I think I love Tobias Wolff. His words are literary yet easy to digest, characters complex and familiar. And the fact that our unnamed narrator, and most his friends, are aspiring writers helps me relate more to their worries. 
 Both Robert Frost and Ayn Rand are visiting writers to the school, which throw the boys into a literary tizzy. The Rand portion cracked me up; I literally laughed out loud when one of the students asked, with his hand waving anxiously in the air, "Miss Rand, who is John Galt?" This also inspired me to finally invest in The Fountainhead, as the narrator read it four times in a row. These young writers brought me back to my own hopeful childhood, when it wasn't even an option that I wouldn't write. I was right there with them. 
 Once the narrator left school, though, I had some trouble. It seems like a completely different story at the end, with him trying to stay afloat in the world. There's a huge time jump with no explanation. I was a little disjointed. 
 But I still kind of love Tobias Wolff.