Great Books for Teenaged Boys: No. 1 - Portnoy's Complaint
Saturday, November 3, 2007 at 11:36PM OK, Ariel, here goes. I've been agonising over this ever since you asked me to recommend you some books to read while the teachers' strike is on. (Novelists shouldn't blog, we think too much and it nearly kills us. Then we come up with these constipated, over-written postings, about one every six months. Ridiculous! I could have, I should have, banged out a list in twenty seconds. It's a week later, and I'm still agonising...)
Anyway, I've given up on trying to do the list, and why they're good, in one go. I'll just try and do a book a day, roughly, for the next week or two, roughly.
Bear in mind, this isn't a list of the Greatest Books of All Time (though it overlaps such a list, a lot). It's a list of books that I'm glad I read as a teenaged boy, or that I wish I'd read as a teenaged boy, and that I think you might like too, maybe. I'd make a slightly different list for a teenaged girl, different again for a man in his twenties, a woman in her twenties...
They aren't in any particular order...
Number 1: Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth. An incredibly rude, incredibly funny book about growing up Jewish and horny in Newark. One warning: Portnoy's attitude to women is very 1969, when the book came out. And I wouldn't recommend it as a guide to behaviour. (Portnoy doesn't really believe that women are human beings, and a lot of his problems are made worse by this blind spot.). But boy is it honest and funny. Philip Roth is ruthlessly, brutally honest about what it feels like to be a boy, and then a man.
Reader Comments (2)
Well, I Guess I'll have to sign up to the public library just for that, it'll be the first thing I'll do tommorow morning (not that I have someting better to do). You should try and make a book a week, because its always good to have something to anticipate for, you'll have more time to think instead of kicking your self up thinking about a book everyday. It'll be a chalenge for me to keep up (don't worry I'm doing this with much love and care), and i guess if other teenagers do surf your website they will keep intrest in the list (you can always hope don't you).
I have no words to say how much I appreciate this, you just made me happy.
Well all I have left to say is thanks alot and I'll tell you how was the book the second I finish it.
I was out last night with some friends, till 4.30am, and I would have trouble recommending a good postcard today.
Hope you like Portnoy's Complaint... (er, it really is remarkably rude, though. Your mother is probably going to kill me...)
Actually, one of the guys I was out with last night was from Tel Aviv. Great conversation (mostly about hip-hop, DJs and Berlin clubs, especially Cookies). He told me Kenneret (my publisher, based in Tel Aviv, of the Hebrew translation of Juno & Juliet, for those readers who haven't been following this rambling conversation) means Sea of Galilee. I hadn't known that. Nice name. He also sorted out my terrible pronunciation...