Walter Dean Myers is "Bad Boy"

I must admit that I've recently been sucked into the tv series Dexter and I feel that right now many stories will simply pale in comparison to the storyline of this show. My husband and I have been compulsively watching it over the past three weeks and was thrilled to see it based on a book: Darkly Dreaming Dexter. This may need to make it onto my list once I make it through my summer stack. With this said, I have been reading when I haven't been recovering from my daily distance running...

I picked up this biography by Walter Dean Myers because he's written a few books I absolutely loved: Fallen Angels and Monster. Both won numerous awards for YA lit. Myers' biography is a mere 205 pages. Above all it's packed full of his love for reading and writing.

Myers recounts his shaky school history and his history of fighting and sports addiction. While I appreciated his attempts to connect with troubled youth and aspiring writers, I felt that his book was speaking to two disconnected audiences. His first audience is the troubled youth, who gets into fights, skips schools but still manages to have parents who care. His second audience is for those who love reading. While he attempts to combine these audiences, it seems that he perceives them as disconnected. The conflict of the book is just this: his struggle with being a troubled but bright youth who enjoys reading. It's funny, but I feel like he should have written "the First part Last" because of his self descriptions.

While there are numerous authors from backgrounds different than my own that I've been able to connect with, I had a hard time connecting with "Bad Boy." I'm an avid reader and I have definitely found myself less than pleased with school, and at times I found myself doing reckless things just because I could. And yet, I felt disconnected. It seemed that he was telling the story from some perspective outside of himself which relied on dates and facts more than emotions and memories.

Like most people, I too, have struggled with identity. And I feel that most of us have. Have I struggled with racial issues during the time of civil rights? No, but I've read other authors who have similarly toiled and been able to continue to relate to the reader. Audre Lorde, James Baldwin and Sherman Alexie all come to mind.

There were many points in the book when I felt like Myers was recounting many of the books he read and too much about the books he read. It made the story feel cataloged. While I, too, have enjoyed reading, I can't say that I could remember the exact book I was reading at a particular time for more than 5 times in my life, yet Myers does this about 20 times. It gets a bit cumbersome because the books aren't meaningful to his overall struggle- which is reconciling being a bright, but trouble black youth, who is emerging as a writer, when writing was not an option as a career.

I'd give Myers a "C" for his work because I felt that it fell flat as far as passion and humor, particularly based on the work I've previously read by him. I'm not judging his life, but I just felt that something about the book did not compel me to continue to read. For being such a short book, it took me nearly a week to push myself to sit down and just read it.