing that opening soundtrack), then Star Trek probably does, too. Oh, and of course, Dukes of Hazzard.)

Lost's backstory and hidden narrative elements all heavily inform the developing structure of my short story collection. An odd set of influences I've got: Alice Mattison, William Faulkner, Louise Erdrich, and the Lost writers. What can I say?

Don't think I'm ashamed of it. There's no question that the provenance of my story structure is one to be proud of. The writers know hooks and angles. Turns out, no surprise, they have interesting taste in books, too. The writers recently posted their favorite novels on the Lost site. I've read every one of their all-time favorites (not that hard, lots of classics in there) and was so surprised and delighted to see The Moviegoer on there. What a strange book that is, full of oddball questy business, and how far it's managed to travel! Man, The Road, that book was tough stuff. I made the mistake of bringing that with me to Italy. Not not not a beach read, but I'd burned through all the other books I brought and so the back-pocket, plane-ride-home book had to come out.

Well, anyway, Emmys are up September 16th. Here are the writers' book choices, if yr interested.

All-time favorite novels:

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Frannie and Zooey by J.D Salinger
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
American Tabloid by James Ellroy

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Books that the Lost writers are currently reading:

So You're Going to Be a Dad by Peter Downey and Nik Scott
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
John Adams by David McCulloch
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War by Robert L. Beisner
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett