Reader recommendation: Bungalow Kid

Monitor readers share their favorite book picks.

After getting through, and reeling from, Hans Fallada's brilliant, brutal, tragedy "Everyman Dies Alone", and then feeling the almost sublime power of John Updike's prose in his time chastened stories "My Fathers Tears," I was delighted, relieved, to delve, plunge, swim or rather float into Phil Ratzer's enjoyable summer mountain memoir Bungalow Kid. Time has cast its shadow here too in this Catskill summer refuge but Ratzer's simple, well told story brings back the mountain summers for all or any lucky enough to have enjoyed a childhood escape into the hills beyond the city.