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juxabelle 's review for:
An Abundance of Katherines
by John Green
"What matters to you defines your mattering..."
Third John Green I've read (TFIOS, Looking for Alaska), and though I've thoroughly enjoyed them all, this will probably be my least favourite.
What I will say about this book however, is that it's extremely useful when one is suffering a recent break up/broken heart. 'An Abundance of Katherines' deals with the sometimes painful emotional garbage with logical cold reason (to which I say "good riddance!"). I very much enjoyed Colin, our main character, strenuously adapting a mathematical formula to gain insight on the romantic compatibility of two people.
It's a quick read- and valuable for the tender grieving heart, trying to make sense of the senseless.
"Well, but it's not as good a story if you dumped her. That's how I remember things, anyway. I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don't fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don't see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky. Hassan told me once that you think like that too-- that you see connections everywhere-- so you're a natural born storyteller, it turns out."
"I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do."
"He missed that, too, and it hadn't even happened. He missed his imagined future. You can love someone so much, he thought. But you can never love people as much as you can miss them."
"...[He] wondered only how something that isn't there can hurt you."
"They each came to precisely the same conclusion about him. He wasn't cool enough or good-looking enough or as smart as they'd hoped--in short, he didn't matter enough. And so it happened to him again and again, until it was boring. But monotony doesn't make for painlessness. In the first century CE, Roman authorities punished St. Apollonia by crushing her teeth one by one with pliers. Colin often thought about this in relationship to the monotony of dumping: we have thirty-two teeth. After a while, having each tooth individually destroyed probably gets repetitive, even dull. But it never stops hurting."
"She never liked me much, but she sure loved me."
"It was the immutable tango between the Dumper and the Dumpee: the coming and the seeing and the conquering and the returning home."
"After it felt like being stoned and sticked from the inside, a fluttering and then a sharp pain in his lower rib cage, and then he felt for the first time that a piece of his gut had been wrenched out of him."
"The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real."
"Even if it's a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward-- ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter-- maybe less than a lot, but always more than none."
"Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they'll always love you back."
"And the moral of the story is that you don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened."
"Nothing happened, really, but the moment was thick with mattering."
Third John Green I've read (TFIOS, Looking for Alaska), and though I've thoroughly enjoyed them all, this will probably be my least favourite.
What I will say about this book however, is that it's extremely useful when one is suffering a recent break up/broken heart. 'An Abundance of Katherines' deals with the sometimes painful emotional garbage with logical cold reason (to which I say "good riddance!"). I very much enjoyed Colin, our main character, strenuously adapting a mathematical formula to gain insight on the romantic compatibility of two people.
It's a quick read- and valuable for the tender grieving heart, trying to make sense of the senseless.
"Well, but it's not as good a story if you dumped her. That's how I remember things, anyway. I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don't fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don't see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky. Hassan told me once that you think like that too-- that you see connections everywhere-- so you're a natural born storyteller, it turns out."
"I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do."
"He missed that, too, and it hadn't even happened. He missed his imagined future. You can love someone so much, he thought. But you can never love people as much as you can miss them."
"...[He] wondered only how something that isn't there can hurt you."
"They each came to precisely the same conclusion about him. He wasn't cool enough or good-looking enough or as smart as they'd hoped--in short, he didn't matter enough. And so it happened to him again and again, until it was boring. But monotony doesn't make for painlessness. In the first century CE, Roman authorities punished St. Apollonia by crushing her teeth one by one with pliers. Colin often thought about this in relationship to the monotony of dumping: we have thirty-two teeth. After a while, having each tooth individually destroyed probably gets repetitive, even dull. But it never stops hurting."
"She never liked me much, but she sure loved me."
"It was the immutable tango between the Dumper and the Dumpee: the coming and the seeing and the conquering and the returning home."
"After it felt like being stoned and sticked from the inside, a fluttering and then a sharp pain in his lower rib cage, and then he felt for the first time that a piece of his gut had been wrenched out of him."
"The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real."
"Even if it's a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward-- ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter-- maybe less than a lot, but always more than none."
"Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they'll always love you back."
"And the moral of the story is that you don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened."
"Nothing happened, really, but the moment was thick with mattering."