Paper Towns

You know why I'm deeply in love with this book? Because, I greatly relate to it.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. About life, about the human condition. And, for now, I see that there's none around me who has the time and the attention to listen to me talk about those two topics. Since that, the book gave me the opportunity to agree with the characters about how they think about life and the human condition, and, I have to say, that I mostly agree with how they see it. 

Quentin. The quiet and passive looking boy - which surprisingly has his own charms and wits once you get to know him - who admires a lady from quite a distance and has his own "perfect" idea of the lady. Is me. Me me me me me. I am quite quiet and passive. I have to say that I surprisingly have my own charms and wits once you get to know me. And I have in my life admired people and had my own "perfect" idea of them.

Margo. The extravagant, exquisite looking lady (which Quentin admires), has her own adventures, her own ways of doing things - which, others see, as something spectacular. People see her as some kind of fireworks show, a thing to enjoy and to admire at. But, she is misunderstood. She became a firework show not to show off her colors, but to express her colors. She does things for a reason, and the reasons may not make sense to other people, but it sure make sense to her. And Margo is me. I relate to Margo a lot due to those things.

And now the metaphors. The strings. The balloons... the patches of grass. How the That Guy Is A Gigolo game in the middle of the night, while Q and Radar (and Lacey and Ben) are stuck in traffic, gave a philosophical meaning which I have ran into in my own life. The cracked vessels, oh, the cracked vessels. I love how Mr Green just suddenly takes us back into those metaphors in the middle of an explanatory thing in the story, because it gives a relevancy towards the story in our own lives. Unfortunately, I can't write down about how I relate to the metaphors that he offers to the readers in the book, because that'd take a long blog post. But, nevertheless...

Dear Mr Green

Thank you for the book

Greatly appreciate it

It became a palette of reflection, thinking, and relating for me.

And... it showed me aspects of the person I am inside Quentin and Margo

Thank you for telling us that books belong to their readers, Mr Green. Because I don't want anyone to claim Paper Towns as theirs.

I can't rate this book

Please Look After Mom

At the moment, I'm trying to read more books. In particular, I've just finished reading this one: Please Look After Mom. Please Look After Mom is a novel by South Korean writer Kyung-sook Shin. While I read the English version of it, it is originally written in Korean.

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If your Mom went missing, what would you do? Usually, it's us who get the lost-in-the-supermarket-and-cannot-find-mom kind of feeling, but in this book, it is the Mom that got lost and leaves everybody in frustration.

This novel made me realize how it is very easy for anybody to forget about the people who truly mean something in their lives. Sometimes, we are all too busy dreaming and thinking about the stuff that do not really matter, when the things that truly matters are right at the reach of our fingertips.

Also, the novel took me to a world that I've never been to before. A world of deep emotion in the simplest ways possible; filled with crops, jars of pickles, puppies, ancestral rites, trees with family value, dreams--whether it became a reality or it didn't, and the mysteries of what's really inside the heads of the loved ones.

To me, this book is a 9.3/10.