Educating Peter, by Tom Cox

1.  What does the narrator have in common with this young protege? “I began to venture tentatively into the unknown and research the very age group I was most afraid of:  Generation Why, the even more confused and disenfranchised descendants of Generation X.” pg. 30

2.  This book is a comedy, very much playing on incongruity of music tastes, ability to articulate coherent values and thoughts and pass judgements based on world knowledge gained from experience.  Which sections are particularly striking to you and with whom are your allegiances? 

3.  Is this a gender book, appealing only to guys?  How accurate is this statement to you? “Of course, most music-obsessed men tend to have a mental age of fourteen, so perhaps I shouldn’t have found this camaraderie so surprising but I couldn’t help feeling hurt.”  The ecstasy that music seems to bring to affectionados may be similar to sports or love.  Is it transfered in later life?  Or do we keep it forever?  Does it wane?

4.  Good writing is always based in close observation.  I like this passage. “If Peter and I were going to get on, I would have to fight my urge to fill every moment of silence with inane jabber and interrogative angling.  Worryingly quickly, I found myself back in a bastardised version of my 1989 mindset – desperate to impress the cool kids, but trying to hold back my natural tendency towards politeness and inquisitiveness, in the knowledge that I’d be like a lot less for what I did say than what I didn’t.  The bacon double cheesburger didn’t help.  I was fourteen again, and all that was missing were the Mr. Whippy hairstyle, the Campri ski jacket and the Cathy Dennis poster.”(p.47)

5.  Tom is a good study of character and portrays even minor characters with believable traits.  See the busker and his comments about “tapeworms” on page 70.

6.  How these buddy stories usually work is that the characters are opposite but reverse at the end of the comedy. 

7.  Is musical taste really based on knowledge and experience?  This is a question unspoken but latent in the music critic’s sneering at youth bands throughout the memoir.  Do you have music tastes which you now abhor years later?  Why is that?