Before I get started this week, I just want to know one thing. Who told the innumerable, fiery Shailene Woodley it was a good idea to wear a nose tube for a whole movie? It’s almost as bad as going full-retard. The boy-dyke cut was bad enough but the tube took the cake. She could have been something and she threw it all away for a schmaltzy, boring, pretentious, derivative cancer flick. Oh well, at least I saw her boobs in that Gregg Araki movie. I didn’t even watch the whole thing, I just wanted to perv on Woodley’s boobies. That part alone was better than the whole of The Fault in Our Stars.
This fucking book has a whopping 36,000 (or so) reviews on Amazon. Does any book have that many views? Let me check.
50 Shits of Grey? 33,000 reviews. Close but not close enough.
Hunger Games? 24,000. That’s respectable.
Harry Potter? Only 10,000 reviews.
Twilight? 7,000.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? 5,000.
Let’s check a classic or two.
To Kill a Mockingbird? 7,600 reviews.
Great Gatsby? 5,000. We’re getting nowhere here.
Catcher in the Rye? 4,289.
Moby Dick? A paltry 1,100 reviews. There has to be something else…
Oh! The Bible. Let’s see…
Not one edition of the Bible has that many reviews.
So what, as they say, the fuck? Is it the wannabe poetic title? I like poetically titled books if they’re done well like A Hreatbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. That one pulled it off, this one didn’t. In fact, that book is everything this book wishes it was. So is it mass hysteria? Is it the mediocre film adaptation? Is it Woodley’s boobies? Is it John Green’s Youtube following? I’ll admit I learned a thing or two from his Crash Course series but not really because he’s so full of shit and wordy that anything you learn gets lost in his nasally Revenge of the Nerds voice and his terrible haircuts. There was one video about evolution that was making perfect sense until he said this animal lineage split into another species “somewhere” but then he kept talking and didn’t explain the split at all. Just a random split? Evolution is animals changing and ADAPTING to suit their surroundings, why would there be this convenient split “somewhere”? I’ll answer that with a quote I’ve heard recently and then get into this shitty novel.
Science: Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.
Or whatever. Every other line in this book ends in “or whatever”, because that’s how John Green relates to the teens or whatever. The big problem with this shitty novel permeates the whole fucking thing, no matter who is speaking or whatever. That big problem is John Green’s voice. I won’t give him any views by posting a link to his Youtube channel here but he uses seven words when five words will do. A lot. He has this lispy, condescending, hipster tone of voice. He uses big words and elaborate phrases when he talks. He says things out loud that you only write down. Nobody says that shit. And he’s smarmy. And you can hear his annoying, preachy voice all through this shitty novel. Quotes, shall we?
Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.
That line is almost true but reading it in John Green’s Voice ruins it. JOHN GREEN! Like Matt Damon in Team America. Or whatever. JOHN GREEN.
“I am,” he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
Fucking NOBODY talks that way. Not even John Green. JOHN GREEN. His eyes crinkling? What a distraction. Amateurs think you have to describe body parts and movements in great detail to illicit some kind of response in their readers when all it does is get in the way. And the kind of girls I like would puke if I said something like all of that to them. I guess Woodley would puke too but that’s on account of the chemotherapy. Hey-ohhhhhh.
Sorry! That’s the only cancer joke I’ll make, promise. Or whatever. JOHN GREEN.
You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.
Also read in John Green’s voice so even if that shitty line was any good, it would be ruined. JOHN GREEN. You don’t really have a say in who hurts you, that’s a lie. “I like my choices”. Christ, I hate this kid. This is the love interest (redundant spoiler alert: he dies) and from what I’ve read, he’s a cynical asshole. Nobody likes cynical assholes. You might even say they’re a cancer on society. That one doesn’t count.
I hate cancer, really I do. My brother and mother both had a tumor at the same time once and it was terrifying and sad. It’s always the wrong people who get cancer. I hate it so much and this shitty novel doesn’t help.
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
You can just see John Green leaning back from his laptop and nodding in agreement with himself after typing that stupid line. Such wisdom and insight into the human condition. Or maybe he’s talking about the car? In that case, yes, John Green, some Infinities are bigger than other Infinities. And some trees are bigger than other trees. And some nose tubes are bigger than other nose tubes.
“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.
My God, somebody Elliott Smith me in the heart, that was bad.
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 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 organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.
Once again, nobody talks like that. And nobody uses the word “naught” unless they’re being ironic or writing. Or both. Or whatever. Also, SHUT UP. God, John Green, you suck.
“May I see you again?” he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in his voice.
I smiled. “Sure.”
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“Patience, grasshopper,” I counseled. “You don’t want to seem overeager.”
“Right, that’s why I said tomorrow,” he said. “I want to see you again tonight. But I’m willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m serious,” he said.
“You don’t even know me,” I said. I grabbed the book from the center console. “How about I call you when I finish this?”
“But you don’t even have my phone number,” he said.
“I strongly suspect you wrote it in this book.”
He broke out into that goofy smile. “And you say we don’t know each other.”
That has to be the worst meet-cute I’ve ever experienced. It even has the girl self-awaringly telling the boy to not be so eager. She’s cynical too, just like any modern teen. Over 7,000 people liked that quote on Goodreads. That’s more likes than Twilight had reviews!
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.
I almost fell asleep just now. Can someone explain that metaphor? And not John Green. JOHN GREEN.
You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.
I could go on and on, there are over 70 pages of shitty, pseudo-poetic quotes on Goodreads for this shitty novel. Go read a true story about someone with cancer instead. Go talk to people at a treatment center. At least you’ll get a real, authentic voice telling you the truth without a bunch of internetic sarcastic ironic pretentious smarmy coy derivative bullshit all around it.
One more quote for the road!
Fuck this book.
Just kidding, let me find one.
There is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.
I won’t make the obvious joke about no shortage of fault to be found amid this shitty novel. JOHN GREEN. JOHN GREEN’S VOICE. WOODLEY’S BOOBIES. OR WHATEVER.
That reminds me… I haven’t seen those in a while. BRB.
Done in 60 Seconds 