I always feel a little bit more warmly about books I read after randomly coming across them in a used bookstore instead of searching for them. Two days ago, Werther and all his sorrows were far away from my mind. Today, after a year of suffering and letter-writing, I'm standing on his grave, crying with Lotte. Bye Werther! We hardly knew ye...

Obviously, in this case, the book's reputation preceded it. But it's an odd novel, pretty short, half-epistolary, half-recounted by an editor/compiler. I always enjoy those opinionated, dramatic pre-20th century narrators, who here tells us up top that "you cannot refuse your admiration and love" to Werther and "to his fate you will not deny your tears." (Imagine Sally Rooney writing this about Marianne and Connell!). Even calling it a "novel" feels a bit weird, because this predates some of the typical accents of the conventional novel. There's not a lot of deep psychological exploration, for instance, or a shapely, flowing narrative: everything is very chop-chop, one incident, then another, in very dramatic language.

Whether you like it depends on how much you respond to Werther's voice or sensibility, I think, which in turn might depend on how relatable you find him (kind of like Catcher in the Rye and teenagers). I actually did find Werther's epochal crash-out pretty convincing and moving, not despite but because it's wildly disproportionate to his troubles; sometimes it just be that way. And I was kind of astonished and haunted by the climax, a six-page passage that's entirely Werther's (and Goethe's) translation of a Scottish mythological epic, which he's reading aloud to Lotte in one last attempt to win her heart. It's so bizarre and, oddly, so modern-feeling: "Often by the setting moon I see the ghosts of my children; half viewless they walk in mournful conference together..."