To Stealth:
Sounds like you enjoyed the movie only slightly less than I enjoyed the book (I haven't seen the movie). I had heard that it was a really great, very profound book, that it was deeply reflective and moving and makes you examine your own life and blah, blah, blah...
Consequently, my expectations weren't that high.
The book was over-hyped for me; I might have enjoyed it more if I hadn't heard all the hype talking it up.
The one positive that I will give this book was that Hazel goes on and on at one point about the end of her favorite book - the one with the pretentious name I can't remember. She talks about how the book ends mid-narrative, like the character just stopped writing, maybe because she died or something, which is the impetus for going to visit the author so it must have made it to the movie. I ended up convincing myself that TFIOS was going to end the same way. It was transparent to me that Augustus would die, but I thought Hazel would die and the narrative would just end, too. In that respect, well done to the author for misleading me there.
Otherwise it was just an okay book for me. It ranks higher than My Sister's Keeper, which I have both read (hated it) and watched (hated that they "fixed" the thing I hated about the book :p)
Unlike Twilight, I can see how people could like this book so it doesn't bother me that it became popular. There's nothing redeeming about Twilight.
I read YA horror (the Fear Street books by RL Stein) and remember loving them. Teenagers killing each other and my parents let me read about it? Awesome!
Other than those, I, also, graduated to adult novels fairly young.
Sounds like you enjoyed the movie only slightly less than I enjoyed the book (I haven't seen the movie). I had heard that it was a really great, very profound book, that it was deeply reflective and moving and makes you examine your own life and blah, blah, blah...
Consequently, my expectations weren't that high.
The book was over-hyped for me; I might have enjoyed it more if I hadn't heard all the hype talking it up.
The one positive that I will give this book was that Hazel goes on and on at one point about the end of her favorite book - the one with the pretentious name I can't remember. She talks about how the book ends mid-narrative, like the character just stopped writing, maybe because she died or something, which is the impetus for going to visit the author so it must have made it to the movie. I ended up convincing myself that TFIOS was going to end the same way. It was transparent to me that Augustus would die, but I thought Hazel would die and the narrative would just end, too. In that respect, well done to the author for misleading me there.
Otherwise it was just an okay book for me. It ranks higher than My Sister's Keeper, which I have both read (hated it) and watched (hated that they "fixed" the thing I hated about the book :p)
Unlike Twilight, I can see how people could like this book so it doesn't bother me that it became popular. There's nothing redeeming about Twilight.
(January 30, 2015 at 3:25 pm)Faith No More Wrote: Has the YA genre ever been anything but garbage? I don't remember ever reading something in the YA that I liked, but admittedly, I didn't read too much of them, either. When I was a teenager, I just read the old adult books.
I read YA horror (the Fear Street books by RL Stein) and remember loving them. Teenagers killing each other and my parents let me read about it? Awesome!
Other than those, I, also, graduated to adult novels fairly young.
Teenaged X-Files obsession + Bermuda Triangle episode + Self-led school research project = Atheist.
