There wasn’t much overlap in their reading matter: my gentle great-grandmother-born in 1890-was the product of an extremely sheltered life, and a more innocent creature in many respects than are most six-year-olds today whereas my mother (in her twenties then) kept books like The Boston Strangler on her bedside table. My mother-her eldest granddaughter-was suspicious.

Four generations of us fell for it in a swift coup de foudre-starting with my mother’s grandmother, then in her early eighties, who borrowed it from the library and adored it and passed it along to my mother. I cannot think of another novel- any novel-that is so delightful to so many disparate age groups and literary tastes. Not only have I loved True Grit since I was a child it is a book loved passionately by my entire family. I think it goes without saying that most books that engage readers on this very high level are masterpieces and this is why I believe that True Grit by Charles Portis is a masterpiece. Then there are the books we love so much that we read them every year or two, and know passages of them by heart that cheer us when we are sick or sad and never fail to amuse us when we take them up at random that we press on all our friends and acquaintances and to which we return again and again with undimmed enthusiasm over the course of a lifetime. ) as opposed to the experience of wallowing and plowing through an actual text, and all too often people claim to “love” books they haven’t read at all. Sometimes we mean only that we have read a book once and enjoyed it sometimes we mean that a book was important to us in our youth, though we haven’t picked it up in years sometimes what we “love” is an impressionistic idea glimpsed from afar ( Combray. It’s a commonplace to say that we “love” a book, but when we say it, we really mean all sorts of things. The following piece appeared in Brick 76, and as the introduction to the 2005 edition of Charles Portis’s True Grit, published by in the U.K.

True grit by charles portis