Book Rec: White Teeth

I read five books on vacation, White Teeth was by far the best.  (Don't waste your time with Beautiful Ruins and don't ever touch Girl on a Train.  After it was in the third B&B bookshelf I gave in to curiosity and it was a terrible mistake)  Anyway, I can't believe Zadie Smith was 21 when she wrote the majority of this book.  It's like seeing David Hockney's self-portrait at 16.  A sliver of me feels motivated to know there is such genius out there but the larger chunk feels incredibly depressed.  Luckily I have no problem with a prodigy writer, I just marvel as she twirls the words around the page like she made each one new.  It has everything I love in a good novel; strong plot, developed characters, descriptive places, witty dialogue.  Here is an excerpt I dog-eared: 

“If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the purest definition of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right now. With every fresh crunch came the memory of previous crunches. She was permeated by familiar smells: wet woodchip and gravel around the base of the tree, newly laid turd underneath the cover of soggy leaves. She was moved by these sensations.”