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).

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).