The first piece of my personal curriculum that I have decided to tackle is reading 3 boy coming-of-age novels and starting one of my own. This is not something I have done absentmindedly, but rather with the strange focus of something that has true importance for my life. You see, I keep coming back to coming-of-age novels about boys who struggle within their teen years. All of my favorite books are ones that I can see from the awkward perspective of pubescent life. The only problem is that I don’t know why.
Sure, I had a pretty tough time in middle school, but everything worked out in high school, if in an overly eccentric way. I always identified with the loners and nerds, but I stopped thinking that those were bad things long ago. Why then do I seem to obsess over the minutiae of teendom. Why do I care if a boy picks up a cigarrete out of boredom or explores his city for the first time? Why am I so concerned with the first time around, when I am at least on my second? Well, in an attempt to try and figure this part of my personal curriculum out, I will be analyzing these books that have left such an impact on my reading life.
For a while now, I have been compiling a list of all of these particular influential books, and here is what I have come up with:
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower
- The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green
- Looking for Alaska
- Catcher in the Rye
- Old School
- King Dork
I would like to analyze my affinity for each one of these books individually in the hopes of find out why they force me to keep looking that this part of my life with a critical eye. I think that I am both up for this challenge and up for doing something, anything to work through this obsession.
