Happy Friday everyone! In honor of it being Friday and the end of the month (those of you in the corporate world know what that means), I decided to take an extended break today and finally finish up The Fault in Our Stars. I'm going to NOT talk about the book first and just thank +Katerina Shapiro for actually purchasing a real, honest-to-goodness paperback for me all the way from the UK. I had started out reading this from a PDF my sister had sent to me, which is fine, but there's just a special enjoyment that I get from holding a book that I can just throw around and bend and beat up. And I got to finish The Fault in Our Stars, the way a story like that should be--curled up on a squishy chair, savoring the feeling of the pages decreasing from your right hand and increasing to your left, until that oh-so bittersweet end.
Remember when you didn't have to worry about battery life or damaging that expensive tablet while it simultaneously burns out your retinas. REMEMBER THOSE DAYS. The thing is, I'm not wholly against e-books. I think digital textbooks are ingenious because textbooks are a) ridiculous b) heavy c) expensive and d) go through way to many "new editions" to bleed out students' bank accounts. But if you're just trying to enjoy a book--a modest 400-page tale of love, life, sarcasm, and maybe a bit of magic, why would you ever want to curl up with an unyielding tablet when you could have a comfortable, real, paperback?
So, because of the upcoming movie, and all the hype I've received from friends/family/media, I was really reluctant to like this book. In general, when something is over-hyped, I tend to run in the opposite direction and cripplingly under-hype it in my mind when I read/watch/experience that something. Until the end of the book, I really thought that the book was just...meh...any ol' coming of age story, add cancer. But, as the story and the message has started to sink in, I'm liking this book more and more. On the surface, it is just a teenage coming of age story, but underneath that is a subtle commentary on life and the bigger picture. John Green circles the question of our existence and human consciousness and the meaning of life and that whole anthropic principle I'm entirely unqualified to speak about, all interwoven into the love story of two sarcastic, if not ordinary teens dying from cancer. It was beautiful. It had witty dialogue. And just enough justified (teenage and otherwise) angst to make you savor how short life is.
A special treat for me at the end of the book was the author's thank you letter to his readers, and that typical and bio that most books have. I really love it when two seemingly unrelated things that you love in your life connect! Apparently, John Green was on an episode of My Drunk Kitchen (a YouTube series that I find quite entertaining) that I've watched, but of course at the time, I had no idea who he was. I totally recognized his face from both the video and the author's bio! GOOD JOB BRAIN! So my brain is devolving into a mess now, and I'm sure my writing has just gone to shit...
Yay for my first COMPLETED blog post...let's see if I continue.
