For me, there are two things that make a great book. One is when it allows me to escape my own reality - to become completely wrapped up in someone else's world, transported to another place or time. And the other is when I can personally identify with the story, seeing myself in its characters and remembering similar experiences, thoughts, and feelings from my own life. Best yet is when both of these happen in the same story, which I'm so pleased seems to be the case for all of us in reading One Man's Meat. At the same time as we're carried away to a 1930s farm in rural, coastal Maine, a place that none of us have experienced or might expect to relate to, we're finding so much that is relevant to our own lives, and our society, today.

Like Shirley, I have strong connections to New York City. I can relate to White's experience of at times feeling both at home, and out of place, in both worlds. I don't think I could ever pick just one place to spend my time - I love the relaxed pace and quiet beauty of Maine, but I also crave the chaos and limitless possibilities of the city. And so, I love that in White's essays about adjusting to his new life on the farm, it is clear that he has not forgotten his former home.

I was born in upstate New York, and fondly remember many, many trips to visit my grandparents in Queens. Reading the essay about the World's Fair brought back many memories for me - though the Fairs stopped long before I was born, many of the landmark structures are still there today, not far from where my grandparents lived. And reading "The World of Tomorrow" reminded me of their stories about visiting the fairs, of seeing this too-perfect futuristic world, where everyone lives the same life of modern convenience, and, as White cleverly remarked, rugs do not slip and there is no talking back. And yet, mixed in with the empty, artificial rooms and synthesized sounds, the fairs were full of real technological advances that we take for granted today. Imagine the excitement of those first long-distance calls!

In that essay, and so many others, White makes such clever observations about the world around him - from Hollywood divorce ("...it has made real for America the exquisite beauty of incompatibility") to poetry ("...Americans, perhaps more than other people, are impressed by what they don't understand") to our constant need to be on the move ("...I enjoy living among pedestrians who have an instinctive and habitual realization that there is more to a journey than the mere fact of arrival"). Over and over again, I am moved, inspired to think, and thoroughly entertained - even to the point of laughing out loud. I can't wait to read more this weekend.

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