The Blue Hill Meadows, Cynthia Rylant. Last night, I was babysitting, trying to get my over-sugared (because I'm a dumbass) niece and nephew to go to sleep already, when my niece grabbed this from the pile. I was happy because it looked soporific, but pissed because it was so freaking long. It did the trick, though, and damn if the story didn't stick with me. Who knew Sherwood Anderson wrote bedtime stories?
The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley. Even though I like to think that I'm not one of those book people (You know, the ones who blather on about the smell and feel of whatever and whatever and books are never going to go away and la la la la I'm going to kill all of you. Maybe those people only exist in library school and you never encounter them out in the real world. Lucky you.), but I do sometimes fall for a really great cover, and New York Review Books get me every single time. This is maybe the first one I've read and actually enjoyed. The Go-Between is the story of a young boy staying at a country estate in Norfolk. The daughter of the house enlists him to carry messages between her and her illicit lover, with disastrous psycho-sexual-social consequences for all involved. It's sort of like Henry James or Ford Madox Ford, only with many of the subtextual elements a bit less subtextual. There's a movie, too, which I'm almost positive I saw, because it screened at my college, and I remember complaining about it afterwards, but I have no recollection of the film itself.
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