The secret diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4

Author : Sue Townsend

Title : The secret diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4

Publ Info : New York : HarperTempest, 2003

Call No. : 823.914 T666S 2003

Summary :

Wednesday June 10th
Pandora and I are in love! It is official! She told Claire Neilson, who told Nigel, who told me. I told Nigel to tell Claire to tell Pandora that I return her love. I am over the moon with joy. I can overlook the fact that Pandora smokes five Benson and Hedges a day and has her own lighter. When you are in love such things cease to matter.
First published 20 years ago, Townsend's story about a young man who details his life in a satiric diary became an international phenomenon.

Lecturers' Book Review : "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ "
Recommended By : Vaughan Mak

Adrian Mole could have been the earliest teenage blogger if the internet had come into popularity some thirty years earlier. As a British boy approaching 14, Adrian details the ups-and-downs of his everyday life in a ‘secret diary’, where he shares his thoughts and feelings about anything you can imagine that might trigger the poetic nerve of a whiny teenager. The book The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ might have been written in the 1980’s, but the picture it portrays of an edgy, zippy young adolescent is just as relevant today as anytime in human history. Young readers nowadays can equally sympathize with Adrian about concerns as small as acnes and as serious as ‘Pandora’, which at one point seems to be what is occupying his mind the whole day:


Sunday January 25th
[…]
6 p.m. Pandora! My lost love! Now I will never stroke your treacle hair! (Although my blue felt-tip is still at your disposal.)
8 p.m. Pandora! Pandora! Pandora!
10 p.m. Why? Why? Why?


When it first came out, the book was acclaimed as ‘the funniest book of the year’, and indeed the whole story is written with such light-hearted humour that it would be hard not to enjoy it, especially when we have all been young once and we know what Adrian is talking about, with all its self-will and boyish silliness. The book would be a particularly good read for students, as most of it is written in reasonably simple English, and it is full of useful idiomatic phrases to learn.