Wherein the cat meets John Green…

and has a temporary truce with The Kid all in the name of Awesomeness.

The BossLady and the Lord of the House took the Kid and The Cat to see John Green. The cat was willing to have that little truce with The Kid because she got to take all the pictures (which, btw, is a lot harder for a cat than for a human being, what with having no fingers and all). The Cat thinks that John Green was mightily impressed with the BossLady’s reading list and gladly signed it for her (as well as all the novels, with personal little notes). John Green also read part of his new novel (more about that later…) and the Cat and the Kid listened and enjoyed:

Also, the Cat is uploading some videos in which:

• John Green attempts to read in Dutch:

• John Green reads part of his new novel (to be published next year) –> this would turn out to be The Fault in Our Stars!

Paper Towns (by John Green)

Warning: 1) text contains spoilers and 2) is not just a regular review…

Who is Margo Roth Spiegelman? This is the question that’s been holding Quentin’s attention for as long as he’s known her. For a while there – before dead men in parks and middle school spoiled everything – they were best friends. Tonight, however, she once again needs Q’s help in an ultimate revenge plan against everyone who’s wronged her.  This is the lead-in to the mysterious quest into the disappearance of Margo Roth Spiegelman.

After Margo’s disappearance act (was it all an act?) Q is convinced she’s left clues for him and he sets out to discover who she really was/is. The search for Margo, however, leads to a search for himself as Margo’s last name, Spiegelman (‘Spiegel’ means mirror in German and Dutch), seems to suggest: Margo is Q’s mirror. When Q looks at her, what’s reflected to him is not only what he wants to see in Margo, but also everything he wants to be himself.

Wintergirls (by Laurie Halse Anderson)

It’s always quite tricky for this cat to review a book when the actual topic is something she really has no affinity with. At first sight, Wintergirls is such a book. It deals with Lia, an anorexic 18-year-old,  in the aftermath of her friend Cassie’s death, a death also linked to an eating disorder.  Although I’ve read quite a bit about the psychological mechanisms behind eating disorders (the need for control, the perfectionism etc.), in essence anorexia is something I will never be able to understand. That said, just like Speak wasn’t a book just about a rape, Wintergirls is not a book just about an eating disorder. Both are books about self-respect and facing your worst nightmares and fears.

Looking for Alaska (by John Green)

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps,” this is what Miles Halter, aka ‘Pudge’ says when he decides to go off to boarding school in Alabama (yes, Alabama…). Considering that Miles is a 16-something teenager, quoting François Rabelais, this is not only err… peculiar (what teenager is into finding out what famous people’s last words were?), it’s also symptomatic of most teens in similar coming-of-age novels: they all seem to be older, wiser and wittier than any 15 or 16-year-old I’ve ever known. And Miles, ‘the Colonel’, Alaska et al. are no different. Similar to how Juno and a series like Gilmore Girls can appeal to both teens *and* adults, John Green’s debut is clever and funny and will make you smile, giggle, and laugh out loud one minute and have you trying to fight back tears the next.

Hidden (or not so hidden, since Miles has a class called ‘World Religions” ) beneath the tale of friendship, love and loss are musings about religion, the search for meaning, and the nature of being a person… “the nature of the labyrinth and the way out of it”, Miles writes in his notebook, the metaphor of life that keeps on recurring in the book and that John Green challenges us to try and answer for ourselves.