A few of my professors had recommended the novel to me when I was an undergraduate, but I resisted, thinking the book too musty, too stodgy, too… well, classic, precisely the category the book now apparently qualifies for. I’d been the one to think of the novel in connection with the prompt, but I was still surprised to find that Grendel had reached the threshold to qualify as someone’s definition of an “old” book-almost as much as the book itself surprised me when I first read it years ago. Scurrying to Google to look up the year of publication, I found that the novel was published in 1971-50 years ago. Not long ago, an acquaintance on Twitter asked for recommendations of lesser-read classics, which he defined as “anything published fifty years ago or more.” Unable to resist any occasion for a book recommendation, I began ticking through titles in my head and came, eventually, to John Gardner’s Grendel, a perennial favorite of mine.
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