696

John Green might not know how to make fifteen-year-old boys like him (and to be honest that probably sounds a little bit creepy), but I think he knows seventeen-year-old boys well enough. And a wee bit about sixteen-year-old girls too.

And he can damn write.

My first John Green's is The Fault in Our Stars and I like it. Really like it. Granted, Augustus is a bit of a smug douchebag but hey, he's seventeen. Plus, he and Hazel had been through so much they can quote lines from a fictional depressing novel and actually mean it.
       
             

I like that this book is not really a cancer book although if John Green tried to be meta, he sort of hinted it several times along the book. Maybe because I usually avoid those kind of books, I found it fresh, not preachy, not motivational (I avoid the word 'inspiring' because it kinda is). It's witty, the character watches American Next Top Model and reads a video game novelization and doesn't read Jane Austen, a real page-turner in general.

My 2.5th and probably the last John Green's is Paper Towns. I read a few chapters of The Rejected Son and I hated it so much I deleted it from my kindle. Will Grayson, Will Grayson sounds interesting but, well... See, Paper Towns is a page-turning well-written book as well. A lot of people have problem with John Green's style but I don't. I love it.

It's just that I couldn't care less about contemporary American teenagers.

It's not that a book has to be deep, or has a meaningful message or whatnots. Q is a geeky boy whose thirty-year-old self I'd probably dig and Margo Roth Spiegelman maybe a geeky boys' (or at least John Green's) dream girl. It's a coming-of-age story so according this, it's in the entering-hipsterdom reading-list with The Catcher in the Rye and Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Did I say that I don't care about contemporary American teenagers? It seems like I also don't really care about 1950's American teenagers and 1990's American teenagers (for the latter at least not anymore).

I like the road trip part though, but that's that. I feel bad now that it has to be a book about teenagers who have cancer that makes me care :( I try to remember how I felt when I just finished The Fault in Our Stars. I remember that I cried. I remember that I grew really fond of the characters. I remember that I wanted to write a glowing review, maybe on amazon, if I wasn't feeling (physically) ill. But I remember that the feeling didn't last more than one day. And afterwards I opened Country of the Blind and read it for the third time and felt I was in my comfort zone.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

I still recommend the book, though.
So do the other 120K people on facebook.