Paper Towns review/reflection

Paper Towns by John Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Margo Roth Spiegelman. Even the name gives off that mysterious vibe. Paper Towns chronicles how Q, Quentin Jacobsen, got the miracle in his life. The elusive Margo has asked him to on an adventure of sorts suddenly one night. And just when Q has thought everything is going to be working out, Margo disappears.

It was only Q who was as worried and concerned over what happened to Margo. Despite the fact that Margo has frequently and repeatedly ran away in the past. Q was then off to a journey in finding Margo and somehow realizing who she really is from Walt Whitman, an abandoned mall, and unfinished subdivisions among others.

I envy Margo. She had this untypical courage. Or was this rebellion? I felt she wanted to be found, but repressed this feeling too much which made her more detached from the people around her, specially her family. But who am I to judge how she has felt to be in her family, in her life. Somehow, I can get it though. How it feels. That it's suffocatingly unreal. Like I can't find myself if I am here...

And Q... the ever adoring neighbor but of course he's more than that. The part where he tells about his perception/idea of Margo isn't who she really is... that got me. The paper girl/boy we think of, and see in those photos and shows and videos. It's really not them. We'll need to dig further, find clues, deduce all these to it's meaningful whole, and pray they'll also want to be found.

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The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

I read the book on a whim. I was intrigued by the title which just proves how much of an unusually-lousy reader I am. Coincidentally, I was nursing a delusionally-broken heart at that time. I resorted to reading again, which I now learned is a way of coping from the harsh realities of my totally-unrelated fangirling life.

So here comes the book, freshly-bound and since I was supposedly-depressed, I jumped with joy when I found the book at the bookstore. And never blinking twice about the Php 600++ price tag.

I did not expect that the book is cancer-related at all. When I read the first few lines, I predicted that it was gonna be boring. (And worse, in the first few pages, physical descriptions of the characters were revealed. Waaaahh! Even in reading a book you are haunting me. Waaaaa!) Please forgive my random spazzing.

Really, I did not expect that the book was cancer-related. This is a sensitive topic for me because cancer runs in our family. I definitely can relate to the medical terms and procedures that were talked about in the book. I knew the ins and outs of cancer, even if I am not a patient myself.

And reading about Hazel and Gus’ life going through it all, I couldn’t even imagine myself in their shoes. Maybe I would have coped differently.

An important thing imparted in the book was about Gus’ fear of oblivion. Since my family’s cancer history, I was /am also worrying about the same thing. When I die, do I just go away, disappear, cease to exist. How will I and how do I make my stay as a conscious sentient being asmeaningful and as beneficial to others.

But then, Van Houten/Hazel’s answers struck me. Because it is true. Because all I have to think of is the now.

There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will also be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away. But even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever.

There was time before consciousness and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human connection worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.God Knows what’ everyone else does.