I stole this from Michael Cunningham (author of The Hours, which I tried to listen to on tape – actual cassette tape, which you kids should ask your parents about – when I was in Iowa and driving a battered old Honda with no air conditioning across great rural expanses, but failed to finish, but I’m not actually all that sad about that) who wrote about the idea in a Huffington Post piece.

And there are so many of these books out there, almost like the cult movies of graduate students in literature.

I had that ‘invisible classic’ moment when reading Goblin Market. I had a moment of ‘how is it that I wasn’t assigned this in high school?’ A marginalized poet from a marginalized school, but reading this beautiful, twisted poetry that would be just perfect for so many people, but while you know she (Christina Rossetti) exists, you never actually read her.

There’s also Persuasion. Sure, you’re saying, c’mon, it’s Jane freaking Austen… how ‘invisible’ is it really?

Point taken, but who, besides Austen completists, have actually read it? You read those ones that were made into movies with that skinny British chick who was in that soccer movie or that American actress who pretends to be English all the time or with that actress who totally got topless in Titanic (which might almost have made that movie not a colossal waste of what felt like a year of my life, except that even if she had walked out of the screen buck naked and propositioned me in the most explicit terms possible, the time I spent in that theater would still have caused me to question whether I had not already died and was receiving the most fiendish torments Gehenna’s master could conceive).

But do you ever read Persuasion?Is it ever assigned in school? No. And you should. While those other books had a larger feel – with the deus ex machina of handsome rich men waiting in the feel – Persuasion feels smaller, more desperate and more real. The handsome man in the corner is less handsome and less wealthy and the happy ending less secure (I mean, the dude is going off to fight Napoleon’s France, which, at least to me, feels fundamentally different than the situation of the handsome rich dude who sits in his huge house and collects 10,000 pounds [figuring in inflation, that’s approximately ten bazillion gazillion dollars in contemporary money]). There is just a sort of desperate, grimy, grimness to it all.