Novel Suggestions
I鈥檓 going back to school next month and I鈥檒l have to stand up in front of the class and read stuff out. The good news is I won鈥檛 have to recite the eight-times-table. All I have to do is choose a book that I encountered for the first time when I was a teenager, say what I enjoyed about it and then read a selected passage. Oh, and it has to be a novel鈥hich rules out all that yucky stuff from the Guinness Book of Records that immediately sprang to mind when I thought about my teenage reading habits. I mean, that woman who hasn鈥檛 cut her fingernails for thirty years鈥ow would she play with a Rubik鈥檚 cube without losing an eye?
But I digress.
I should explain that all of this is part of a project in which authors and other 鈥渓ocal personalities鈥 are being invited into classrooms to help inspire younger readers with their recommendations. I鈥檓 going to in Inverness. All I have to do is choose a book, just one book, but that鈥檚 easier said than done.
I was going to plump for The Catcher in the Rye, but I reckon that鈥檚 too obvious and, in any case, most teenagers will have read that already. My next two choices were The Trial by Franz Kafka and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. I read both of these when I was sixteen and, moreover, I brought them to school every day for six months so that my contemporaries would be blown away by my obvious depth of intellect. Those shallow fools! Not even the girls seemed impressed.
Both books have to be excluded on the grounds that I only pretended to understand them then and I certainly don鈥檛 understand them now.
The books I really enjoyed were The Hitchhiker鈥檚 Guide to the Galaxy and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. I rummaged around in the attic, unearthed my original paperback copies and thumbed though the pages looking for a suitable passage or two. Hmmm. Somehow they don鈥檛 seem as funny now as they did then. Perhaps they read better when accompanied by bottles of full-strength irn bru, smokey bacon crisps and an Aztec bar.
Finally I found the book I鈥檓 going to talk about. I remember buying it from a second-hand book stall and I just might have been drawn to the cover photograph of a sultry woman with bare shoulders and come-hither eyes. The photograph, as it turned out, had absolutely nothing to do with the story and was obviously an attempt by the 1970鈥檚 publishers to hook a new readership.
The story is set in New York before the First World War and the central character is a young girl, an Irish-American immigrant, who fights her way out of poverty and into a better life. The book is, of course, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
But what would you have chosen?
