Things I will never be: a teenage boy, a person who never sleeps (or for that matter, a person who never sleeps during the day, given my proclivity for napping), a person who reads comics/graphics novels/whatever you want to call those books with all the drawings and dialogue bubbles, a person who will probably never be able to extricate herself from high school drama, humor, and life.

No matter how incredible my adult experiences (I have a truck! A house! I can go to the store and buy candy any time I want!) there is an inexplicably seductive quality to high school life--not the real thing, of course, but the imaginary world of sex, secrecy, and snark that exists in my favorite TV shows: Friday Night Lights, Glee, Veronica Mars.

I recently flew to San Francisco for a conference and a 4-night stay in a boutique hotel that looked like it was decorated by a Manhattanite with a 400-square foot apartment who thinks a $50 throw pillow is a bargain. I flew first class because through some quirky karmic wormhole, I was bumped from my original $119 flight to first class, plus a $300 ticket voucher. I mention this not just to be an obnoxious braggart, but because it is exactly like the forces that rule high school life. No one deserves seat 1D (first row, first class) anymore than anyone else deserves backne, untameable curls and dyslexia. But teenagerhood and flight are similar that way: sometimes you're a size 4 cheerleader with a rack like Jennifer Aniston, and sometimes your flight is rerouted to Fargo and your brand-new Swiss luggage is circling a luggage carousel in Dayton, Ohio.

Being a high school teacher/librarian for the past twenty years has given me some insight into teenagers and also fortified me against many of the evils of the world. I continued to be fascinated by this weird 4-year period in life, and I keep reading about it. It's not enough to endure adolescents for seven hours a day, I also have to tack on another few hours reading about them. The Crazy School by Cornelia Read is one of my recent favorites, combining some of my favorite topics: mystery, sass, boarding school, bizarre psychological stuff, and teenage life.

Protagonist Madeline Dare is hired to teach at an expensive boarding school for troubled teens, and establishes a great rapport with her students, given her snarky humor and tenacity. Despite her good relationships with kids, however, Madeline is aware that something weird is going on at the academy--a student commits suicide, another disappears, and the headmaster requires everyone, students and teachers, to participate in counseling sessions. As she investigates the recent events, Madeline comes closer to discovering the dark secret at the heart of the institution, and only by joining forces with one of the academy's most dangerous students can she get to the heart of what's going on.

Nothing like this ever happens to me at my school, and I'm thankful that most of our mysteries are things like who spilled raspberry smoothie in the hall during first lunch? and who used up all of the ink in my printer? Nevertheless, the high school culture and the students rang true and entertained. If you like your mysteries smart, funny, and sexy, put this one one your list!

Walk Right Back. Or Don't.

Tim Farnsworth, the protagonist of The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris, is a lawyer leading a seemingly ideal life with his devoted wife Jane and their daughter, Becka, when he is afflicted by a nameless, unexplained compulsion to walk until he falls down. He leaves his office or his home when the urge to walk becomes impossible to ignore, takes the pack that Jane has lovingly prepared for him, and sets out to wander New York City until it becomes physically impossible and his wife has to come pick him up.

Needless to say, Farnsworth's disorder impacts every aspect of his life: his teenage daughter withdraws, his marriage becomes strained, and his work defending a wealthy and prominent murder suspect suffers. He and Jane seek advice and medical treatment from every expert they can think of, but no one is able to explain the compulsion--although it manifests physically and has serious health implications, it has the characteristics of a mental illness.

The Unnamed moves along briskly, fascinating for both its examination of a psyche under seige and for the legal drama lurking in the background. But what makes it so powerful a read isn't the reading, but the having read. I put this book down and could not stop asking myself, "wtf?" What did I just read? Who writes a book about a guy who just walks, inanely and dangerously, without explanation? And why? Why is it so interesting? Tim Farnsworth doesn't kill anyone or have any hidden childhood trauma or deep, dark past or engage in any bizarre sex acts. Then I remembered my secret weapon for answering questions about books I read: a B.A. in English.

I'm not claiming to have any definitive interpretation of The Unnamed. I'm not even claiming that there is or should be anything more than a thoughtful analysis of any work of literature. You can say whatever you want about a poem or a story or a novel and its "meaning," and that's fine with me. I might think you're a kook, but if (unlike far too many students I've worked with), you take the time to actually think about what you read and say something besides "that's stupid" or "that's boring" or "I don't get it," you're doing more with your brain than just storing it in your skull behind a sign that says Here I Am Now Entertain Me.

I want to be entertained by novels and stories and movies and songs. I want to "get" them. But there's something even more satisfying about not getting them and being forced to listen to their complexities rattle around in my brain for a few days until I form some sort of intelligible "aha!" That's what happened with The Unnamed. I went from "huh?" to "how about this...?"

My "how about this" regarding The Unnamed is that Farnsworth's compulsion to walk is a sort of metaphor or symbol for all our unexplainable compulsions--but his is just weird enough to make us stop and wonder. But then, it's not that weird. Ok, so he walks endlessly and suffers psychic and physical harm. But don't we all have compulsions, or at least habits, that are less than healthy or at least, when viewed by onlookers, a bit strange? Why do I bother to keep six chickens that don't lay eggs? Or a collection of several hundred rubber stamps that I don't use? Why do I keep ingesting cheese and candy and wine when I know they're as bad for my ass as Tim's walking was for his toes?

There is no magical formula for understanding novels or stories or poems or (especially) other people. But what is magical is reading something and letting it tickle your brain for the time it takes to makes some sort of sense of it; once you've accomplished that, you've been entertained in the best way possible.