I just recommended someone on HN a book by Camus. The First Man. I read your other comment about your having a troubled childhood. I can relate. When I was 14

I just recommended someone on HN a book by Camus. The First Man. I read your other comment about your having a troubled childhood. I can relate. When I was 14 I started reading everything Camus ever published. I became very withdrawn. My family became very concerned. I wrote important phrases by Camus and stuck them on my wall. Pretty soon my entire wall had Camus phrases. My dad's psychologist (and my family) recommended I should 'explore' other types of literature. It was a very tough time. Except for me, I viewed my depression as crippling. Yes, I was a very logical child, as yourself, but, as Camus suggests, viewing life as absurd leads to a very morose nihilism. I skipped school and was about to fail secondary school. I didn't care. I didn't excel at school, I excelled at philosophy, but that didn't really matter in secondary. Every single book I read by Camus influenced me and was a stab to the heart. He sometimes wrote on the troubling matter of adults not willing to understand adolescents, and I felt very much misunderstood. Plus, I was also torn between two cultures; one rooted in tradition and another which was very progressive. The Myth of Sisyphus has references which might help to know or understand before jumping into it. The Stranger is definitely more accessible and, for obvious reasons, it is his most widely read book. But the protagonist in that book is a bit of a character study. I think at one point I related to him, but stopped saying so, because a lot of people interpret Meursault as a sociopath. I don't think I was a sociopath, but was deeply confused about the world in which I lived and distanced/detached myself from everything to understand my world better. It's hard to explain, especially here. The First Man was the first book that ever made me cry. I never really knew my mother, and this book is about a boy named Jacques, and his relationship with his mother. It is also about a boy's reservations about living in poverty, and living with a poor family (and everything that entails), which I got to experience very early in my life. But it is also a metaphor for cultures colliding: Spanish (which also happens to be my grandparents' culture) and a more 'modern' one, French (in my case, English-speaking North American). Of course, it has Algerian references, as well. I highly recommend Camus. For those who've never read him, I would recommend these, in this order: A Happy Death The Stranger The First Man Exile and the Kingdom Resistance, Rebellion, and Death I would place The First Man first, but it is a very different book from everything else Camus has written (except his diaries, I guess). My favourite Camus book is definitely The First Man.