Crossing to Safety (Modern Library) (Modern Library Classics)

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It made me think that part of the wisdom we gain as we age comes in recognizing what truly matters: the people around us and the ways we connect.

Every story is told from someone’s perspective, Larry seems to be saying, don’t trust this to be the only version.Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. Our voices and breaths went up and got mixed with the shadows of trees and the bloom of arc lights and the glitter of stars. For the past several years, my husband and I have lived in a few academic communities while he worked in administration and I worked on faculty.

Of course the closeness of the relationships and reliance of the couples on each other fluctuate over time, affected by world and family events. I have met this type of personality (control freak) at times in my life and feel it is you who are responsible if you let others control your life and daily agenda. Yet, all of these reasons are detailed in the book that, ostensibly, he has eventually written about the friendship of the two couples, Crossing to Safety.I could wash my hands in the ferns, and when I pick a leaf off a maple branch I get a shower on my head and shoulders. On the one hand I needed two weeks for 280 pages which is not a good sign, on the other hand I enjoyed reading it a lot.

The warm shudders I experienced as I sank into each night with this book on my lap, the stunning imagery of diminished time against an unchanging landscape, and the quiet story of academic couples faced with tragedy, makes me certain that Stegner will be an author I grow with this year. Two young couples meet and quickly find they have much in common: Charity and Sally are both pregnant and their husbands, Sid and Larry, have jobs in the English department at the University of Wisconsin. The Morgans, struggling to make ends meet, are flattered by the well-to-do and glamorous Langs’ interest in them. His people are academics, so there is a lot of conversation around poetry, literature, history, culture – all of which they love, but if it’s unfamiliar to you, it doesn’t matter.Sidney is also a teacher, and independently wealthy; his wife is a blunt and ambitious string-puller whose family owns a Kennedy Compound-like piece of land in the Vermont hills. I even went to Florence back when you could just waltz into the Uffizi without standing in hour-long lines constantly being approached by ‘brella salesmen.