(Three-day weekend...No punishment.)
For once, I actually feel productive. I've done a lot this weekend--finished all of my homework (at least all that's due tomorrow, though I'm just about to start on stuff due Wednesday), finished two books (and on my way to finishing a third). It feels nice to be ahead of things again. I honestly don't think I've been ahead in my homework since...last school year.
So I thought I'd do something I haven't done previously on this blog: review a book. Or two.
Friday afternoon, I finished Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins. Cutest. Book. Ever. Honestly, I think that book was the only thing that kept me from offing myself during this awful past week. No joke.
Quick summary for those who haven't read it: Anna gets sent off to boarding school in Paris for her senior year and falls in love with one of her classmates, who just so happens to be hot and British (even though he's actually partially American). Adventures around Paris, heartbreak, and falling head-over-heels in love ensues.
In short, it's a romantic comedy...in book form. Like Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling would be playing these roles if this were a movie (and they were about ten years younger). It's very innocent in a lot of ways (but not all ways...there were a few choice swear words tossed around quite frequently), but it's not unrealistic by any means, which is sometimes how these types of YA (Young adult) novels go. But not this one. It wasn't sugar-coated to the point of potentially contracting literary diabetes and wanting to gag every time Anna and St. Clair (the aforementioned hot British boy) had a scene together. You laughed at their genuine silliness that endearingly reminded me of me and my friends' day-to-day antics, you cried a little inside (or a little outside) when they fought, you gushed when they finally got together...It's wonderful, and I'm glad I chose to finally read it when I did. I think I needed that little bit of happiness. As you may have noticed in the previous blogs this week, my week was going absolutely terribly, school-wise and with stuff going on at home. I hardly felt happy at all this week. Except when I was reading Anna. I felt happy and light-hearted. There was a point when I actually craved to read the book (yet another level to the I-couldn't-put-it-down occurrence that often happens when encountering well-written books). Friday afternoon, I got home at 2:30, sat down on my couch, and read for the next two hours, determined to finish the book. I needed to absorb that last little bit of happiness that I seemed to be lacking this entire week. And I did.
At the moment, I'm also getting kind of obsessed with the last lines of books/poems (like some people are equally obsessed with the last lines of famous people). There are some books I've read in the past few months whose last lines have duly summed up my feelings on life at the moments. (The day the last Harry Potter movie came out, for example, I finished reading Maureen Johnson's The Last Little Blue Envelope, whose last line was, stated by Ginny "It's always easier to say good-bye when you know it's just a prelude to hello".) Anna was no different: "...home isn't a place. It's a person. And we're finally home."
At several points during the book, Anna struggled with the concept of 'home'--being torn from her childhood home in Atlanta, exchanging it for the dorms at SOAP (the school she attends) and the streets of Paris...discovering that 'home' is the place in which you feel like yourself, and you aren't afraid to be that person in the slightest. Like you aren't forced to compromise yourself in any way. And, for Anna and St. Clair, it was any place where they were with each other.
And I found myself struggling with this at the moment as well, taking Anna's observation into consideration. I'm in my senior year of high school but, unlike Anna, I'm in the same place with most of the same people I started out with in Kindergarten. Groups of friends have changed over the years...There are people who were there for a really long time and now they're not there nearly in the sense that they used to be...and things aren't feeling like home to me anymore. Maybe that means it's time to find somewhere else to live. Then again, I'm not entirely sure I'm ready to move.
Now for the other book, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars (often referred to as TFiOS). FAIR WARNING: Spoilers, ahoy!
Like, seriously, if you haven't read the book and want to read it with as an unblemished impression of it as you possibly can, scroll down to the end of the post, where the stars are.
Like, seriously. Last chance. Stars...
Are they gone? Good. Now, for those of you who have read it/don't care about getting spoiled (if so on the latter, shame on you)...
This book...wow.
From the time I opened the book to find the purple Sharpie J Scribble (the name of John Green's signature...he promised to sign all pre-orders of the first printing of the book) until I finished it a day later, I could not put it down.
I'd come to the conclusion, due to the hype in the weeks leading up to the release, that this was going to be a tear-jerker. Now, I don't usually cry while reading books. And I didn't cry while reading this book, either. But don't immediately count me off as heartless. That's just not how my feelings escape while reading. (By the end, I resolved to calling John Green a rotten bastard...John, I apologize. Please don't stop writing books.)
Honestly, I found myself smiling a lot more during this book than I thought I would. It's a book about kids with, essentially, incurable cancer. They're terminal. To paraphrase Hazel, their futures are written for them with their diagnosis. But it wasn't one of those "cancer" novels that Hazel (and, frankly, Anna...didn't notice the connections until I was halfway through TFiOS) despises, in which a completely innocent child fights like a champion until the very end, but ceases to pull through or is miraculously cured by the camaraderie and loving support of his/her family/community. It couldn't be. It wouldn't do justice to the story at all. But Augustus and Hazel do have their struggles, and their families have very different ways of dealing with their disease...and yet there were some endearingly uplifting moments that had nothing to do with their sickness, such as when Hazel and Augustus (in the novel, Hazel calls him 'Gus', but I can't bring myself to call him that) have dinner together along the canals of Amsterdam, drinking the stars...or when they received cheers from innocent bystanders when they kissed in the Anne Frank House. There's a lot of love in this book, and not just the love that suddenly crops up when someone you know develops this potentially life-sucking illness (Augustus's siblings, I feel, are completely guilty of this). It's real love, when you feel you can't live without someone, like you're completely happy while you're with them, and you don't care that they have to cart around an oxygen tank or are restricted to bed rest or have their eyeballs cut out. You love them in spite of all that, and you feel at home with them.
This is, by all means, very delicate subject material, and if anyone could hadle it elegantly and with humor, all while writing about and for teenagers, it would be John Green.
That's not to say, of course, that there aren't heartstring-slashing moments in this book as well. When Hazel and Augustus go to Amsterdam to meet their favorite author but get ruthlessly rejected...when we find out that Augustus's cancer has returned bigger and badder than ever.
A little background information: John Green worked as a chaplain at a children's hospital for five months, so he encountered a lot of sick kids, really sick kids. That was twelve years ago, and he'd been trying to write about his experiences there ever since. And I have to say he did a smashing job at it. Like I sad before, it isn't a stereotypical book about cancer. There's so much happiness that engulfs this book, right down to the very end after Augustus dies (ope, spoiler alert). This isn't a book about cancer. The characters in the book have cancer. But it's about falling in love and being a teenager and not having to give up the right to be a teenager, even when your life's circumstances have, at times, prevented you from doing so, when your circumstances determined that you have to be an adult and make adult-like decisions.
It's incredibly smart as well, one of the many things I admire about John Green and his writing style. He doesn't write down to his readers, who are mostly teenagers. He writes with impeccable intelligence, making his characters equally (but not obnoxiously) intelligent. As I read the book, I was brought back to my AP junior year English class, filled with William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens poetry. This may have become my favorites JG novel simply because Augustus seduces Hazel with lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Oy vey...
This one screams to be reread, but I don't know how soon. Maybe some time after the end of this year. I'm even surprised I'm talking about it this soon after reading it. I'm still letting it settle in my mind. I'll let you guys know if I think of anything else.
It also didn't occur to me until just now how much these two books have in common. Totally didn't mean to read them together. But I'm glad I did.
*****People who haven't read TFiOS are now welcome back. But seriously. Go read that book.*******
Definitely one of my more lengthy posts. But I liked it. I hope it didn't bore you guys at all.
Still chewing away at Perks. Hope to finish it sometime within the next week so I can talk to you guys about it. It's a book I really want to talk about...
This week and next week should be better. They're short ones. This one may be super short since snow's is projected for the next few days.
Books read: 2
Go ahead and leave a comment if you guys want to...I'm giving you permission.
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