I’d been a religious user of the Internet for four years at that point, and finally there was a novel that brought a sliver of my real-world experience into it. That could not keep me immune to its charms. Unlike a lot of the other stuff I tried to get my mom to buy me, this was an easy sell after she read the jacket copy. It was Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, and I picked it up because of the cover’s deliciously clean lines, cute Lego man, and the pages of numbers and repeated words and weirdly sized text I saw while flipping through it. The book from that time that I read over and over again, though, wasn’t dark at all. And then there was Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and an intense Kafka phase (that still hasn’t really ended). In seventh grade, I stumbled upon Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. In sixth grade, I was reading series books about girls a little bit older than me who were getting their periods and making out with boys for the first time. My transition from reading young adult fiction to adult fiction was pretty sudden. But what I’m getting at with this vague thought is more about missing how lost I could get in another world, with characters who felt like friends, whose lives I felt I was living a little bit, too. Do I miss being adolescent, spending weekend days lying on the living room couch with whatever book I judged by its cover at Borders? Of course. Sometimes I think, I miss the places I used to go in those books I used to read.
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