“the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / but in ourselves”

January 16, 2012 | Filed Under Books | Leave a Comment 

I need to write something down.

I need to articulate something, but I can’t.

The fact is that I can’t even look at the book, let alone look through its pages without feeling a tear or a hundred wanting to break through.

I bought it without knowing what it was about. I sort of just wanted a signed book by John Green, and I knew it would be, at the very least, really quite good. When I finally got my hands on it, and opened the first few pages to see the dedication, I knew I was in some serious trouble. When I read the brief synopsis in the jacket, I was seriously contemplating just putting it back on my shelf and not bothering.

I’m a crier. I’m a most particular crier when it comes to stories about degenerative diseases vs. families/friends. Again, why I didn’t just put it back on my shelf, I really don’t know.

I consumed the book in one extended sitting. The last 100 pages were spent in an alternating state of tears slowly running down my face or uncontrollable, hysterical sobs. Seriously, books make me cry a lot, but this was just ridiculous.

Not only is the story well-written and involving and true in an absolutely immense and rare way, I seem to lately have contracted a new way of taking in information that left me completely open and vulnerable to this story.

One of my favourite quotes ever is from the TV show Castle where Nathan Fillion’s character asks his love-interest (seriously, if they don’t get it on this season, I’m sending a horse head to the script writers) how you know when you’re in love. She answers simply “all the songs make sense”.

Not only are all the songs ten times more poignant now, all films, all books, all stories in general, tend to hit me in a much more direct way now, as if the path to my heart is now lit with flashing neon signs.

Somewhere along the way the main characters stopped being Hazel and Augustus and became me and my love. I couldn’t take it. It was too real.

When there were only thirty or so pages left, he came down to check on me, and all I could do was cling to him like a koala with vertigo, and it took all my will-power not to beg him with all I had to never ever die.

John Green, I love and adore you and what you do, but I can never ever re-read this book.

But thank you.

“he and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain”

January 14, 2011 | Filed Under Books | 2 Comments 

I first heard of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen through a blog post written by the brilliant Heather of the Fuel/Friends Music Blog. I don’t think I’ve ever been more immediately intrigued by a book than I was then, and I knew I just had to run out and buy it. So I did.

The title quote of this post is one of the most descriptive quotes from the book if you’re trying to sum the story up in a sentence. From the first page it’s just filled with so much slow-moving pain, that it’s sometimes difficult to see that it’s all fuelled by intense love, but still, it is there. The story follows a family and the changes and evolutions it inevitably will go through over several decades of living and loving.

I don’t want to go in to anything specific about the plot, because I so want someone to read this and go out and read this book and discover it for themselves, and if they had even an inkling of what would take place plot-wise, I think some of the magic might be lost. Not that the plot is really important at all. I think if the specific events and actions taking place were to be replaced with others similar to them, the story would still work. It is the underlying themes of family and love and how you can love someone so, so much, and yet not be able to help yourself from wearing them down completely and semi-deliberately destroying them that really make this book.

It was kindof a slow read, which is unusual for me, but in this case, it’s actually not a sign of poor writing or a boring plot. Quite the contrary. You get the sense that the author has spent years and years meticulously writing and agonising over how best to portray the story he had in mind. Every sentence is important and completely serves the mood and the emotions that need to be conveyed on each page, and no word feels wasted.

“However little he’d ever known how to live, he’d never known less than he knew now”
Whenever someone writes or says something that so completely hits home for me, I usually get a little sceptical. Who the hell are they and where did they find that window into my soul? But then I normally calm down, maybe cry for a second or two, and then just sit in awe and wonderment that someone can have such insight and also the ability to put words to this enlightened knowledge. It’s all the more credit to Franzen that this book held several such moments for me, including one that describe me and my life more heartbreakingly accurately than most anything I’ve ever come across:
“and it occurred to her that she was a person who dwelt in fantasies with essentially no relation to reality”

Even though it was tough to get through at times, I’m so grateful that I made the effort, and it was such a rewarding experience. The almost completely all-encompassing portrait of a family the book gives us is something you probably won’t come across anywhere else. Think about your own family, do you even know all of their stories as well as you could? I would guess not.

(I’m going to try really hard to write about every single book I read (for pleasure, I won’t bore you with descriptions of books about election results and such, I promise) this year, because I so easily just forget about the ones I read, and this might be a way to help that. I have a couple more to catch up on that I’ve read so far this year, and then I’ll hopefully write something tiny and boring about each one I read throughout the year. If you’re still reading this far down on the page, you’re awesome btw!)