Reading log: The Fault in Our Stars

[toorsdenote]

Confession 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:

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.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/syd___/]

After your last book post I was going to ask you if you followed the Vlogbrothers! Q and I watch their videos together, and the last non-pregnancy related book I read was An Abundance of Katherines. Bought Q a pre-ordered copy of TFIOS (signed in purple sharpie)for the holidays, which we are planning on reading together out-loud. The Green brothers are unashamed to be silly and thoughtful and exuberant and we like that. It's been a fun household activity, which has expanded to telling science jokes at any social gathering. I am looking forward to reading TFIOS, and when I get a copy Will Grayson, Will Grayson. I remember enders game, and even some of the L'Engle books had that similar intense and poignant level of self-reflection, eloquence and wittiness that made them so compelling to me was a teen. Across the gap, maybe those things speak to us then in a different way now, because that is how I aspired to be as a teen and now I am more "realistic" about my options and capabilities.

From An Abundance of Katherines, I appreciated a core reflection about how we can create memories based on their fit with a narrative, to the extent where we remember them clearly as happening the way that we have told them, and then go on to structure our understanding of our lives based on these sense of history. The role of narrative in our lives is actually something I have been exploring in the therapeutic world. Narrative therapy -- where my writing and reading self gets to cross-over into my social-working/counseling self.

Thanks for sharing your book reflections!


oh and, a science joke for you:


Argon walks into a bar, the bartender says "We don't serve noble gasses here!"

...

Argon, doesn't react.

[toorsdenote.livejournal.com]

I haven't read An Abundance of Katherines yet -- it's the only one of his that I haven't at this point. I'll have to add it to my list!

I like narrative therapy, too. I think it really is true that our identity is a story that we tell ourselves, and changing the way we tell our story can make a huge difference to our lives. That was grammatically ugly, but hopefully you know what I mean.

[http://users.livejournal.com/syd___/]

too bad we aren't residing closer to each other, we could totally swap John Green books. :)

and I totally know what you mean, and got to start working with it a little bit with clients last year!