Great Books for Teenaged Boys: No. 1 - Portnoy's Complaint

OK, Ariel, here goes. I've been agonising over this ever since you asked me to recommend you some books to read while the teachers' strike is on. (Novelists shouldn't blog, we think too much and it nearly kills us. Then  we come up with these constipated, over-written postings, about one every six months. Ridiculous! I could have, I should have, banged out a list in twenty seconds. It's a week later, and I'm still agonising...)

 Anyway, I've given up on trying to do the list, and why they're good, in one go. I'll just try and do a book a day, roughly, for the next week or two, roughly.

Bear in mind, this isn't a list of the Greatest Books of All Time (though it overlaps such a list, a lot). It's a list of books that I'm glad I read as a teenaged boy, or that I wish I'd read as a teenaged boy, and that I think you might like too, maybe. I'd make a slightly different list for a teenaged girl, different again for a man in his twenties, a woman in her twenties...

They aren't in any particular order... 

Number 1:  Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth. An incredibly rude, incredibly funny book about growing up Jewish and horny in Newark. One warning: Portnoy's attitude to women is very 1969, when the book came out. And I wouldn't recommend it as a guide to behaviour. (Portnoy doesn't really believe that women are human beings, and a lot of his problems are made worse by this blind spot.). But boy is it honest and funny. Philip Roth is ruthlessly, brutally honest about what it feels like to be a boy, and then a man.