John Green
John Green is not a perfect person.*
But he comes pretty damn close.
His writing.
It's like a writer married a fairy and then when they had sex the fairy didn't have eggs, but fairy dust and then she got pregnant and John Green was born.
Pretty much.
He creates this fictional world that is so good and so real that everything that happens in this fictional world seems like its happening in reality and then attachment occurs. Over the space of 313 pages, Augustus Waters and Hazel Grace and Van Houten and Isaac and everyone became apart of my life. When (SPOLIERS) Augustus died, it was like a bit of my heart had been ripped out. It was like Hazel Grave and Augustus were my best friends and they made the best couple and then he was gone and took a piece of my heart and sanity with him. (SPOILERS ARE OVER FOR NOW, BUT I'M PRETTY SURE THERE'S MORE SPOILING FURTHER ON. I recommend reading the book before continuing).
John Green's vocabulary is like a long piece of rope. That is, it's extensive. He doesn't use really simple, basic 5 year old language, yet he doesn't use long over the top words that don't need to be there. When needed, simple words are good, but mostly he uses middle-of-the-road words - words that I will understand (most of the time), but they aren't too basic.
In Fault** he takes you on this long journey: a rollerocoaster ride really, that has ups and downs and twists and loop-de-loops. It never stops moving and there is a new surprise at every turn. When the book ends, it's like a slap in the face. Everything you do feels so inadequate, and it's as if nothing matters anymore. Because five minutes before you were in the ICU with Augustus and hoping with Hazel Grace and then suddenly hope dies and the book ends. The first time I read it, I just lay there, thinking what to do with my life. Not "oh, I'm gonna stop world poverty" thoughts, but the real deep "shit, cancer and disease and what can I do about it?" thoughts. Real life thoughts.
This is what I sent my friend to get over a John Green novel, aka Fault (I've edited it slightly):
1. Cry
2. Cry
3. Cry
4. Get angry at cancer
5. Wish it was gone
6. Ship Hazel Grace and Gus 5eva
7. Remember about Gus.
8. Cry more
9. Rinse and repeat.
So you will never get over the novel and the unfairness of the world and the paranoia that your favourite author is also a douchebag alcoholic that hates kids and that maybe someday someone that you know will get cancer and they'll have to live though the pain and the suffering and the agony that it brings and watch it destroy everything and everyone around them.
->That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.
->Okay? Okay.
-> I fell in love the way you fall asleep. Slowly and then all at once.
-> The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves
-> They don't kill you unless you light one. And I've never lit one. It's a metaphor, see. You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing
-> The world is not a wish-granting factory
-> My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations
-> What a slut time is: she screws everybody
-> Some infinities are bigger than other infinities
-> I lit up like a Christmas tree, Hazel Grace
-> It'd be a privilege to have my heart broken by you Hazel Grace.
*one day I will do a list on these.
*The Fault in Our Stars. The best book written by John Green. Maybe also ever.
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