Little Free Libraries

 There are three Little Free Libraries within a short walk of our house, and one not much farther away. With the elimination of my commute giving me more time to walk in the neighborhood, I have paid some attention to them, and retrieved a few books. A couple that I have recently read include

• The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith. According to the back cover, Evelyn Waugh called it "the funniest book in the world." Perhaps so for the English, but I don't think the humor travels well. To find it more than mildly amusing, one must have more feeling for the English class structure of that day than I have, perhaps more than can be picked up from books. I returned it to the library where I found it.
  
• The Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson. This is an excellent history of the American Civil War, beginning with the mutual dissatisfactions of north and south starting in the 1840s, and ending with the last Confederate surrender. It is big, eight-hundred-some pages in the hardback edition I found, 936 in the paperback version now in print. I took it along, because I wasn't sure that a man of my generation--one in grade school during the centennial of the war--was allowed to pass up a free copy of such a book. Having read it through, I took it back to another Little Free Library because it was so big. I suppose that an Englishman might have found it as flat to read as I found The Diary of a Nobody; but perhaps the bulk would have deterred my hypothetical Englishman.