I beat Chuck at something! I recognize Ruth Rendell! I'm clueless over the other three, but I got one! ;-) I read Agatha Christie all through elementary school. My mother owned every book Christie ever wrote. In 4th grade, I had to draw a cover for my favorite book, and you know what, they just don't appreciate kids trying to draw covers for murder mysteries. (I can just imagine what would happen if a kid tried that these days! Ritalin and therapy for life.) I believe the book was "A Murder is Announced" though I think the American title was different. I remember one of the clues in the book was, "Georgie Porgie kissed the girl hiker and made her cry." Bradbury was more homey (the stories made me feel like I was curled up with my favorite quilt in my room), but I liked Heinlein better - to me, he had a wider range of ideas. It seems to me like many of my favorite authors have gone downhill over the years. A lot of them seem to get into a rut, or develop an easy but artificial cadence with their writing after a while. (I have a big list of authors who have disappointed me after they became famous and started cranking out books.) My current favorite for plain ole fun, cheesy reading is Janet Evanovich with her Stephanie Plum mystery series. There's no pretentions that this is anything other than a fun way to spend an afternoon. I've gone through 7 books so far and they're still fresh. I think that as we read more books, and expand our repetoir, we stop having favorite authors because no author can have every book come out perfectly. After a while, we see the faults as well as the high points of each author, and focus instead on the individual books. And I guess we can forgive you for getting into Monkey Flipping late in life. ;-)