Things I've Read

There are books I like because, despite the fact that they aren't well written, they contain a certain amount of truth that I found intriguing. Such was my experience with Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.

Then there are books that are so full of truth that I can't bare to read them. I pick them up... and put them down. When I pick it up again I skip ahead a few chapters, but soon after down it goes. Up. Down. Up. Down. Until I give up and throw it across the room. Honestly, if I had known what Nick Hornby's book Slam was about when I first saw it, I never would have checked it out of the library. The jacket described it as "a coming of age story". In retrospect I should of been more suspicious of such a broad description. Every book in the Young Adult section is a "coming of age story" isn't it? Isn't that what young adults do? To Hornby's credit, it wasn't just the truth in his story that made me not want to finish it. It was how well written, how excruciatingly real his characters were that made me literally throw the thing. Can I give high marks to a book I didn't really finish and don't ever want to see again?

The thing I keep learning about endings is that they aren't a long time
coming, and they don't sneak up on you either, because endings just don't happen.

Julie Powell - from Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously

Age isn't like a fixed thing. You can tell yourself that you're seventeen or fifteen or whatever, and that might be true, according to your birth certificate. But birth certificate truth is only part of it. You slide around, in my
experience. You can seventeen and fifteen and nine and one hundred all in the
same day.

Sam Jones - from Nick Hornby's Slam