Youth!

The New York Times Magazine's Sixth Floor blog posts, for reasons obscure, an aggregate list of each staffers' five favorite novels, with names redacted (perhaps the one instance in Times Magazine recent history of editors not wanting to attach their names to something). Who can it be who likes both The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the latest Jennifer Egan (besides "a Middle American Reader"?)

Hugo Lindgren, though, lets the cat out of the bag that he is the one contributor whose favorite novels include The Godfather by Mario Puzo, and his four other favorites thus are revealed as:

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon
• The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett
• The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., by Robert Coover
• Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

Did American Psycho feel too cliché?

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_