In Book Swap, a Reader staffer recommends two to five books and then asks a local wordsmith, literary enthusiast, or publishing-adjacent professional to do the same. In this installment, Reader deputy editor Kate Schmidt swaps book suggestions with her roommate (and fiance) Ted Cox, longtime Chicago journalist, current editor of the news site OneIllinois, and author of 1,001 Days in the Bleachers (Northwestern), a collection of sports columns that first appeared in the Reader.
At the start of the summer I was asked by a friend to recommend a classic American novel, and threw a curveball at her: Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), a social satire of the Gilded Age that also becomes a genuine tragedy. In a 2004 review for the Guardian‘s series on old classics, the author Margaret Drabble summed it up nicely: “Not all enjoyable novels are great, and not all great novels are enjoyable. This is, supremely, both.”
