John Green Audiobook Collection on MP3-CD: Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars

I avoided this book for 2 reasons: Its popularity ("it can't be that good if the masses like it"), and its main theme (cancer). That was a big mistake. While it is sad, it is also so very human and damn funny. Highly recommended.

But I guess that's to be expected since I lost my Grandma to cancer when I was young and have been chronically ill my whole life. Some people think Hazel is overly pessimistic but I could totally relate to her. Some of the stuff about the characters was a little unbelievable, but for the most part I enjoy his writing style and it pulled at my heartstrings.

I am gonna be a man and admit that this book hit me at a deeper level. I was invested in the characters, laughing and crying along with them. I should have given this book a chance when I first heard of it. I would recommend you pick this one up and read it if you haven't yet, if you are anything like me you wont regret it.

@johngreen@mastodon.social's The Fault in our Stars is the story of a 16 year old girl, Hazel, riddled with terminal cancer. The novel opens with her multiple awful treatments, dependency on an oxygen tank she must take everywhere and use even while sleeping, her depression, sarcasm, loneliness.

She meets a boy at a support group, Augustus, who's lost a leg to cancer but is now cancer free. Amid shared irony, and angst, they fall slowly, then suddenly, in love, and depart on an adventure to track down the mysterious author of her favourite novel.

Any book about terminally ill children is sure to be unbearably sad, but Green's writing is so compelling that this novel will surely wring a tear from even the hardest hearted eye. (Green explicitly wants to reject the tropes of the cancer-kid genre. I'm not widely read enough to judge whether he succeeds.)

Fault in Our Stars is cleverly a kind of reverse Romeo and Juliet, but Green has crafted a story that projects way beyond a mere teen love tragedy. Teen angst extrapolates into authentic existential angst when the teen is terminally ill, bringing into sharp focus the real problem with existence and mortality. "What's the meaning of life?" isn't a well-formulated question, but "what do I do with this life I've found myself in?" is, or better: "how do I make this life meaningful?" What does meaningful even mean? Does fame for important achievements entail meaning? Does meaning have to be public? Is being remembered by loved ones enough? What about when they die?

These questions are explicit in Hazel and Gus's banterings, but the people and places they encounter on their adventures raise related ones. If I achieve something great, and then waste the rest of my life, is it still meaningful? Can my life have meaning if I don't know it before I die? Is having a meaningful death the same as having a meaningful life?

Alas, there are many questions. Are there any definitive answers? Of course not, but there are some pretty good proposals which, in lieu of other more fantastical ones given by religion or other metaphysics, could help some of us face the yawning chasm of the void mortality confronts us with.

Green is as erudite as Borges, but with pomposity swapped out for emotional warmth. I liked this a lot, even if I'm not sure I can bear to read more of his work; I'm still recovering from the acute melancholy I underwent from "Anthropocene Reviewed" and haven't managed to steel myself yet for "Turtles all the way down".

PostScript: There's a movie adaptation of this novel. As always, movie-then-book would be the way to go.

I managed to feel very cold-hearted reading this book. Everyone told me how sad the book and/or the movie are. Yet I wasn't moved to shed a single tear even though I tend to bawl when reading.

That's not to say it's a bad book. I enjoyed reading the story of Hazel, a 17-year old with terminal cancer, who meets a cancer survivor at a support group meeting and falls in love with him. They even get to go to Amsterdam, to meet their favorite author, who turns out to be a giant kind of loser.

Hazel and Gus are charming, sarcastic and realistic about cancer, and so you naturally turn the pages quite quickly, until the not very happy ending. I think I'll pass on the movie, but I did enjoy the book, even though it didn't rock my world.

This book cuts through the romance we build around death and the silent sufferer and tries to reveal the reality of childhood cancer and how it terrorizes its victims and their families. Although some parts of the story seem a little improbable, the story is gut-wrenching in its honesty and refusal to superhumanize the sufferers. In the end, we realize that just living and handling life's challenges as the come builds us into heroes.

Pregunté por un libro en portugués y me trajeron este. La persona que me lo dio sintió algo de pena por no ser intelectualmente relevante pues como bien lo anuncian en todas la librerías es un best-seller, así que bien podría ser un bodrio.

La historia de una niña con cáncer empieza siendo para mí una mala señal, explotar los dramas tan irracionales como el cáncer, me espantó un poco en la primera página; pero a medida en que el personaje se iba creando a través de sus diálogos mi espanto fue disminuyendo paulatinamente. Sus bromas de humor negro no son muy agudas pero tienen gracia así como su historia de amor es dulce pero no empalagosa.

Quizás es un buen compañero de viaje, de un mal rato o de un insomnio. No es revelador, ni hace cuestionar sobre el sentido último de la existencia humana. Es sólo un libro que intenta hacerlo “vivir lo mejor de su vida hoy”. Medio auto ayuda simulando el pesimismo. Bonito. Bonito pa' que.