The taste of leaving: Paper Towns

Title: Paper Towns
Author: John Green
My Rating: 4.4/5

"Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life—dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows.  After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues—and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew."

Despite the high rating, I have mixed feelings for this book. And by mixed feelings I mean I'm not a fan of the relatively slow start of the story. I understand that the night Margo and Quentin spend together in the beginning of the book has a big significance later in the plot, and the things they did that night is great and all, but at some point it just didn't really engage me anymore. 

So I had a slow, growing-to-love kind of relationship with this book. But as the story carried on, I became completely engrossed in it. Sorry about that French worksheet that I never turned in, Madame . The thing about John Green is that, as a YA author, he never tries to talk down to his readers. He has these amazing insights into coming of age, and sometimes these insights require some thinking on the reader's part, and he doesn't dumb it down for us. It is in this rewarding thinking that I often find myself transformed into some new level of self-awareness and understanding of the world. It's truly incredible, especially when the story is not only philosophical but also very frequently hilarious (*SPOILERS*: oh my god Ben's little problem on their "graduation road trip" oh my god I just laughed to death at one in the morning while my roommate slept soundly on the bed next to mine).

The ending is especially enlightening, and it totally made me cry. Dang it, the entire read I was like wow I didn't cry to this one isn't that something now--come ending and I am oh so screwed. If I explain why I was so moved by the ending, I will probably totally ruin the story for you, so I am going to be a nice person and not do that. I am going to talk about a few quotes from the book that really got me.

Timeout. Before getting to the quotes, I forgot to tell y'all something: I am currently a high school senior, 61 short short short short days away from graduation. I have people (okay, one person especially) that I hold very dearly to my heart, and the thought of having to say goodbye--maybe forever--just breaks my heart. So this book was the perfect, spot-on, just-in-time remedy for me.

Now, back to those lovely quotes:

"Doing stuff never feels as good as you hope it will feel." (77)

"She raised on leg and gave me all her weight as I dipped her. She either trusted me or wanted to fall." (79)

"It's a metaphor for adolescence: writing in a language--adulthood--you can't comprehend, using an alphabet--mature social interaction--you can't recognize." (86)

"Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl." (199)

"It is so hard to leave--until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world." (229)

"Marco knows the secret of leaving, the secret I have only just now learned: leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you." (234)

"But there she is, and I am watching her through the Plexiglas, and she looks like Margo Roth Spiegelman, this girl I have known since I was two--this girl who was an idea that I loved." (282)

xx
Vanessa :]


EDIT:
Forgot to say: surprisingly I liked this book more than Looking For Alaska.

The town was paper, the memories were not.

Title: Paper Towns
Author: John Green
Rating: 3.9/5.0

"Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life—dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows.  After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues—and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew."

I really wanted to fall in complete love with this book like I did when I read The Fault in Our Stars. Unfortunately, I did not. It's not that it's a bad book. Don't get me wrong! But it isn't as brilliant  as some of his other work.

To like this book you have to look deep inside of you. I'm a senior in high school. I've got less than two months until I graduate. So this book hit me at a perfect time in my life.

John Green does something that John Green in best at. Understanding teenagers better than teenagers understand themselves. Green has this uncanny ability to create something prolific from something so minuscule.

Now maybe I didn't like this book as much because it kind of lost me in the middle. Maybe it's because it didn't make me cry. But it made me think. It made me think about what was important in my life. About how I looked at my life, and what I was going to do with it.

Looking back at it, the middle (where I got lost) was probably the most important part. It's the part where the main character begins to realize who he is. You see Quentin realizes that all the people in his life are very different from what he believes them to be. Not because they're leading him on, but because he has a mental picture of who his friends are. While it's not completely incorrect, it's not perfectly accurate.

We see people in our lives how we want to see them. We do things because we believe that we need to do them. We spend every day of our lives planning for the future. And as soon as that future gets here, we begin planning ahead for the next day.

I'd really like to write a longer review of this book. But there's not a lot to say. If I were to try to paraphrase the 332 pages of this book I would never do it justice. Because what I get out of it will be completely different than what you reading this right now ever would. This book draws from the experiences of the reader. You project your own feelings into this book, and that's what makes it so great.

[Source: Goodreads, DeviantArt]

Music Monday

It's monday again!!! And I just started reading Paper Towns by John Green, so I thought I'd do a book theme mix.

a paper town for a paper girl from Mewtilation on 8tracks Radio.

"Some infinities are bigger than others:" The Fault In Our Stars

Title: the Fault In Our Stars

Author: John Green

My rating: 5/5

“Diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer at 13, Hazel was prepared to die until, at 14, a medical miracle shrunk the tumours in her lungs... for now. 

Two years post-miracle, sixteen-year-old Hazel is post-everything else, too; post-high school, post-friends and post-normalcy. And even though she could live for a long time (whatever that means), Hazel lives tethered to an oxygen tank, the tumours tenuously kept at bay with a constant chemical assault. 

Enter Augustus Waters. A match made at cancer kid support group, Augustus is gorgeous, in remission, and shockingly to her, interested in Hazel. Being with Augustus is both an unexpected destination and a long-needed journey, pushing Hazel to re-examine how sickness and health, life and death, will define her and the legacy that everyone leaves behind.”

(Announcement: This is an older review from November 2012. It's been on my Goodreads account for a while, so I thought I should post it here, for consistency)

John Green. Oh John Green. Why must you write something so deep and tearjerking in such a believable way. After devouring the book in two sleepless (and foodless) days I am just devastated by the time I reached Acknowledgements. 

I am going to get my only tiniest complaint about the story out of the way, and then I'm going to quote my favorite (sometimes very hilarious and very painful) lines from the story, because I can't form words to praise it.

K. I think the only thing I'm gonna be nit picky about is the use of language. I totally understand that given the stuff Hazel and Augustus have gone through in their life, they will inevitably have some deep thoughts, and will exchange meaningful ideas more often than regular teenagers. But then again, sometimes the way they talk sounds a tad too processed--it's almost only good-looking on paper, but when you try to read it out loud it sounds way too formal, and pretentious, even, if I may. (But I'm not implying that I don't enjoy the good-looking-ness of these words and thoughts on paper. To be honest, I'm blown away by most of them.)

So that is that. Now let's move on and talk about my favorite quotations:

“That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.”

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”

“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”

“And in freedom, most people find sin.”

“Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.”

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”

“I love you present tense.”

These words pretty much sum up my feelings. I have never cried so much for any book (I did cry almost as much for Perks of Being a Wallflower, the MOVIE. the book I cried for too, but not half as much.)

And the ending just. I know it's the only possible way to end the book, but just. I don't know if I'd rather read until Hazel is dead or what. Hard to decide.

Bravo, John Green. Bravo.

xx
Vanessa :]

Music Companion to TFioS

Something to read the Fault in Our Stars to:
http://8tracks.com/ness428/omnis-cellula-e-cellula

(Sara this is especially for you.)

xx
Vanessa

i'm smiling uncontrollably while reading TFioS...and people are starting to stare.

stop it augustus waters. stop it.

Things to ponder...

As you probably know, I've just begun reading The Fault In Our Stars. I'm on page four. And it's already fantastic. 

"Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)"

That is the most touching, deep, and meaningful thought that I've read in a long time. It gets me thinking. As humans, in fact, as living things, we fear death. We try to avoid it (usually). But when you think about it, everything you do, everyday you wake up is one step closer to death. Now I understand I'm being all depressing, but I swear I have a point. While, yes, every day you are closer to death and that's a saddening thought, every day is also another day of life. Another day to enjoy the world. 

If everything is a side effect of dying, then that fantastic night at the movies you had with your crush was a side effect of dying. The time you spent laughing with your best friend until neither one of you could breathe was a side effect of dying. Your graduation, your marriage, your children. They are all a side effect of dying. 

Life is a side effect of dying.

It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's mixture of good things and bad things. The good things don't always make the bad things better, but then again, the bad things don't always spoil the good things or make them unimportant. It's a journey, a great adventure that we must experience to reach our goal. The great parts of the story are the moments leading to the ending. 

The side effects of dying. 

On a more uplifting note...

This just came. Yeah. I'm excited too.