The Red Badge of Courage is another title on the long list of books I somehow avoided being assigned to read in junior high, high school or college. Decades later I am rectifying this oversight due to my interest in Paul Auster's biography of Stephen Crane.

Crane's language is vivid, magnificent, and at times cinematic. One feels almost as though one is watching a Terrence Malick film, a bookend or companion piece to his adaptation of The Thin Red Line, with the internalized struggle of the protagonist and Crane's descriptions of the natural world and the unnatural effects of battle upon it.

Where Crane loses me is when his characters speak. His tendency to phoneticize dialogue and dialect, abusing apostrophes to indicate how the speaker drops vowels is at cross purposes with his narrative gifts, slowing the reader down to decipher what a character is saying. The rest of the book is so clear and marvelous, Crane could plausibly have written it entirely without dialogue — but that's a squandered time machine voyage for a future reader to embark upon.

Also: Every time you encounter the phrase "hither and thither," drink a shot.