Book Review : Paper Towns by John Green

Paper Towns by John Green

"Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one."- Q

Quentin 'Q' Jacobsen has been in love with Margo Roth Spiegelman ever-since they were little. Things changed by the time they were both in high school, when Margo became the 'it' girl.

So when Margo turns up outside of Q's bedroom window- dressed like a ninja- and invites him- "Basically," she said, "this is going to be the best night of your life."- on a mission to 'right some wrongs and wrong some rights' , Q follows.

Having had the night of his life with Margo, Q thought things will finally work out between the both of them. Unfortunate for Q, Margo vanishes the next day, leaving series of clues of her whereabouts, the paper town. 

As he embarks on the journey to the paper town with his two best friends; Radar and Ben, alongside Margo's Lacie, he begin to realize how different the real Margo is from his Margo- "Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one."

As I was reading the book, all I could think about was "where's Margo! What happened to her? Is she dead?". As unexpected as it was, Paper Towns was,...well...a disappointment? *sigh*

I was so in love with most, if not all of John Green's books that it kills me to say that I'm disappointed with the existence of Paper Towns. As similar as Margo is to Alaska Young from Looking For Alaska, this so-called 'manic pixie dream girl' is way less amiable, and selfish. 

What drives the novel is Quentin's refusal to let go the thoughts of Margo, I reckon. The things that got me reading though, were Radar's endless jokes and the metaphors used in the novel(John's really good with metaphors, I can tell you that for sure), the Black Santas, and of course, Quentin's awesome parents. 

Nonetheless, Paper Towns promise you hell-worth-reading adventures that map-less-ly got you wondering what's next. John can never go wrong with educating the readers on how to become a decent people. At the end of the story, I learnt about how each of us are only humans, and how we should not be judging others.

Rating

"The fundamental mistake I had always made- and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make- was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl."

Extras

Book Review: An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Colin Singleton graduated high school and got dumped for the NINETEENTH time by the NINETEENTH Katherine. In John Green's second young adult novel, An Abundance of Katherines, he introduces readers to the annagram-obsessed former child prodigy, Colin Singleton. The fact that he has dated and  has been dumped by nineteen Katherines, "not Katies or Kitties or Cathys or Rynns or Trinas or Kayes or Kates or, God forbid, Catherines" is mind blowing. In order to help him forget about Katherines, he and his best friend, the Judge Judy- loving Muslim Hassan embarks on a road trip to prove a mathematical theorem he hopes will let him predict the future of any kind of relationships which ends up being a trip of self discovery for both boys. 

Their road trip has an unexpected final destination at a small town called Gutshot, Tenessesee. Here, the boys meet Lindsey Lee Wells, and her mother Hollis. Colin then begins to work on his 'theorem'. He believes that every child prodigy must have their "Eureka moment" and his was the theorem. Throughout the novel, Colin undergoes quite a personality change, and eventually learned that he is actually a "dumper". And most importantly, "if Colin had learned one thing from Gutshot, it's that you can't stop the future from coming". 

  

You will enjoy this novel for thousands of reason. The book was written with lots of witty languages and humors. It's phenomenal. The dialogues are quick, realistic and EXTREMELY hilarious. It is also filled with funny footnotes with anagrams that are completely random. Take note that the story is written in third person point of view, instead of first. 

From my point of view, Colin is actually a very unlike-able character as he is self-centered and egotistical only because he's a child prodigy. Which is why I think John Green created Hassan. I have a strong feeling that he created Hassan to counter Colin, as Hassan is as thoughtful and faithful about his religiosity. His existence in the book is perfect. Readers will find it funny how they are always giving each other hard times. Their back and forth banter is exactly how any two guy best friends would behave, which made me laugh so hard I cried. 

Colin is in search of meaning of his life and the Eureka moment he reckon he'll find once he finishes the 'Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability' which I can't help but to disagree with. Do we really have to achieve greatness just for the sake of having the sense of accomplishment now that "our lives' finally worth living"?

This book features a formula which, according to Colin, can predict who's going to dump who and when will it happen. John said he's rather bad at math, but frankly speaking, I think it's a brilliant formula as it actually works for a good percentage of the time (trust me, I've tried!).

Thank you John for making another great book, that thousands of readers can undoubtedly relate to. I now calls everyone 'sitzpinkler'. 

Rating

"Eventually, he found the bed too comfortable for his state of mind, so he lay down on his back, his legs sprawled across the carpet. He anagrammed “yrs forever” until he found one he liked: sorry fever. And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus. Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word – forever – and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage. It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he’d ever gotten. And he’d gotten plenty."

Book Review : The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green Product Details Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Dutton Juvenile (January 10, 2012) Language: English ISBN-10: 0525478817 ISBN-13:  978-0525478812 Hey John, you sure do know how to write freaking sad stories don't you?  Btw, I actually 'google'-ed that An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten for God's sake! Oh well... F.Y.I people, this book is John Green's fourth 'solo' novel, and his first time writing from the point of view of a girl.    "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings."- Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)   Summary from Goodreads: Diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer at 12, 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. It sounds wrong for me to say that I love a book about kids with cancer, because I hate that these poor kids even have cancer in the first place. But as always, John Green managed to spin that magic somehow. The Star-Crossed Lovers: Meet Hazel Grace Lancaster - 16 years old Stage IV  thyroid cancer survivor with "lungs that suck at being lungs". She's probably the best nerd any of you could meet. She is a very very intelligent young woman. Funny? Yes, and sarcastic too. Adorable? Yes. Adventurous? Yes. A Nerdfighter? Totally! "I'm Hazel. Sixteen. Thyroid originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs. And I'm doing okay." Hello Augustus Waters! - 17 years old charming, self-effacing, funny, insecure, worried, and heartbroken former basketball player who has lost a leg to osteosarcoma,   He knows what he wants out of life, and isn’t afraid to stare death in the face as he keeps an unlit cigarette in his mouth most of the time. "My name is Augustus Waters, I'm seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I'm just here today at Isaac's request." “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are book which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”    - Hazel   I honestly cannot criticise this novel in any shape or form. It has become one of my favourite books of all time, and I know I am never going to part with it. There are so many things I want to say about this book but I’m so afraid I might not get them all right. There's just so so much emotion throughout this whole book that it was just so hard not to feel them. I remember reading it in the train once, and I was telling myself not to cry (you guys know what it's like to get a lot of strange looks when you try to choke back tears, right?).  John Green, you broke my heart, AGAIN! 'Young Adult'? Like seriously? Considering the gravity and scope of all the human experiences in it? You have got to be kidding me! I mean there's love, loss, illness, tragedy and DEATH! Come on! "I fell in love with the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once." I tried hard to not get too attached to them, because they'll die eventually, but I guess I failed. I love both of them so much, I mean it's hard not to. Sigh... I'm not gonna tell you guys anything about the ending. You have got to read the book to actually know what happened. Don't go around reading other reviews about it. My life ended just when the book did.  HEY! GO BUY THE BOOK! You won't regret it, I promise! This is indeed an uplifting book that celebrates the importance of life, being in love, friendship and living your life to the fullest. Thank you, John Green, for writing hours of consuming, inspiring, beautiful words.  Oh hey Gus, this one's for you,...(spoilers alert!) 1.  "My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories- it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me, because there's no one I'd rather have..." I started crying. "Okay, how not to cry. How am I- okay. Okay."  I took a few breaths and went back to the page. "I can't talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”- Hazel Lancaster 2. 'Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should've gotten more.'  'Seventeen,' Gus corrected.  'I'm assuming you've got some time, you interupting bastard.  'I'm telling you,' Isaac continued, 'Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interupt you at his own funeral. And he was pretentious: Sweet Jesus Christ, that kid never took a piss without pondering the abundant metaphorical resonances of human waste production. And he was vain: I do not believe I have ever met a more physically attractive person who was more acutely aware of his own physical attractiveness.  'But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him.'- Isaac Rating:  Please let this be the official soundtrack of this book! Because, it's AWESOME! DFTBA! John Green is a New York Times bestselling author who has received numerous awards, including both the Printz Medal and a Printz Honor. John is also the cocreator (with his brother, Hank) of the popular video blog  Brotherhood 2.0 , which has been watched more than 30 million times by Nerdfighter fans all over the globe. John Green lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Book Review : Looking For Alaska by John Green

                                        

                                      Looking For Alaska by John Green

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Speak (December 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0142402516
• ISBN-13:  978-0142402511

This book is divided into two sections, Before, and After.

Before“Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were ‘’I go to seek a Great Perhaps.’’ That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.” Sixteen-year-old Miles (Pudge) Halter’s life has been devastatingly dull. He has no friends, no girls and no adventures, except for an obsession over the last words of dead famous people. And so he leaves Florida for a boarding school in Alabama, in hope to find the Great Perhaps. There, he befriends an interesting group of students consisting of his genius-scholarship-student roommate, Colonel; the witty-rap-obsessed Japanese, Takumi; the gorgeous Romanian, Lara; and the beautiful, interesting, complicated Alaska Young who inhabits his soul. The plot goes with the group’s occasionally getting busted for smoking cigarettes and drinking ‘Strawberry Hills’ liquor on campus, sneaking out after curfew and playing pranks. The plot ended when they played Truth or Dare, Pudge and Alaska are kind of experiencing a little foreplay (despite how faithful Alaska is to her boyfriend) and Alaska starts freaking out and with the help of Pudge and the Colonel, she manages to drive off campus. Pudge and the Colonel then got to bed, thinking nothing was wrong.  

After

..............

Somewhere between looking for the sequel of the Night Angel Trilogy and P.S I Love You books, I found John Green’s Looking For Alaska. “I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers - where you repeat what you've already said with phrases like 'In summation', and 'To conclude'.” – Looking For Alaska. To write a summary and review on this book with only 800 words would be unfair, it’s not enough. So, here goes nothing. This is by far one the best books I’ve ever read. Sadness, guilt, anger, mischief, trust, love, John Green penned these in a way I’ve never encountered in any other books. I read this book in one siting; it’s haunting and compelling in the simplest of ways. This is a story of one boy’s journey to seek a Great Perhaps, a story about friendship unlike any told before, a story full of quiet incidents with larger than life lessons. This is not a love story; this is a story about love. After reading and re-reading it again and again, I’ve decided that the Great Perhaps is not a destination, but a journey instead. And I think Pudge found it within himself. 

“We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken.”- Pudge. I've messed up everything I could possibly have messed up. For the longest time I was wallowed in self-pity it made me stop doing things for everyone else and it made me realized that this is my life, and one day nobody else is going to care so I need to do things for me. I think I learned this because it showed me how short life really is and that I can take control of things and make my life what I want it to be. This book deals with teens in a realistic and important way. The sprinkling of famous last words and philosophies completes the plot with precise dosage, rather than distract. And the characters, flawed as it is are still very human, well-developed and their actions come across as genuine.

This book connects itself so much to me that at one point, I could basically picture myself as Miles ‘Pudge’ Halter. I have so much in common with him, that I’m able to read the book from my point of view. When he says things like “I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn't hate people who watched or played them.” and “I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn’t sound dumb.” I laughed so loud that my mom thought I was on drugs.

There were lumps inside my throat as I read the last page of the book. Because I’d like to believe Alaska isn’t dead. I’d like to picture her smoking or drinking in the barn, sorting out her priorities. I’d like to picture her driving home, and stopping at her boyfriend’s house to tell him it’s over. I know she isn’t fully committed to her boyfriend. If she loved her boyfriend, she wouldn’t have felt the need to say it to Pudge. I’d like to see her at home, reading a book alone in her room and most of all, I want to see her happily in love with Pudge. I want to picture her being alive.

”Thomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over there'. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.” – Pudge. 

Rating:

“We didn't have sex. We never got naked. I never touched her bare breast, and her hands never got lower than my hips. It didn't matter. As she slept, I whispered, "I love you, Alaska Young.”  

John Green first novel, Looking for Alaska, won the 2006 Michael L. Printz Award presented by the American Library Association. The film rights to Looking for Alaska were purchased by Paramount in 2005. His second novel, An Abundance of Katherines, was a 2007 Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His next novel, Paper Towns, is a New York Times bestseller. He also coauthored a book with David Levithan called Will Grayson, Will Grayson. 

In 2007, John and his brother Hank were the hosts of a popular internet blog, "Brotherhood 2.0," where they discussed their lives, books and current events every day for a year except for weekends and holidays. They still keep a video blog, now called "The Vlog Brothers," which can be found on the Nerdfighters website.