Teen Angst? Naaah...: A Quasi-Autobiography: #tbt review

Smart-alec urban nerd Ned Vizzini (author of It's Kind of a Funny Story) wrote a lot of anecdotes about junior high and high school and got them published while he was under 18. This collection of marvelously self-deprecating pieces will feel familiar to anybody who has ever been a teenager.

Vizzini was a nerdy Magic-playing teenager in New York City in the 1990s, and wrote about it. A lot of those anecdotes got published, and they’re all here, from the day he first played Nintendo in middle school to getting into the best public school in NYC to coming home drunk for the very first time to falling in love. The sum total of his anecdotes is a thoughtful and eloquent memoir of an adolescence, told from the point of view of someone who was still there at the time.

These are engaging little vignettes that show the author’s progress from late childhood to late adolescence, somewhere between awkwardness and grace. This is a young man who is privileged to be white and smart and financially secure in a city where many teens are anything but; he’s well aware of this. At the same time, he has faced social and emotional handicaps that form the basis of his self-deprecating sense of humor. This is a very real account of life in the big city for a teenager who may not be exactly typical but who faces many of the same problems that other teens face.

Playground by 50 Cent: #tbt review

(Finished April 25, 2015)

Butterball is a 13-year-old playground bully who has just landed another kid in the hospital. And he's absolutely not interested in telling his therapist, an out-of-touch white lady, what happened and why. His mom has made him move to Long Island with her when all he wants to do is live in the City with his dad, nobody will leave him alone about his weight, and he pretty much has nothing to say to anybody. 

I started reading this book with almost literally no idea what to expect. I was being a good librarian and deliberately reading outside of my wheelhouse. When I walked over to the Young Adult section, this book happened to be displayed with its very eye-catching cover facing out. So I picked it up, read the teaser on the back, and decided to go for it.

It turned out to be completely engaging—at first because the narrator manages to be such a complete idiot and yet display this intriguingly sharp, dry sense of humor, and then because I wanted to know what had happened on that playground, and then because I needed to know why and what would become of him. Little drawings throughout gave me a sense of what Butterball's world looks like to him. This, and the richness, realness, and effortless-seeming naive charm of Butterball's narrative of his own life, kept me right there with him—when being a mom of a teenager, and a white lady of a certain age, might have tempted me to empathize more with his mom or with his therapist.

This is a quick read that reminds you what trauma can do to kids, what their resilience looks like from within, and that there is such a thing as redemption. Highly recommend.

Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite: #tbt review

When I first read this book in 2002, it was still too soon after the 90s for me to realize just what a product of the 90s it really was (all the mansplaining about the magic you can do with a laptop and a modem becomes a little heavy-handed after a while, for example), and I was still too young to realize the degree to which Brite is maybe just a touch too close to her characters in all their just-post-teen rebellion. 

Rereading it in 2013, I concluded that in spite of my minor quibbles with it, this is a gorgeous, highly readable book. The settings are flawlessly painted, the characters have depths that they themselves aren't aware of, and, like all the best haunted-house stories, the plot hooks you remorselessly and draws you along until your knuckles are white and you are tempted to close the book--but you can't, because you have to know what happens next. Very, very worth reading.

Not convinced yet? Read this review by Paul Jr. on Goodreads.

Robin by Dave Itzkoff

Read by Fred Berman

Wow. Just… truly. Wow.

When Robin Williams died, it hit me hard. Yes, he’d been in quite a few embarrassingly bad movies. But he’d also been the heart and soul of some that had been sources of joy and comfort and solace to me. He was a bright light in the world and the loss of that light made my world noticeably dimmer.

I was also deeply furious with him, for having taken his own life. And bewildered that somebody who was so loved by so many, and had such obvious and brilliant talent, would do such a thing. How could he fail to understand that the world would be a dimmer place without him? That lasted a long time.

Finally enough time had passed that when this book came to my attention I decided I could stand to read about him. And it was just right. Itzkoff takes us through his life story, from his parents and their backgrounds, through his lonely childhood and his insecure early career, to the years we remember best. And of course we didn’t know him at all. In some ways, nobody did; I came away with the impression of an incredibly lonely man.

Itzkoff is gentle with his subject, but thorough. This isn’t a money-grubbing, celebrity-shaming tell-all, by any means, and yet I came away with an impression of having at least glimpsed every side of Robin Williams, including the less-shiny bits. But I also came away with an impression of the whys. Why he became who he became, why he took those roles, why he ended his life. Whether my impression is accurate or not, of course I will never know. Nobody but Robin Williams really knew Robin Williams. But I feel like I know some of the reasons for that, and I’m glad. And devastated all over again that he’s gone.

The narrator, Fred Berman, does a great job giving us a feel for the voices of the people whose quotes he’s reading, without quite mimicking them. I’d give him five stars--but he somehow failed to learn that Marin (as in Marin County, where Robin Williams spent much of his adult life, so it gets mentioned a lot in the book) is pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable. This was seriously and frequently irritating and seems like a major oversight. Aside from that, excellent narration.

Mosquitoland by David Arnold

read by Phoebe Strole

Better than it needed to be; though plagued with the tropes you expect in a book about a teen girl dealing with mental illness, there were enough surprises throughout, many of them pleasant and all of them interesting, to keep me reading this book. A solid 4 out of 5 stars.