I hadn't the least suspicion that this was the perfect book to read right after I’d completed a long Virginia Woolf season but my reading life has a way of finding connections in spite of me. Having finally finished with Woolf last week, I searched my book pile for something I thought would be co...
I have never been much of a reader of Literature. My tastes tend to run toward simpler fare that I can enjoy on a level that doesn’t require a great deal of thought on my part. In short, I typically read to be entertained, not moved. So, when I heard an interview with William Maxwell on NPR in ’9...
If this 1945 novel were published today it would be marketed as YA. Two fifteen year old boys, one solidly middle class, athletic, and good looking (Spud), the other lower middle class, half-orphaned, small, skinny, and ridiculously unathletic (Lymie), become best friends on the north side of Ch...
This is a rare gem of a book. It is so perfect in its depiction of traveling and falling in love with another country that, not only would I not change a word, I found section after section I wanted to absorb into my skin. Although written sixty years ago and set just after World War II, the int...
