Oh, the Places You'll Go!
Dr. Seuss's last book, and a surprisingly unsentimental map of the Waiting Place, the Lurch, and the slump you are supposed to get out of.
The graduation-gift reading of this book is the wrong one. It is not a congratulations card — most of its pages are about failure modes.
The Waiting Place is the best thing in it: a whole population stuck waiting for a phone to ring or a better break or a Yes-or-No, and the book's verdict is that this is the one place you must not stay. Then the slump, the Lurch, the unslumping that is not easily done, and the honest arithmetic at the end — 98¾ percent guaranteed, which is not a hundred.
It stays on the list because it is the shortest correct statement of the thing: the failure mode is not losing, it is waiting.
Neighborhood