Rules of Civility

If I had the time and it was that kind of a blog, I'd write a paper on this book. It's that good. Rules of Civility is the first novel by Amor Towles and most of it is set in the late 1930s and early 1940s in New York. It's a coming of age sort of story of socialites. It is now one of my favorite books.

It's witty in an I'm-not-trying-to-be way. The enchanting story was flawlessly written. It has beautifully constructed sentences which all in all made it a highly sophisticated book.

It's multi-layered. What I mean by this is that the book is very smart. I feel like I want to read it again with a dictionary. But it didn't make me feel like an idiot. I think the book is written perfectly for the time period and since I was born in 1979, I don't know the time period well. It was like getting to know someone. And reading it again will be like moving the relationship from acquaintance to friend.

This novel is interesting because it gets funnier, better, and smarter the smarter (and perhaps older) the reader is. Kind of like the show "Gilmore Girls". The show was funny and smart to the average person. But more so if you actually got the cultural references and jokes.

As I was reading, I wondered who this author was that could craft a book so beautifully and yet so readable? Yeah...he went to Yale and Stanford.