Reading log: The Fault in Our Stars
Jan. 22nd, 2012 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
toorsdenoteConfession time: I've been following the Vlogbrothers on YouTube since 2007. It's a video blog done collaboratively by two brothers and definitely aimed at a more teenagery audience than me, but I enjoy their videos.
One of the brothers is a fairly successful author of young adult fiction, and a couple weeks ago he released his latest novel, The Fault in Our Stars. The book is about a 16-year-old girl with terminal cancer and opens on the day that she meets a hot, albeit one-legged, 17-year-old boy at cancer support group.
It's definitely a much more entertaining book than that suggests, though, and contains many more madcap adventures than you'd expect a terminally ill girl to be having.
The teenagers in Green's novel definitely seem a little too smart and eloquent and witty to me -- I'm sure I wasn't as erudite as Hazel or Augustus when I was 16. Then again, I remember once reading Orson Scott Card defending Ender's Game against the same charge; he said (and I'm paraphrasing) that it always seems to be adults who feel the teenager characters are unrealistically smart; teenagers themselves find them to ring true. When I read that as a teenager I nodded my head sagely. So maybe all this really says is that the perennial gap of understanding between teenagers and non-teenagers hasn't gone away since I crossed to the grownup side.
My favorite quote from the book is this one, in which the narrator is remembering a memorable event:
Perhaps it doesn't mean as much out of context, but that really rang true to me. I have always been too easily derailed by nostalgia and what-ifs; it's easy to fall into thinking that life would be perfect if only x occurred. But really, when x occurs, all we end up doing is wishing it would happen slightly differently or would happen again or would keep happening forever. Yad aniccam tam dukkham -- what is impermanent is unsatisfactory. And everything is impermanent.
One of the brothers is a fairly successful author of young adult fiction, and a couple weeks ago he released his latest novel, The Fault in Our Stars. The book is about a 16-year-old girl with terminal cancer and opens on the day that she meets a hot, albeit one-legged, 17-year-old boy at cancer support group.
It's definitely a much more entertaining book than that suggests, though, and contains many more madcap adventures than you'd expect a terminally ill girl to be having.
The teenagers in Green's novel definitely seem a little too smart and eloquent and witty to me -- I'm sure I wasn't as erudite as Hazel or Augustus when I was 16. Then again, I remember once reading Orson Scott Card defending Ender's Game against the same charge; he said (and I'm paraphrasing) that it always seems to be adults who feel the teenager characters are unrealistically smart; teenagers themselves find them to ring true. When I read that as a teenager I nodded my head sagely. So maybe all this really says is that the perennial gap of understanding between teenagers and non-teenagers hasn't gone away since I crossed to the grownup side.
My favorite quote from the book is this one, in which the narrator is remembering a memorable event:
I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.
Perhaps it doesn't mean as much out of context, but that really rang true to me. I have always been too easily derailed by nostalgia and what-ifs; it's easy to fall into thinking that life would be perfect if only x occurred. But really, when x occurs, all we end up doing is wishing it would happen slightly differently or would happen again or would keep happening forever. Yad aniccam tam dukkham -- what is impermanent is unsatisfactory. And everything is impermanent.
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