OGIC: Some links

Hi there, I’m just back from a largely internet-free vacation (except for some road tweeting) and am pretty busy catching up on everything, including my blog reading. Here are some items that have made me a little bit less sad to be back from perch dinners and rockhounding.
● At A Commonplace Blog, D. G. Myers reviews the new Richard Russo novel That Old Cape Magic and includes Russo’s Empire Falls in his best American novels of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Find out his other four here.
● Levi Stahl is reading Anthony Powell again. He has some especially nice observations here.
● Finally, the Walrus reminds us that before there was texting, there was passing notes in class. What’s been lost in the transition? Penmanship as an added means of expression, certainly–“I am attempting to write neater this time so I won’t give away my frenzied state of mind,” one of the reprinted notes reads–and the happy fact that these snapshots of Saskatchewan school life around 1960 survived at all.
Enjoy, and eat cherries.