'All Sit in Sullen Silence and Await'

My middle son has a friend, a fellow Marine, who had questions about Russian literature. He asked about Andrei Platonov and Leonid Andreyev. I’ve never read the latter but told him what little I knew about the former. I recommended Vasily Grossman, and he said he intends to read Stalingrad. Previously, he had suggested Michael read The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, one of my favorite novels. This Marine, whom I have never met, has an interest in colonial Algeria and I was able to recommend Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (1977), which he subsequently read. This is one of the ancillary pleasures of reading good books. Suggestions, of course, are made to be ignored but occasionally one takes hold and one’s pleasure is doubled. I don’t remember anyone recommending a book to me when I was young. That probably contributed to me becoming a semi-secretive reader. I assumed no one was interested in the books I loved. That began to change at the university…