What I'm reading

 "Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe" by Benjamin Alire Saenz

There is beauty to a book that shows a truth of the human condition. Seas of details and heaping mountains of thoughts create complex and compelling characters. Complicated back stories and shining adjectives lovingly craft a perfect image of a person in your mind. Whole, aware, and alive, a character who comes into their world fully formed. These books attempt to pry open the ribs of the main character and breathe life into each thought for them. Yet in "Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe" the author Benjamin Saenz tries a more honest tack. But it feels like a sucker punch to the gut.

Angel Aristotle Mendoza does not claim to know himself. In the typical teenage journey to self awareness, the grasping, gasping trial of finding your own inner truth, his mind is laid out plainly. Simply. But it is not everything. It is hard to know anything about yourself. People are rarely whole. Life likes to take little bites out of you. Your father's voice, chomp, eaten by the pain of Vietnam. Your brother's memory, gulp, swalled by silence and fuzzy memories of long absence. It takes context and heart ache to build a person in real time and Seanz honors that truth. He honors the pain and confusion of teenage angst and lays it on the page without embellishment. This is Aristotle's truth. He does not know himself.

I originally picked up this book at a conference as a quick read. Young Adult (YA) novels soothe my soul and take up a smaller niche in the cavernous archives of my mind. More room for serious professional development...ha. It had all the right award stickers and a title enigmatic enough to pique my interest. But it languished at the bottom of my bag until I got home and sat on my to be read shelf till a day and half ago when I read this article. It describes in its later parts the growing trend of adults reading YA. And debates the criticism that it is the end of a great literary tradition when adults bypass true literature and head for the kiddie books.

Pish posh, I thought. There are great, life changing, earth shaking truths in YA. I mean, if you poke around inside my ribs I am sure some of those building blocks of my essential self are molded from the words of J.K Rowling and Phillip Pullman, Roald Dhal and Louis Sachar. I pulled those words and lessons around my ears and build my teenage context with a healthy mix of my own heart ache and theirs.

So the minute I read the last page of this book, I found my fingers leaping for the keyboard because this book is important or will be to many someones. It takes the universal secret that no one is whole and proves it. Each of us, finds fuzzy, scary, uncomfortable places within ourselves. But we don't have to be afraid.