The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

This is another book that was recommended to me by my students. This book is so captivating that I read it in one day while waiting for delayed flights from Chicago. The book opens with a teenager named Charlie who is dealing with the suicidal death of a close friend. We go on to read that Charlie has experienced another death in his lifetime when he was seven years old; that death traumatized him so much that he was placed into a psychiatric hospital. As we continue reading, we find out about how there is something a little off about Charlie and it seems that he is a little unstable. The book allows us to experience high school through Charlie's perspective; the loneliness, the stereotypes, new friendships, broken hearts. We also learn about Charlie's unstable mind and the cause of his emotional issues.

I can see why my students recommended this to me and plan to recommend it to future students. If you like emotional stories, or stories about teenage "issues," you'll enjoy The Perks of Being A Wallflower.

A trite coming-of-age novel that could easily appeal to a YA readership, filmmaker Chbosky's debut broadcasts its intentions with the publisher's announcement that ads will run on MTV. Charlie, the wallflower of the title, goes through a veritable bath of bathos in his 10th grade year, 1991. The novel is formatted as a series of letters to an unnamed "friend," the first of which reveals the suicide of Charlie's pal Michael. Charlie's response--valid enough--is to cry. The crying soon gets out of hand, though--in subsequent letters, his father, his aunt, his sister and his sister's boyfriend all become lachrymose. Charlie has the usual dire adolescent problems--sex, drugs, the thuggish football team--and they perplex him in the usual teen TV ways. [...] Into these standard teenage issues Chbosky infuses a droning insistence on Charlie's supersensitive disposition. Charlie's English teacher and others have a disconcerting tendency to rhapsodize over Charlie's giftedness, which seems to consist of Charlie's unquestioning assimilation of the teacher's taste in books. In the end we learn the root of Charlie's psychological problems, and we confront, with him, the coming rigors of 11th grade, ever hopeful that he'll find a suitable girlfriend and increase his vocabulary. --Publishers Weekly

Read some for yourself: http://www.amazon.com/Perks-Being-Wallflower-Stephen-Chbosky/dp/0671027344/sr=8-1/qid=1167673861/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-4307603-4662060?ie=UTF8&s=books

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Running with Scissors is a memoir that was recommended to me by some of my students at the start of this school year. I had no idea what the book was about, but was intrigued when I saw that it was made into a movie. I decided to read it while flying to Chicago a few weeks ago. I could not put this book down! It so quirky, weird and awkward, and at times that I found myself asking, "My students have read this?"

It is about the early life of Augusten Burrough, the son of a withdrawn, alcoholic father and a mentally unstable mother. Augusten's guardianship is turned over to his mother's therapist, a wildly insane man with a family full of mental patients (literally). As we read, we learn about Augusten's distaste for school, his loneliness, his realization of being gay, his first romantic relationship, and the friendships he has with his adopted family members.

This book is very entertaining, funny, yet disturbing all at the same time. I highly recommend it to everyone.


There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. "I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor's office," he writes, "And it certainly wouldn't be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours." There were certainly numerous chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist, and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist's eccentric extended family, gobbling prescription meds and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a pedophile who lives in a shed out back. But just as he dreamed of doing with that old table, Burroughs employs a vigorous program of decoration and fervent polishing to a life that many would have simply thrown in a landfill. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. And rather than despair about his lot, he glamorizes it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a capella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward. Burroughs's perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic. And it's ultimately a feel-good story: as he steers through a challenging childhood, there's always a sense that Burroughs's survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. --John Moe

Check it out: http://www.amazon.com/Running-Scissors-Memoir-Augusten-Burroughs/dp/031242227X/sr=1-1/qid=1167673165/ref=pd_bbs_1/105-4307603-4662060?ie=UTF8&s=books

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

I have been wanting to read The Joy Luck Club for a few years, and I was finally able to. It is the story of four Chinese women who come to America to escape their war-torn country and thier American-born daughter who struggle with thier families' heritage and assimilation into American culture.

It starts out with June, the daughter of the recently passed founder of the Joy Luck Club, contemplating her mother's life and her new position in this group of women. Since her mother's death, the other members of the club have asked June to take her mother's place at the mah jong table. The women request that June travel to China to learn about her mother's past and to meet her orphaned half-sisters to tell them about their mother's death. The book continues on telling the story of each woman's childhood and then later, adulthood. The Joy Luck Club is a beautifully written book that I highly recommend to anyone, but think women will relate to more than men.

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery. --Amazon.com

Read a few pages: http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Luck-Club-Amy-Tan/dp/0804106304/sr=8-2/qid=1167672280/ref=pd_bbs_2/105-4307603-4662060?ie=UTF8&s=books