The January issue of Out Magazine had an article on nine neglected classics, books selected by today’s literati, as "queer reads." As a qualitative researcher, I wonder what criteria were used for this list, not to mention why these people were asked to select them.

Regardless, they are:

1. The Inheritors by William Golding
2. Nebraska by George Whitmore
3. The Story of Harold by Terry Andrews
4. Fadeout by Joseph Hansen
5. The Last Puritan by George Santayana
6. The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
7. The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White
8. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
9. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Well, seems this list gives me an interesting selection of books to read, especially since I do not read many books identified as being gay (though the Out article did not qualify what this may mean in this case).

I have always been fond of the work of Willa Cather, and often think about her when I pass 5 Bank Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, where she lived while she wrote her classic work listed above. I hope she smiles down on me as I walk by, as I have spent many a time reading the plaque in her honor in that very location.