True Notebooks

Mark Salzman is one of the authors I'd have never found on my own. He is unusual
in that he writes both fiction and nonfiction equally well. True Notebooks opens with Salzman having trouble with a
character in a novel he's writing. Almost before he realizes it, he somehow finds himself teaching a class to a group
of teenage boys in a juvenile detention facility. All the boys are under age seventeen and all are facing murder charges.
Though Salzman is at first apprehensive, he is amazed at the quality of the boys' writing. Last November, I carefully set
So Many Books, So Little Time aside, to be saved for my first read of 2004. But I picked up True Notebooks late
on New Year's Eve and couldn't put it down till I finished it on January 1st.