Readers don’t consume books. Books aren’t merely content. Readers enter into relationships with books. They bring their time, their imagination, their life experience, their hope for a rewarding relationship. Books bring themselves: all of themselves, complete and eternal.

The relationship a given reader has with a given book depends as much on the reader as the book. How old is the reader? Where is s/he from? What life experiences have shaped that person before cracking a new tome?

All this is to say that Late-Adolescent Me may well have responded differently to this book than Late-Middle-Age Me. Late-Adolescent Me may have seen its diarist as a tortured and hapless young man, reflective of the seaminess of the American underbelly. Late-Middle-Age Me sees its diarist as a drug addict, a hustler, and a not particularly interesting character. LA Me may have imagined its New York as a seedy and dangerous place where anything can happen. LMA Me imagines it as a world gone by, distant as the Gilded Age.

This book may well have resonated with the me of an earlier time, but today’s version of me found it more alien than any science fiction novel. I couldn’t get my hooks into the diarist. I couldn’t put myself in his shoes, and frankly I didn’t want to try particularly hard to do so. ‘The Basketball Diaries’ is a book for the young, for people who don’t yet know what real pain feels like. This book was not for me.

“We've just mastered the life of doing nothing, which when you think about it, may be the hardest thing of all to do.”

This book is incredible considering the skill and beauty of Carroll’s writing at just 13 to 15 years old. Also an enlightening snapshot of beatnik/punk counterculture, addiction and growing up in 1960s New York. I would recommend it to anyone as a literally and historic education, it’s just quite a challenging read - hence the rating.

in my eyes basketball diaries is genuinely the greatest book of all time, Jim Carroll is an incredible man whom lived a difficult yet incredible life and the portrayal of how the beginning of an addiction feels in comparison to the emotions felt during the ending of an addiction was near perfect, well written, credible, fantastic book that although is not for everyone; will always have a place in my heart