Paper Towns by John Green | Rating: ★★★★☆“Here’s what’s not beautiful about it: from here, you can’t see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”
Ugh, I know, right? A John Green book. So, like, totally, like cliche. But here’s the thing: I love John Green and his work. Say what you will, but I’m not going to deny that I love the way his words flow and his stories. His novels may often have a repetitive theme to it in terms of how his characters act but they still, for me, provide my mind with the opportunity to think. Really and truly think, you know? And that’s important when reading a novel.
And I’d like to make it clear that in spite of flaws and the certain level of pretentious that his characters sometimes reach, I think that his books are something special.
