I hope you are right.  I just play around with that electoral map on RCP, and even when I give Romney every state he should/must win (VA, NC, FL, CO, IA, even NH, etc) I am still stuck at 267.  That means he's got to have one of WI, OH, MI, PA, or NV.  And I just can't wrap my mind around a Republican winning any of those except Ohio, and Ohio is way too close for comfort. 

The whole thing is close, and it shouldn't be--as others above have said.  That's what's so vexing.  Look, I couldn't stand Clinton, Gore, Kerry,  or the Obama of 2008.  But I could understand how the casual apolitical centrist undecided moderate could vote for them.  This Obama, with this record...I just don't understand it.  The 30% of the country that is hard left/liberal, I get.  They're always going to vote for the Democrat.  But this should be a 57/43 election.

Has anyone heard anything reliable on what the campaign internal polls are showing?  I know this is guarded info, but it seems like someone must know something.  I am desperate to feel a little better before Tuesday. 

Docjay: I still remember specific pages from that book.  There was a fold-out page that had a picture of a bunch of different guns.  The "tools of the trade," they called it.  I learned the word "deter" from that page.  As in, "deter a would-be foe with a sawed-off shotgun."  I didn't need to look it up. I learned it from context.

Ah, the Time Life series.  We had the Nature Library and the Science Library.  I read the volumes (or parts thereof)  on ships and planes and medicine and mathematics many times. We also had the Old West series.  I wore out the introductory volume: The Gunfighters.    

Those family reference series are pretty much history in the age of the internet, don't you think?  Just like the family encyclopedia.  Kind of bittersweet.  I love Wikipedia, but there's nothing like having a bunch of interesting nonfiction/reference-type books lying around to peruse randomly.  I read way more of that kind of stuff as a kid than novels and stories. 

(I'm not making a value statement of one over the other here:  both kinds of reading are important for kids.  If anything, I regret not having read more fantasy/great fiction as a kid.)

I second Encyclopedia Brown.  In fact, I started my own detective agency.  (I only got one case--never solved it.)  And of course, Sherlock Holmes.

I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure series, too. 

In my early teen years, I read Poe.  (One of my English professors pointed out that for many people, our serious adult reading begins with Poe.  I find this to be true.)

Later I read a lot of King, Clancy, and Crichton.

I grew up in a house full of books.  The thing I remember the most vividly is sitting in my dad's study listening to him read "The Raven."  The room is dim and book lined, with an old ticking clock--a classic example of a man's private study.  To this day, when I think of Poe's "chamber" I think of that room. 

My personal reading in childhood tended more toward non-fiction.  Apollo Expeditions to the Moon, Modern Air Combat, Wings, my grandmother's copy of Courier and Ives Chronicles of America, her 1920s volumes of The Book of Popular Science all are vivid in my mind.  There was a wonderful 20 volume series of hardbacks published in about 1971 called The Pictorial Guide to American History.  I read the WWII volume and some of the volumes from the 1960s (covering the space program) over and over. 

As for fiction, I never could get off the ground with the great fantasty works of Tolkien and Lewis.  I only now am doing Narnia (reading to my kids).  And I am listening to The Hobbit via Audible.com.  I really missed something by not reading these in my childhood.

He'll return to his native Kenya [:)], where he'll be eligible to serve as UN Secretary General.

What about Batman, but instead of the camp 1960s approach, us the Nolan / Dark Knight approach. Really build Gotham as a believable universe.

"It is but a scratch!"

Any Bradbury.  M.R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.  And Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (the only Henry James I can read...)

I grew up on Poe.  And I second Washington Irving.  As Richard Brookhiser once said about The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:  "There are bigger stories in the world, but none that are better made."

If you want to terrify your children, there's nothing better than the Tailypo.  I remember seeing a storyteller tell that story in a cajun accent on a Saturday morning show when I was a kid, and I never forgot it.  I never saw the book or heard the story again--until a couple of weeks ago when I ran across it at a great indy children's bookstore in Kansas City (Reading Reptile, if you're ever in the area).  Anyway,

Tailypo, Tailypo,

Why'd you cut off my tailypo?

...you know, and I know,

that I'm here to get back  my tailypo...

A strong second to My Early Life and to Meditations.  Although, have you ever actually tried to live your life as a Stoic?  Who hasn't, after reading Aurelius, said, "Yes,  I'm going to live like that!"  William Hazlitt had some interesting thoughts on that.  Let's just say it's easier said than done. 

Who are these people he is talking about?  I've heard of--maybe--one.  "Disgusting" is the word I was going to use, too, King Prawn.  This is sick.  He should go down to the nearest hair salon, have a seat, and lose himself in the copies of Us Weekly and People.  Hasn't he ever read the opening of Plutarch's life of Pericles?

"With like reason may we blame those who misuse that love of inquiry and observation which nature has implanted in our souls, by expending it on objects unworthy of the attention either of their eyes or their ears, while they disregard such as are excellent in themselves, and would do them good... In the exercise of his mental perception, every man, if he chooses, has a natural power to turn himself upon all occasions, and to change and shift with the greatest ease to what he shall himself judge desirable. So that it becomes a man's duty to pursue and make after the best and choicest of everything, that he may not only employ his contemplation, but may also be improved by it. "

Up above, I said "of course" with reference to Grant's memoirs, as though I just assume that all literate people have read that book.  I did not mean to come off as pompous.  The book is long, and I am only just now getting through it.  (I'm about 250 pages in, and it's over 800 pages in the Library of America edition.)  We read what we can, what we get to, what interests us.  That leaves a lot unread.

Sometime, we should play the old game "I've never read..."  I'm sure I could come up with a pretty frightening list of what I haven't read. (There's the story of the English professor who won the contest but lost his job when he admitted that he had never read Hamlet.)  But that sounds like another conversation.

Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de St. Exupery.  Great memoir/essay-like meditation on life, adventure, manhood, responsibility,  and early flight.

Grant's Memoirs, of course.  Also the letters of Arthur Conan Doyle.  The Jefferson/Adams letters.  Clarence Thomas's autobiography.  Thomas Sowell's A Personal Odyssey.