This is not so much as a review as it is a short contemplation. So I’m not going to officially call it a book review.
For one, John Green‘s the Fault in Our Stars is no book to be typically on the Christmas Recommended Reading short list. It was tragedy from the first page. Anybody who knows cancer would know that a story that includes it could never end well. It was always a matter of time. To be precise: how much time remains, and how you live through it, and then after.
To me the book was about the sheer ferocity of the human will to live, for whatever reason it can anchor on. It was about (to Gus and Hazel, please excuse my shallow mind and limited vocabulary) hope, dismay, absolute and relative truth, about fight and faith. It was about how death and dying can make us understand living, and can likewise make us shun it. It is about relatability. See, I too had infinites I wished were longer than they were. But as Gus and Hazel frequently reminded each other: the world is not a wish-granting factory. But that doesn’t make it any less a place of joy.
Merry Christmas.
Photo credits to owner.
