Love Story; by Erich Segal.

Good read, racy read, and quitessential college love story set in Harvard, with rich preppy guy falling for smart poor girl.

This book - and film - was so much a cult, that not only usual contingent of admirers of all things western, but even the most extreme of the self proclaimed leftists amongst our colleagues were all goofy over it - so much so any girl who looked remotely like the girl in the film was surrounded by men going gaga for little reason they could truthfully ascribe.

When the film and the book eventually lost its cult status, those admirers not only faded away, they soemtimes turned into severe critics, baffling the poor unsuspecting girl, who thought she had them admiring her truly for her virtues, which was only a convenient front for them to justify themselves. She would not have believed it, however, so no one told her. Most guys would have been too ashamed to even admit it to themselves much less inform her.

And the other important difference of course was that the film set a standard that was very romantic - for one half of the world, with the other half struggling to match it forever since it was impossible to really match it.

Think about it - not only a girl had to be smart and independent minded and cute enough to attract a rich and stupid guy but then had to sacrifice all her wishes and dreams, or at any rate put them on hold, while he went to graduate school and she worked to make it happen - to put food on table, pay rent, and still be sexy and independent.

Not that most women did not do attempt to make that struggle - in US, at any rate, where it was possible at all - but then came the whammy of the last needed step the girl in the story prescribed to be the idol, the icon, the forever unattainable unmatched one. She went ill with an incurable disease and died.

This is where most normal ones failed to measure up. They kept on living, very inconveniently, so the guys had to go through other steps to find the domestic wives that the independent strong first love did not transform into. Or they had children and Love Story had not prescribed how the guy should transform. Trouble. And struggle for the uncomprehending women about what exactly they had not struggled to do if they had lacked it in the first place, which they had not.

The girl in the book had no such problems - and while the cult status of the book is no longer hot, it is now set in concrete, with a stone on top.