Back from Los Angeles am I, and into the frantic (and not blogging friendly) swing of teaching. So just a quick note to say this:

I adore LOST. It is, in fact, a major source of discontent in my relationship: D, who started out as a LOST fan, has utterly lost faith. He finds the set of conventions that the show has established and now mercilessly, endlessly exploits to be cheesy, manipulative and tiresome, and (worse yet) he thinks the writers are making everything up as they go along.

I, on the other hand, think that they have had a rough outline of the whole show all along, a foundation from which they have improvised a complex and enthralling moral universe.

We had a similar "difference of opinion" about the last season of Battlestar Galactica, which vaguely pleased him while it made me increasingly enraged. Eventually we had to agree not to discuss it at all. Otherwise our every conversation went something like this:

D:     "So... did you see the episode last night?"
SP:    "Mm."
D:     "And?"
SP:    "I don't know. I didn't love it. What ever happened to character consistency? I mean..."
D:      "WELL IF YOU HATE IT SO MUCH WHY DON'T YOU JUST STOP WATCHING IT???"

Come to think of it, most of our worst arguments have been about television. Don't even get me started on the time we fought for hours at the top of our lungs about the definition of the word "procedural." Tensions run high around the small screen in our homes.

All this is just to introduce this brilliant list of the Books of Lost. It is a show that wears its bibliophilia on its sleeve. I like that.

So much so that I am going to fire up the Tivo and watch it right now.