Opening paragraphs...........

I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.  It seemed more sedate than I remembered it, more perpendicular and strait-laced, with narrow windows and shinier woodwork, as though a coat of varnish had been put over everything for better preservation.  But, of course, fifteen years before there had been a war going on.  Perhaps the school wasn't as well kept up in those days; perhaps varnish, along with everything else, had gone to war.
-John Knowles, A Separate Peace

With our recent move, I came upon a number of books that had been hidden in the nether reaches of the book shelves.  My slightly defaced 1966 paper-back edition of A Separate Peace was such a book.  If memory serves it seems there was this great trilogy (A Separate Peace, Lord of the Flies, and Catcher In The Rye) of "coming of age" novels my generation had to read in (+/-) the eighth grade.  Judging by the underlining and ink-pen margin notes, we were expected to gain much knowledge and insight from Knowles's novel.  Judging from the defacement of the front and back covers, there was some resistance to that expectation.  I just remember not liking those three books very much.  I liked reading, but my taste ran more to Franklin W. Dixon's Hardy Boys, Wilfred McCormick's Bronc Burnett series, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and Donald Cooke's The Silver Horn of Robin Hood.  Maybe these books were less serious than the big, and "important," trilogy, but they were way more fun to read, and they still offered lessons to be learned.  Call me shallow.