reading Slumps & youTube

Dear Reader,

Leviathan, image by
Keith Thompson

It has come to my attention that I haven't posted my reading list on this blog for a long time now. The last one I believe was just before my disillusionment; and my writing since then has been going through drastic ups and downs. I had been keeping up with my reading however. But I seemed to have entered a reading slump after finishing the Leviathan Trilogy by Scott Westerfeld and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell at the beginning of this year. I even tried to re-read my all time favourite novel North & South by Elizabeth Gaskell but even that did not bring me out of my slump. 

What finally brought me round was actually The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (often shortened to TFiOS). I'm not sure why I put off reading this book for so long, since I've been follow John Green and his brother Hank on Youtube for a few years now, and am proud to call myself a Nerdfighter. (Aside: some clarification for you, dear Reader, a nerdfighter is not someone who fights nerds but actual nerds who fight to increase awesome and decrease world suck i.e. bad things). 

So spoiler-free mini book-review: TFiOS is, on the most basic level, about a 16 year old girl named Hazel Grace Lancaster, who loves reading and watching American Reality TV and has an obsession with this inadequately ended book called An Imperial Affliction by Peter van Houten. Also, she's in the last stage of her terminal cancer. Then, in the typical style of boy-meets-girl stories, one day at Support Group she meets Augustus Waters, a gorgeous and charismatic cancer survivor who is, in turn, obsessed with metaphorical resonances. And so they embark on both an emotional and physical  journey to find out what happens after the ending of An Imperial Affliction. 

Surprisingly enough, it was not the book-within-a-book aspect that I like most about TFiOS (unlike Cloud Atlas, where I thought the book-within-a-journal-within-letters etc... was the best part). It was actually Hazel and Augustus's existential discussions that I loved the most. For example, that cancer and depression are just "side effects of dying", that there are an infinite number of infinities and that "some infinities are bigger than others" or how the world isn't a "wish-grating factory" and so disappointment is just an inevitable side effect of life. Anyway, I agree with Markus Zusak (The Book Theif) in that TFiOS is definitely John Green at his best. 

To add to the brilliance of this little blue book, around the time I was reading it I also discovered the booktubers' community on Youtube, which felt like coming home after a long and tiresome vacation. They reminded me of my love for reading, of discovering the stories that others had put words to and introduced me to a whole new chapter of books that I have still to explore. Which was something I was particularly lacking since my fellow bookworm/best friend, Codename: Pixie, had major eye surgery and has been unable to recommend new books to me for sometime. Anyway, there are in fact a few booktubers I'd particularly like to mention: thereadables, booksandquills, supersushipizza and Bookables.  

This post has become a lot longer than I had originally anticipated so my rather long reading list will just have to wait until next week. Be patient, my dear Reader. Now all that's left to say is: don't forget to be Awesome.

Nida 

P.S. - make sure to follow me on twitter @Bookaholic786, (though I realise now that that name isn't technically correct).