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This book is from 2016 and written by an academic who still uses “cyber” as a prefix like it is 1994. I am so curious how it will land. I’m in the introduction so I have no opinions yet but I’m very curious to see how highly academic research from a decade ago maps to what has actually happened since.

This book runs a lot closer to my personally held beliefs. (The introduction is about the need for free play which is arguably what my whole certification course was built on) and I’m very curious how he’ll address my concerns for unstructured learning and “unschooling” more broadly.

Well. I’m glad I gave it a try but I don’t like it. It feels like stuff keeps happening but there’s no particular direction. It also appears that about 6 chapters is as long as I can deal with any of these characters.

Immediate response: ok yes, this is funny, like goofy cartoon farce funny. Cameron as a character is……. Not appealing.

Just time jumped and the University proves that there is an interesting book in this idea but this is not it.

Sometimes when you read a book that is building to Having an Important Point, you can see it coming a mile off. I am sure that this one is going to have an ending with a point to make on living and life stories and all the rest but I can’t predict what that point is going to be. It’s so flat that I’m expecting to find the point or opinion at the end surprising.

I suppose that it being about hell, this shouldn’t be surprising but this book does spend a lot of time on the MC’s faith and his crises about it. It’s short enough that I’m not going to put it down but if it were a full 400 page novel, I’d probably DNF it for the crime of being dull. There are notes in it that are adjacent to interesting but the cast of “every man normie Americans” aren’t landing.

So I was going to DNF this one but then I picked it up again and skipped like 4 chapters until the next external plot beat and am reading again. Gonna read the Hell book first because it is tiny and then come back to this.

Sometimes you put in a library hold because you saw something recommended on a YouTube short and a few months later you get something like this. what a premise. Let’s see where it goes.

I am continuing to enjoy being infuriated by him. It’s like studying an old superior ass under a microscope. He advocates strongly for answering questions honestly and to the best of your ability and not pretending at perfection. He also throws out that his advice is for the “abler students” and some things should be controlled for via eugenics. Nodding along and then BANG the fuck was that opinion Bertie?!?

It’s interesting how this book relies on the genre tropes. They sit in the background and so it can hop over things like training montages or “my mom was running with the wolves” in ways that a YA novel usually wouldn’t. But it isn’t actually a YA novel, it’s just built on the bones of one and the bones hold up the other narrative which is a neat choice.

This author picks his main characters so well. The deep pov makes how weird it all is work. The lack of explanation and exposition means it’s all just moment by moment. Which is very engrossing.

It’s interesting to read a well reasoned if occasionally painful account of a lot the old “common sense” on childhood and education. This guy really really believes that children are a blank slate onto which their lives are etched. I am much more of a believer in co-constructed knowledge and that kids are born people not just future adults. It’s validating to disagree so passionately with someone.

I had a little meltdown last week about feeling pressure at work to “clicker train the children” this book opens with an argument to essentially clicker train the newborn so it will grow up to be a morally upstanding future adult.

It’s interesting for a nonfiction on a historical topic to be so committed to time and place with no analysis. It’s not quite written like a piece of fiction but it’s also not an explainer. (I haven’t read the massive second book worth of appendices - 700 ebook pages of appendices) I am both very locked in but also I might benefit from more context and extrapolation here or there.

I will say, knowing where it ends, that the authors choice of writing it “in the moment” with lots of anecdotes and this storyteller’s flow makes everyone look like a lunatic. DID YOU NOT THINK?!?? I am fascinated. I am watching a 100 year old train unfold over months and I’m having a ball.

Sometimes you look at a book and think, ah yes, that’s exactly what I’m looking for. And sometimes you impulse pick up one of the Library Skip-the line loans and find yourself fascinated. Let’s watch the century old train wreck unfold. (Financial investigations fill a “true crime” shaped void in my white-woman stereotype. I avoid true crime because of the misery tourism and exploitation but this? Popcorn.

There are so many notes in this book that are so familiar. The shoes anxiety because it’s the pair you’ve got by they’re not nice even if your new clothes are. The clubhouse in the back of an abandoned car. The bit with “take your kool-aid into the other room” and the house with the plastic couch covers. The linoleum floor of the church basement with all the cousins. I can see my childhood in it all.

Reading this on the heels of Catcher has my mind turning. This dreamy choppy entry into teenager hood vs Holden’s mental breakdown exit from teenager hood. Narrators who see everything but only look at it from the edges and the truth sort of slips in around the poetic phrasing or rambling digressions. I haven’t fully worked my opinions on it out.

Another note that stands out in this is how hard it is to estimate the narrator’s age. Like is it happening over years? sometimes she seems like she’s 9 or 10 but other details (like being old enough to have her first job) discounts that. But that is what being a preteen and an early teenage feels like. You’re a little kid. You’re the oldest person in the world. You don’t know anything. You know everything

This author is so good at a turn of phrase. Just these single unremarkable sentences that paint an entire picture of the moment and the dominos out from the moment. “Two boys were getting hollered at. One for something he did and another for something he didn’t” + “I always cry when nuns yell even when they don’t yell” and like yeah I know what your school is like.

It’s a collection of nostalgic snapshots of childhood and it is landing so well like heartstrings and what not over siblings and bikes and that sort of half-wild age when you’re old enough to be let out alone and young enough to still cuddle up with your mom in bed.

My version has an extremely long prologue about the author so I’m only on chapter 3 here and I am so charmed. I love the short simple but poetic sentences. I like this kid and her secret self already.

Sometimes this book goes Very Meta. The conversation with the teacher about the oratory class and all the digressions. Holden is made of digressions and he uses them to avoid the point entirely.

I am fascinated by Holden’s distaste for effort. How dare the performer prepare? Practice makes you a phony. Actors suck because they’re acting. Good skaters have to practice. Being bad at things is embarrassing and everyone rubber necks at you. But being good is also bad. You’re such a mess Caulfield. This is why 16 year old me would hate you.

I am getting the pattern of the narrative now. Holden’s got some baggage about Catholics and wealth and the movies that’s going to come back later in the story. I am very sure there’s going to be some reveal that makes you go, oh shiiiiitt.

Holden, baby, your screed on suitcases makes me want to beat you with a hammer. The narrative ping pongs between making you really feel for this poor fucked up kid and then the next minute you’re like Oh Right. Hammer time. I’m sure he’ll break my heart again in 5 pages. He’s also the most friendly and gregarious misanthrope you’ve ever seen. Friends with everybody while he monologues about their faults.

Holden is walking 40 blocks or something and his mind running through this ridiculous loop is so reminiscent of every stress meltdown walk I've ever taken but he is EVEN more avoidant than I am so he is rambling on about his opinions on fist fights (one of which he got into a couple hours ago) and there are no paragraph breaks and like JEEZ kid, I have been there, but JEEZ.

He’s such a shiiiiiiiiit. I’m finding it cute and funny but my dude, Holden, you’re such a shiiiiiiit. “It went over her head” He’s got the worst kind of 16 year old arrogance. Holden, you were born in the wrong era, you would LOVE being superior on Reddit like it matters. High school drop out but he’s so sure he’s the smartest guy in the room.

Omg I wrote that “Holden can’t even label his emotions” before I got to the bit with his brother and the garage windows. Like oh.

Also I see why adults want to give this book to teens but do teens ever enjoy it? I feel like you need to distance of adult hood to appreciate this kind of view of teenager hood.