The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll

The Basketball Diaries is a memoir by Jim Carroll written in diary form to show us what it was like growing up in New York City during the late 1960's.  Living with sex and drugs as an everyday occurrence, we learn the struggles of Jim Carroll and how it affected his life.

A memoir could be written as a narrative, but in The Basketball Diaries, Carroll wrote it as the book suggests, a diary.  I think this was a great way to write this book because it really brought the reader into his life.  It was in depth and I felt that you were really brought into his life.  You felt his struggles with drugs and sex and how tough it was for him living in New York.  I think if it was written as a regular book, it would've lost that affect.  

Where Carroll lived is where I live now and I found that all the more exciting.  Granted it's in the past, five decades ago to be exact, I found out facts I didn't know about my neighborhood.  I even had to look up some of the places he talked about to see if they were locations I could visit now.

There were times when the book seemed to get too unreal for me and it was hard to believe this was actually his life.  Every entry was about sex and drugs, every single day that all it seemed he did.  He would get caught and then right after, go back to the life he was living.  With the entries getting repetitive, I began to lose interest in the book.  You could predict what would happen before you moved to the diary entry.

I rated this book 2 out of 5 stars, because I enjoyed that it took place in New York City.  I always love when books take place where I live.  I just wished it had more variety to it for it to be enjoyable.