Selfish.

113am:

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green. A friend bought it for me as a secret Santa present, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about it- I had never heard of it, and the summary was dull. A book about a girl with cancer meeting a boy who turns her world upside down. Sounds like a teenage chick-lit novel with a sob story ending. 

But here I am at the end of the book, with a pile of used tissues, a congested nose and red, swollen eyes. This book didn’t blow me away, but still, I find myself emotionally invested. There’s a profoundness that I don’t understand, but at the same time, I do. A defeatist sarcasm that plays both in my head and the book.

I don’t want to like this book. But I do. I don’t want to be one of those silly girls who gets attached to a fictional character in a book.When they make it into a movie, the movie will be terrible. It will be a soppy teenage romance about a girl with cancer who falls in love with the perfect man- like a Korean drama, but with white people and worse. And I don’t think I am attached. But there’s a clarity and a confusion in the poeticism of the novel. The storyline is elementary. The thought and execution is exquisite. 

“But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves.’ Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.”

I can’t quite decide if I liked the book or the writing, the story or the fragments of reality embedded in the narrative revealing the fleetingness of life and the inevitability of death.

If you haven’t already, you should read the this book. It will make you cry but it might also make you think. Like 113am pointed out, the premise is pretty blah but I found that what i took away from the book was far greater than the sum of its parts. If you like The Fault in Our Stars you will also like Looking For Alaska, also by John Green.