I wish, I wish, I wish in vain ("The Butcher Boy" by Patrick McCabe)

Francie Brady - a small town boy with a bit of a wild imagination, a passion for comic books and John Wayne movies. Via a first person account (with little punctuation), Patrick gives us two stories, one imagined on top of another. This wonderful novel is in fact a stream of consciousness, flowing to-and-fro over the line of sanity. It is a world reflected through a best friend, an alcoholic father, a depressed mother and mean old neighbor Mrs. Nugent. There are priests, three-headed ladies in the market, fish, and so much more.

The age of oneiric culture ("Feed" by M.T. Anderson)

In M. T. Anderson's fictional world (set a century or two into the future), everyone is connected by an internet-like web called "the feed". The main difference - "the feed" is an integral part of your body. Imagine having a wikipedia inside your brain. "Telepathic" communication with everyone who is currently online. (the "currently online" part refers to basically everyone who is awake and not heavily "damaged"). People talk less and less, and language begins to degrade. Written word is almost non-existent. Children no longer need to learn (as we know it today) in schools - not even how to read.

It’s more now, it’s not so much about the educational stuff but more regarding the fact that everything that goes on, goes on on the feed. All of the feedcasts and the instant news, that’s on there, so there’s all the entertainment ... like their favorite feedcast, this show called "Oh? Wow! Thing!", which has all these kids like us who do stuff but get all pouty, which is what the girls go crazy for, the poutiness.

But the braggest thing about the feed, the thing that made it really big, is that it knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are. It can tell you how to get them, and help you make buying decisions that are hard. Everything we think and feel is taken in by the corporations, mainly by data ones like Feedlink and OnFeed and American Feedware, and they make a special profile, one that’s keyed just to you, and then they give it to their branch companies, or other companies buy them, and they can get to know what it is we need, so all you have to do is want something and there’s a chance it will be yours.

Love is a battle lost before even begun ("Love Lasts Three Years" by Frédéric Beigbeder)

The title of this blog post is also the first sentence in Beigbeder's autobiographical novel. It beautifully captures the dominant mood of our dear protagonist throughout the story - one of misery, anger, and ultimately, a particular kind of existential angst.

He begins by postulating that love essentially has three stages, each lasting exactly one year: passion, one year of gentleness, and the ultimate year of boredom. He uses the reader as a personal psychoanalyst, and spews his thoughts and feelings out as soon as they come to him. One can't escape realizing the common irrationality of his thoughts, but, as it often goes in these cases, through all the irrationality, we seem to glimpse something that seems true on a more fundamental level.

Have a nice trip through our world ("The Reason I Jump" by Naoki Higashida)

Our view of autism is a limited one. We do know that there is a spectrum of autisms, we do know that each case is different in it's particulars, and we do know that there are some common characteristics. But, really, the formal knowledge is very sparse, and the carers of people with autism don't have much to go on.

If you haven't had personal experience with autism, you might be thinking of Dustin Hoffman in "Rain man" right now, or a similar popular depiction. You would be wrong. I know that my understanding of even a "well-adapted" autistic person was way off the mark. Autism is, in fact, a world completely different from our own, and our attempts at grasping it fully are doomed to fail. Naoki wrote "The Reason I Jump" when he was thirteen, and his depiction of the world of autism shatters into pieces a multitude of our common sense misconceptions. So many things we would take for granted seem to be the polar opposite of reality. This is so much the case that it is difficult to classify the book as "non-fiction". Either the book was made up by someone who is non-autistic, and is complete fiction, or we have up till now grossly underestimated and unappreciated the potential and complexity of autistic personalities.

Semper Augustus ("The Fault in our Stars" by John Green)

John Green craze has caught on wildly recently, and all the cool kids are reading his novels. Especially with the insane attention that the TFioS movie has received globally. I honestly do like John's books, but it becomes difficult to think critically of his work with all this fog of fandom-created attention and blind praise.

To be honest, my favorite John Green book (so far) is "Paper Towns". It speaks to me on a personal level, but I also think that of all the John Green books, it is the most well rounded one, as well as "the most important" one (although I don't like thinking about books as important).

I should also mention that I am a huge John (and Hank) fan. I consider myself a part of the Nerdfighter community, and I normally do my best to spread the awesomeness of the vlogbrothers as far and wide as I can. All that said, I'll start the review. My feelings about this book are generally positive, but it does have some serious shortcomings. As always, if you disagree on anything, please feel obligated to mention it in the comments. :)

"Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars." -Peter Van Houten

The book tells the story of about one year in the life of Hazel Grace - a stage IV cancer patient, who is kept alive by an experimental (and fictional) drug for an unpredictable amount of time. For the largest part of the book, she interacts romantically with a cancer survivor (and amputee), Augustus Waters. TFioS is a cancer story. It is, but it's not a regular cancer story. It gets down and dirty with the disease on several levels - there are physical, emotional and social aspects of the sickness in all their gory details, and at times it gets really difficult to read. There is no sense of the protagonist reaching up to an angelic level of consciousness, simply based she will die sooner than she "ought to" (by our standards).

Museums and carousels - ("The Catcher in the rye" by J. D. Salinger)

It would be difficult to spoil the experience of reading "The catcher in the rye", as nothing much really happens in the novel as far as events go. That being said, I will split this post into two parts, the latter one being reserved for those of you that have already read the book, as I feel there is a particular enjoyment in finding and deciphering meaning in any literary work, without being previously exposed to others' views or opinions.

As previously mentioned - not many events occur in the novel. We merely get a look at Holden's view of what had happened to him approximately one year before the moment in which he is actually telling the story. Thus, the story is entirely in first person, and reminds me somewhat of "Forrest Gump". This reminiscence is aided by the fact that Holden is a very troubled person, though not in the same way as Forrest.

This word, "corruption"... (Behind The Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo)

I honestly don't know where to begin. It is such a thought-provoking work!

Spoiler alert - I will be talking directly about what the book made me think about. However, in this case, I feel that it might be overlooked, even if you haven't read it yet, since we are actually talking about a news report!

At first glance, "Behind the beautiful forevers" seems to be a fictional narrative about a slum, called Annawadi, that is situated very near a Mumbai airport. The story revolves around several families in Annawadi, and how they get by. The characters and events seem to be constructed to tell a particular story, however, it turns out that the whole work is an extended report by a journalist. Katherine is a journalist for "The New Yorker", and has spent her professional career by reporting from areas of extreme poverty. After she got married in India roughly some ten years ago, she took on herself the project of telling the story of an average Mumbai undercity. She spent three years in Annawadi (2008-2011), and all the names, events, motivations, psychology etc. are factual (to the extent the truth can even be ascertained in such a context - the author's note at the end of the book sheds some light on the subject).