This is a very quirky addition to one of my favorite categories of reading:  books about books.  Perrin, who died in 2004 in Thetford Center, Vermont, was a Professor of English at Dartmouth and a fine essayist of rural life and nature.  This book is a collection of columns he wrote for the Washington Post reviewing what he describes as ‘neglected minor masterpieces’.  Not for Perrin is the review of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past or Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.  Instead he applied two rules in choosing the 40 books he reviewed:  No book less than fifteen years old was eligible and no book that more than 2 of his colleagues had read were considered.  The final list included four translations (French, Russian, Japanese) and two individual poems, as well as novels, memoirs, diaries, fantasies, etc.  Perrin writes in an easy and informative style, and he certainly makes many of these books sound attractive.  I had heard of only 10 of the 40 authors, and had read none of the books.  I was drawn to several which I hope to read in the coming years:  Diana Athill’s Instead of a Letter (which is a prequel to a memoir of hers that I very much enjoyed), The Best of Friends: Further Letters to Sydney Carlisle Cockerell who was director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge for 3 decades, James Gould Cozzens’, Guard of Honor; Philip Larkin’s poem Church Going, C.S. Lewis’s collected essays, They Asked for a Paper, and Henriette Roosenberg’s The Walls Came Tumbling Down, a memoir about her years in and after WWII as a Dutch Resistance fighter and then a prisoner of the Nazis.  Delightful spending time with Perrin after a break of many years from his Third Person Rural.