An Abundance of Nerdfighteria

An Abundance of Katherines 
By: John Green

When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton’s type is girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact.

On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy-loving best friend riding shotgun but no Katherines. Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl.

Love, friendship, and a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke add up to surprising and heart-changing conclusions in this ingeniously layered comic novel about reinventing oneself by Printz medalist John Green, acclaimed author of Looking for Alaska.

-Summary from Goodreads

I have a confession to make: this book slayed me. I am Colin, you guys. It killed my heart to read about a character who I can relate to so, so much.

No, I'm not a prodigy.

I'm just... well, known as really, really smart. I don't think I am--just that other people say so.

Why am I telling you this? Because this book will mean so much more to me than it will mean to someone else. It was tongue-in-cheek funny, dorkily beautiful, thrillingly emphatic.

It was me.

I'm not going to go on and on about how I am Colin or that I think I'm a friction* prodigy (which I'm not) and whatnot. I just want you all to know that I may be a bit biased. But a good kind of biased. In fact, I plunged into this book terrified, because I didn't know if it could possibly live up to the achingly heart-breaking Looking for Alaska. But I loved it even more than Alaska, if you can believe it. The nerdiness of this book made me so, so happy. The characters were fantastically developed; so real, I think I talk to them in my head now. And the plot, while not unpredictable, was intricately complex and heartwarming.

This is a book about math for those who hate math. A book about prodigies for those who envy prodigies. A book about life for those who despise life.

A book for you, my dear reader, to read, especially if you resent reading.

*I say friction instead of freakin', in case you were wondering what it means.
P.S. DFTBA!

Looking for Alaska

Looking for Alaska
By: John Green
Reported by: Juli Helms

Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps." Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young. Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.

Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another. A stunning debut, it marks John Green's arrival as an important new voice in contemporary fiction.
  
-Summary from Goodreads

This book destroyed me.


Every single tear I could possibly have spilled out and I swear I fell asleep crying more and more. Looking for Alaska is an emotional ride that will shake everything you feel out of you and leave you no, not empty, but drained, and then you'd just want to cry more because everything that happened just couldn't possibly have happened and they did and you're just like, no, this is all a joke.


I loved this book and then I hated it. Not because of the writing or the characters, for in that aspect this book is a masterpiece.


It was, in fact, a major event that happens that divides the book into Before and After that had me wanting to rip the book to shreds, because I just couldn't stand it, you know? 


I'm trying to talk about how amazing this book is. Hopefully that is conveyed. But the thing with Looking for Alaska is not how realistically John Green portrayed teens or how the book is simply fascinating, but rather that the messages in this book will leave you horrified, touched, amazed, destroyed. 


I'm going to read other John Green books--truth to be told, I just can't not read them, because maybe there's a part of me that's hoping what happened didn't happen, that John will tell us all it was just a joke in another book.


But the other reason is that this book made me a reader again. I didn't scold or care about the writing technique, inflicting conflicts play-out, etc., which I now tend to do with books and analyze them. No. This book flipped the clock around like what The Hunger Games did to me, and that was enough. I want to be able to read without stressing over punctuation. 


I don't know if this book should be starred. I want it to be, but it destroyed me, so on that account I can't. Maybe one day when I re-read it I will analyze it again, and give it a star. Or maybe it will destroy me again and again and again.


I don't know. But I do know that I am going to get out of this labyrinth of suffering one way or another, and only then can I love this crooked book with my crooked heart.