Paper Towns

by John Green

[Jyc]

★★★★★ // Favorite John Green book. I didn't realize how much I loved this book until I re-read it a few years later. It was nostalgic. Just like Q, I didn't love high school as much as I've been letting on. But what sustains my fondness over it isn't the people and the big moments, but that temporal moment of my life when I was young and bitter and still utterly curious about the world. And this quest to find Margo had both been a not-so-subtle quest to find himself, and this romantic idea of wandering the earth to find his 'soul mate.' The Greek belief that soul mates are bound to find each other's half and reconnect is reminiscent of this journey, but I'd like to think that staying together forever is not necessarily the case. Sometimes meeting that one person who understands you is enough. More so, I loved this book's tackling of our projections—of how much we idealize a person up to such point that we forgot that we do not own their memories, and neither how they'll turn out to be. What a treacherous thing to believe—that a person is more than a person.