"Prep"

The first five pages were less than riveting, but somehow things soon changed. I stayed up very late charging through Lee's freshman and sophomore year. Marathon reading sessions are a quintessential guilty pleasure, and now that they have become rare, it's kind of good to know that one can still have 'it'.

Pull of this book:
The boarding school hothouse environment is something I can identify with, (I too saw the biggest number of Shiny People in my high school); having plumbed my own potential for neuroticism not so long ago, I can now see Lee as a sympathetic figure.

A key paragraph:

• This phenomenon - being gripped by an overwhelming wave of feeling that was clearly not the feeling of the people around me...: It made me uncomfortable,.. and it also thrilled me, because it made the world seem full of possibilities that could make my heart pound. I think, looking back, that this was the single best thing about Ault, the sense of possibility. We lived together so closely, but because it was a place of decorum and restraint and because on top of that we were teenagers, we hid so much. (... Yet) Depending on circumstances, a wild fact could be revealed to you, or you could fall desperately in love. In my whole life, Ault was the place with the greatest density of people to fall in love with.