I am a huge Ira Levin fan, and I highly endorse this suggestion. Pretty much any Levin book is a page-turning social satire. (The Boys from Brazil is another goodie.)

Inner Chapters in South Lake Union is a great one. They have a cafe and beer, too.

And Mercer Street Books in Queen Anne is a lovely, well-curated bookstore.

Up in Greenwood, there's Balderdash Books, which is kind of similar in feel to the late, lamented Abraxus crossed with the U District Twice Sold Tales, and Couth Buzzard Espresso Buono is just up the street from them.

It's not strictly used, but I really like Ada's Technical Books on Broadway. It's nice to see a good science-minded bookstore in town.

I know I'm forgetting a couple; I'll come back when they come to mind.

A lot of novels-in-stories are just short story collections that an agent insisted the author turn into a linked collection because novels sell way better than short story collections.

I don't think that's the case here; I think Egan has enough clout that if she wanted to publish a short story collection, publishers would happily buy that collection as is. I think she might be trying to tell the story of a very specific social group, from when people first met to the point where the group fades from the memory of the next generation. It's kind of a vague concept, but it's an interesting one.

Do you know what kind of life your grandparents had when they were kids? I mean, you probably know some dry biographical details, but you don't know the people they hung around with, their friends. That's a huge part of a person, that kind of context is essential to knowing what a person is like. And it evaporates so easily.

So if that's what Egan was trying to do—and I'm aware that I'm kind of stretching here—it's super-ambitious and she was fairly successful, too.

I adore the Lethem and the Shteyngart, but I would love to use this as an opportunity to read Goon Squad, which I haven't read yet. My vote goes to that one.

I dog-ear books. I know that on some people's moral scales, that makes me worse than Hitler, but it's the most efficient way for me to find passages I'll be using for reviewing purposes. (Whenever possible, I try to dog-ear the advance reader's copy of a book, which somehow feels more disposable than a hardcover.) I have a pretty good memory and so I almost always remember what was notable when I find the dog-ear.

On the other hand, I don't mark down anything in books at all. I have a serious aversion to writing in books; it feels as though the text in a book is a finished product, and tampering with it would be somehow wrong.

But I do have a friend who writes tiny little smiley faces in pencil when she reads something that makes her smile and writes HA when she laughs out loud and so on. When I read a book that she's annotated, I feel like I'm sharing the reading experience with her, and I really appreciate that she noted how she felt when she read. Reading has never felt so friendly as when I read a book she's marked up. So that's a pretty strong case for making notes.

Of course! Browsing is the best thing about bookstores. Feel free to take a look and see what's around, and if nothing cries out to you, you shouldn't feel obligated to buy anything. (Just don't take a book to the cafe, read the whole thing, spill a latte on it, and then put it back; I can say from personal experience that booksellers don't like that.)

Myrna is right: Nowadays, at least, editors come in at the very end of the process. A lot of editors I know do a lot of the job that editors used to do: Identifying story problems and cleaning a book up to the point where it's okay to get to an editor.

If you don't have an agent, your book should be pretty clean when you hand it in. How clean? At least clean enough that you wouldn't be horrendously embarrassed if you lost a copy on the street and a stranger picked it up and read it. It should feel like a book. The agent is supposed to make it a better book.

I love those kinds of books. They're really satisfying in a really great way.

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra is the first book that comes to mind. It's an epic cops and robbers story. And Naguib Mahfooz's Cairo Trilogy brings you to Egypt in the 20s for a huge, sweeping family saga. And if the back jacket copy of Shantaram entices you at all, you'll probably get sucked right in to that one.

More along the lines of Carter Beats the Devil, Matt Ruff's Set This House in Order is a look into a multiple personality. The research he did really pays off. (It's kind of like Middlesex in some ways, which is a book you should've read by now and if you haven't you should put at the top of your list.) Similarly, Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, about a detective with Tourette's syndrome, is a great book that gets you into a brain you would otherwise not have access to.

Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is a great look into a son of Indian immigrants with an unusual name. It's not super-melodramatic, but the writing is gorgeous and it pulls you along the way a compelling plot normally would.

Maybe you'd like early John Irving. Cider House Rules takes you to a different time and place, and it gives you a romantic dilemma to salivate over, too. And it's not exotic, but Richard Russo's Empire Falls gives you a depressed mill town in Maine packed with fascinating characters. I know he got it exactly right because I grew up near a very depressed mill town in Maine.

And I haven't read all of them, but have you considered the Clavell series? (Shogun, King Rat, etc.) He's less lecturey and more melodramatic than Michener, although he does have that white-guy-writes-about-the-exotic-Far-East thing going on sometimes.

I bet Steve Winter might have some suggestions for you, sci-fi-wise, but you might like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which is a book that spans a millennium, telling a series of stories that are linked in mysterious ways.

Sure there are. The problem is that they generally shy away from the "romance" label and refer to themselves as "literary fiction" to convince people to pick them up. But literary fiction is way too broad a label, so here are a few specific titles to get you started.

One Day by David Nicholls just came out in the U.S. this summer. (It was a runaway bestseller in England.) It's a love story about two friends who sleep together once in college. The book's conceit is that each chapter only visits them on one particular day every year—-the anniversary of the morning after their college hookup. It moves along quickly, and the characters are fun and cute, even if it falls apart a bit at the end, there. (A similar reading experience to One Day: Claire Marvel by John Burnham Schwarz.)

Ron Hansen put out "an entertainment" a few years ago called Isn't It Romantic?. It's about a young French couple who get in a fight in a small Nebraska town. It's a super-light, enjoyable souffle of a book, and cleverly written.

What about High Fidelity? Nick Hornby launched a whole fleet of books about romance and relationships from a man's perspective. And Michael Perry's Truck: A Love Story is a sweet real-life romance.

It's interesting to me that almost all the books I can think of were written by men. I wonder if female authors shy away from writing straight-up love stories because they're afraid of the romance-novel label? I've read some great books with romance in them—-Aimee Bender's An Invisible Sign of My Own has an adorable romance in it—-but I can't seem to think of that many books by female literary authors that would qualify as romantic. The only one at the moment that I can think of is Emma Donoghue's Landing, which is a lovely story about a long-distance lesbian love affair.

Hopefully, others in Questionland will be able to help bridge this good-romance-novel gender gap.