The practical reason I’m reviewing these books in the same post is that they are both due at the library. But also, each of them led me to do something I hadn’t done for a long time.
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John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars is as good as you’ve heard. At least right now I think it is– my reaction to it was all emotion. I stayed up til midnight finishing the book, and I haven’t done that for ages. I was a little teary at one point when we were getting on toward the end, and then I read something that made me say “WHAT?” and burst out crying…and laughing…and then crying…and laughing. I mean, loudly, with a bandana’s worth of nose-blowing. I was kind of a wreck until the end.
(I’m not a nerdfighter, btw. I didn’t get much out of Looking for Alaska except “troubled-girl trouble at prep school, blech.” And John Green is so omnipresent on the internet that I have a perpetual “oh, he’ll still be around when I get around to him” attitude. So this was a surprise.)
I don’t know how I’ll feel about the book in a couple of weeks, but wow. And I do think that Hazel and Vera Dietz would be friends, so that’s a good sign.
If you’ve finished the book, there’s an author Q&A tumblr here.
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Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? prompted me to whip out my little notebook and take notes, and I hadn’t done that in a long time either. It was a very thinky book for me. I had hoped that all my little notes would coalesce into a beautiful essay and my life as an English major would come to fruition, but this did not happen. They stayed little notes in my notebook:
A few of the connections did strike me as a little forced, particularly in the part about mirrors–though I’ll happily sling Lacan some of the blame for that. And I don’t really get the end. A way out from what? It seemed arbitrary, albeit self-consciously so because in the recursive story of her family and her book there’s no clear beginning or endpoint. BUT. In the heart of the book (around page 194, says my note), I began to feel I was being shown an intricate network of relationships, reflecting and affecting each other. A subtle, fragile system that was much more complex than literary “themes” repeating, and that did not seem self-centered. I think she got somewhere.
Elsewhere at: