Reading notes: 'A Month in the Country'

By J.L. Carr, whom I wasn't familiar with. I was looking for a novel set in summertime,1 and decided against re-reading The Great Gatsby yet again, and wound up finding2 A Month in the Country. It's absolutely gorgeous: short, understated, engaging, and moving. A shellshocked World War One veteran finds work in northern England restoring a medieval painting. He restores the painting, thinks about it, meets some people, and has some tea. There's nothing cheap, obvious, or manipulative about the book. It would make great reading for high schoolers or students of writing ("The main character has a stutter; why is it so rarely mentioned, and why doesn't the author render his speech with the stutter?"). I absolutely adore this book, so much so that I took a couple days off reading fiction or writing about fiction just so that I could leave it "in my mental RAM" and undisturbed. A local library has an adult summer-reading program where you check off squares on a bingo-style grid, and I am…