Making the art of criticism fun.........

"One has heard of a tree so tall that it took two men to see to the top of it.  Here is a novel so huge that a whole shift of critics is needed to read it.  Did I myself do it all alone?  By no means.  I read only the first and last paragraphs of each chapter.  The rest I farmed out to my wife and children, to my cousin Ferd, and to my pastor and my beer man."

-H. L. Mencken, reviewing Theodore Dreiser's The "Genius".  Mencken and Dreiser had a tangled relationship, but had been friends.  As copied from Damning Words:  the life and religious times of H. L. Mencken