The OTHER italicized section

What's your stance on inner monologues (especially those in close 3rd person)?

Italics or no italics? I keep getting conflicting advice and examples out there in the world of literature.

I'm pulling my hair out. My favorite authors do it differently and my favorite writing books conflict on this.

It's largely up to you. There are many ways to do this correctly. Depending on the length of these inward asides, some writers use parentheses, some use italics, some treat the inner voice like an outer voice (ie, using the punctuation of dialog) and some even change fonts, though I wouldn't recommend this. (Many agents have a habit of formatting e-submissions in their favorite fonts, anyway, so there goes that--and its correctness of this tactic is debatable.)

That said, be very careful. Inner monologues, blog posts, diary entries--all often italicized--and subplots that involve perspective changes--all of these, if not done well, simply take me out of the story. Most of the time, when I see a work with multiple perspectives, I prefer one and wish the other didn't exist; with inner monologues, I often think they serve only to take me out of the story.

So, in that case, I selfishly like that they're italicized--so I can easily skip them and get back to the real story.

This isn't to say that these devices are inherently bad, only that that they're difficult to make work.

Two books that use them well--I Am the Wallpaper (where the protagonist's diary is an integral part of the story) and The Mists of Avalon (yes, I was one of those).