The Fault in Our Stars (Spoiler-free, I promise)

You should read the book The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. If you've known someone who has died, you should read it. If you assume that someday you will die, you should read it. If you are or were once a teenager, you should read it. If you spend most of your days engaging in but not really thinking about the miracle that is breathing, you should read it.

Does that cover everyone? Good. Just in case, I'll say it again: You should read this book.

I devoured the book, in the most intense figurative meaning of the phrase. My copy arrived at my house around 1 PM. I sat down to read it around 9:30. Approximately four and a half hours later, I finished the 313th and final page. I went downstairs and ate two sticks of string cheese, went to the bathroom, and began this blog post.

For those unfamiliar with the novel, its main character is Hazel Grace Lancaster, who was diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer at age thirteen but has somehow managed to survive more than three years. The cancer eventually spread to her lungs, so she's dependent on a portable oxygen tank. She has few friends, she reads the same novel over and over, and she thinks about death a lot -- not in a particularly dramatic or macabre way, but in the way that any of us who use more than a tenth of our brain ponder whatever situations realistically lie in our near future. Hazel reluctantly attends a weekly support group for kids with cancer, and it's there that she meets Augustus Waters, an intelligent, irreverent, extremely good-looking kid who's in remission for a relatively treatable form of bone cancer.

Hazel and Augustus hit it off so quickly and completely and are so unabashedly attracted to each other that at first it felt a little unbelievable, but I have immense faith in John Green as both an author and a human being, and I was not disappointed. I have thankfully never known a family member or friend living with a long-term illness, so it took a few chapters to understand that for Augustus and Hazel and their peers, a good portion of their lives are shaped by all-or-nothing decisions: You don't know how much time you have left, so you enthusiastically pursue the things you want and you don't waste time on things of little importance.

I really can't think of another piece of literature that I've read that was so immediately thought-provoking (even among John's earlier books, which are each more thought-provoking than most of the rest of the young adult genre combined). The Harry Potter series is full of deep truths and timeless, ageless themes about life, love, humanity, and death, and as most of the seven or eight people who read this blog are aware, it has helped to shape myriad facets of the person I am right now, but I've spent more than a decade of my life thinking about those books. (And let's face it, I read the first four with the life experience and self-awareness of an eleven-year-old.) The Fault in Our Stars has been in my possession less than twenty-four hours, and it's caused me to contemplate the complexity of life, the inevitability of death, the existence of fate (or lack thereof), the narcissism of the universe, the power of attraction, the blessing and fragility of health, the realities and imagined aspects of heroism, the credibility of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the beauty of a well-designed Venn diagram, and the power of words (and I mean I actually combed through my own thoughts on these topics, in addition to taking in John's and the characters'.)

I have long held John Green in high esteem. Aside from being my second-favorite author (I know he would be honored to learn that he was even a distant second to J.K. Rowling, and he's really not very distant), he's a brilliant video blogger, a radically compassionate and logical humanitarian, a discerning curator of other people's words, and an unintentional co-founder of the Nerdfighter community, which has greatly influenced my life and choices lo these past three years. That I could someday write one-hundredth as well as John and that my books could be one-hundredth as important to one-hundredth as many people is more than I can imagine. Also that I could use capital letters with such Significance and Aplomb.

Though The Fault in Our Stars deals with a wide array of intense topics, nothing is ever treated superficially. Additionally, though the book is narrated by a self-described "terminal" teenager, it manages to altogether avoid being depressing. The total acknowledgment of the frightfully sad and utterly unfair is woven seamlessly with the snarky observations of rebellious adolescents, the split-second decisions that make life hilarious, the complexity of suburban family dynamics, and the self-consciousness and excitement of true love, along with a perfect smattering of nerdy references. I have rarely been so charmed by a male lead, and I have never before enjoyed video games as much, felt such disdain or such despair for a raging alcoholic, or cried so hard over a paragraph about math. (Though my spectacular family did teach me, many moons ago, that math can, at times, be supremely beautiful.)

As I read the novel, I occasionally jotted down things that resonated particularly strongly with me on the nearest piece of paper, which so happened to be my to-do list for the last few days. I wrote down the word aqueous, which I'm not sure I had ever heard or read before, but which is so beautiful that I keep staring at it and repeating it over and over in my head. I also wrote down the word vitrine, which is also quite intriguing in its physicality, but whose meaning I could not quite divine from its context. (I just looked it up. Vitrine: noun; a glass cabinet or case, especially for displaying art objects.) I recorded a quotation from Augustus on page 123: "You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are." On page 138, Hazel feels bad for scrambled eggs because they have been so stigmatized that one cannot mention them without conjuring up images of breakfast, which is exactly the sort of ridiculous manner in which I often feel bad for totally innocuous inanimate (try saying that five times fast) objects. I actually tore off the list (without everything on it having been completed! Gasp!) to scrawl across the back of it a sentence that I can't repeat without giving away a major plot point, but it suddenly put into perspective something that happened immediately after I was informed of my grandfather's death almost five and a half years ago and which has occasionally bothered me ever since. (For those who've read the book, it's the last sentence in the second paragraph on page 262.)

A lot of things in this book made me think about Grampy and the comparatively brief time he was ill and my memories and feelings surrounding his death. I've actually been thinking about him a lot in recent weeks. It seems I miss him most at Christmas time and during the first month of baseball season. But I digress.

I know The Fault in Our Stars has been a very long time in coming. John has said he's been working on it in one form or another ever since his time as a chaplain at a children's hospital more than a decade ago. It's obvious that it was influenced by Esther Earl, who touched the greater community of Nerdfighteria indelibly if fleetingly, and John has admitted as much, though I think the main purpose of the author's note at the beginning is to gently remind Nerdfighters that he could never and would never attempt to write a biography of Esther disguised as a novel. There's been a lot of furor surrounding the publication and release of this book, not only among John's rabidly loyal fans, but within in the industry. Few other books have had so many copies pre-ordered, and John made history by signing every one of the 150,000 books in the first printing. (For those wondering, my J-scribble is green, but sadly without a hanklerfish, yeti, or special note.) TFiOS was originally supposed to be released in April, and we're all grateful that the date was moved forward several months.

Sometimes when I anticipate something so much and for so long, I start to worry that there's no way it could possibly live up to the monumental expectations I've developed. Sometimes, that turns out to be the case (see: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2; LeakyCon 2011). Thankfully (given how easily excited I am), more often than not the actual finished product absolutely lives up to my idealization of it. It's rare, however, that something far outstrips those expectations, more than I ever could have imagined, and The Fault in Our Stars does just that.