Upon finishing John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars there were two things running through my head. The first being that this book was so awesome that I really should re-read it at once. (Which I then didn’t do.) The second was that it is completely unfair that a lot of people will probably never read it. Maybe because it’s so called Young Adult Literature. And you’re not supposed to read that kind of stuff once you stop being an young adult. Or perhaps because you know what books about kids who happen to have cancer are like.
Well, whatever reasons you might have not to read The Fault in Our Stars, they’re all wrong. You totally need to read it. It’s awesome. Like, completely, mindblowingly awesome. It’s so awesome that I’m willing to overlook the geographical impossibility to see the halo of Amsterdam’s red light district all the way from the Jordaan. Perhaps The Fault in Our Stars is set in a reality slightly different from ours.
Oh, and another thing: The Fault in Our Stars not only manages to be totally awesome, funny and sad at the same time, it’s also full of words in just the right order. Man, if somebody hadn’t already done it, I would like totally start a blog dedicated to John Green quotes. Like, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.
and
There will come a time,I said,when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this—I gestured encompassingly—will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.
He’s got a way with words. He really does. Do yourself a favour, and read his work. The Fault in Our Stars would be a good start.
- Book read
- John Green — The Fault in Our Stars
- First line
- Late in the winter of my 17th year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time thinking about death.