i am currently reading the most amazing book, Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe. his prose is captivating and unlike anything i've ever read before- a cross between james joyce and william faulkner. it's a slow read but worth every second. i highly recommend it to any literary aficionado, especially if you're from the South or appreciate Southern culture.

here's just one amazing excerpt where Eugene, who up until now has simply scrawled lines and called them letters, learns how to write and thus unlocks the mystery and the power of language...

"The line of life, that beautiful developing structure of language that he saw flowing from his comrade's pencil, but the knot in him that all instruction had failed to do, and instantly he seized the pencil, and wrote the words in letters fairer and finer than his friend's. And he turned, with a cry in his throat, to the next page, and copied it without hesitation, and the next, the next. They looked at each oter a moment with that clear wonder by which children accept miracles, and they never spoke of it again."