Maaaaaan, I have been so unexcited by this book. A cancer book. With a character named "Hazel Grace." PUKE. A character who is 16 and gets into cars with boys who have been checking her out blatantly all evening and who she just met ten seconds ago. Man, that is... stupid. Maybe she doesn't care about death because she expects to die, but ugh. Also, calling the boy character GUS? YUUUUCK. Augustus is good; Gus is horrid.
I like it more than I thought I would, and there have been a few moments that made me chuckle a bit or smile. Still though, ugh. I'm not super feeling this book. I feel like I should read it though, since it is / was so popular with my students. I should try to understand why.
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Finished it, and ugh. Personally, I did not like this book. I think I just do not like John Green. He makes me think of Nicholas Sparks, whose books I also tend not to like. The protagonists feel really fake and lofty, and I also just hate their names. The plotline of the jerk author disappointed me in so many ways. It just felt... poorly handled. I'd be fine with him being a jerk, but the reactions of the girl to him later on were so awful, I just did not like it. Not to mention that the snippets from his imagined book grated on me with the feeling that they were trying to be really deep by being really vague and insisting that the reader knows so much less than the author. In a word: hipster.
However. I can see how so many younger readers loved this book. Since they have most likely not read the breadth that I have, this could very well have been the first time they encountered such devices. A book stopping midsentence? A character who actually dies? Unfair life? A brilliant author who's actually a horrible person? WOW! These would probably be quite a change from a lot of other popular Y.A. books that are out there (I know because I read them). I have read a lot in my lifetime, however. And so this does not bring to light new things for me as it does for readers who have not yet read as much, regardless of their age. And so, I can see the value of having this book available for my students, as it can expose them to a somewhat different style for the first time in a very accessible and fairly easy way.
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Well, like I said, I read this again for Shakespeare class and man, I love it! I feel like I missed so much! I'll probably feel like this every time I read one of his plays, but man, I feel like I could just go on and on and ON about all the interesting things in this book! I won't do that here, though. I'll save it for my final project on Shakespearean conspiracies!
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