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.

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.

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.