Le Grand Meaulnes

"I read this in my teens—and haven’t read it since. There are endless twists and turns in the plot with this person falling in love with that person, and this person going missing. The reason I picked it is because it is just so unapologetically romantic and in a very, very European way. One of the principal characters falls in love with a girl who he comes across in a chateau in the woods, which he then can’t find again. It’s kind of absurd, and it’s easy to scoff at, but there is something comfortingly European and romantic about it. It’s almost stereotypically French, I suppose, in the way that smouldering, serious-looking black-and-white French films are almost comically stereotypical in their Frenchness. As I read it in my late teens, I almost don’t want to ever read it again because I have a horrible feeling, in my slightly more jaded 50s, that I won’t take to it as much. But I just absolutely wallowed in the romance of it all."