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Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.
brnoze: This is a wonderful story with a great premise. A young adult who wakes up as a different person every 24 hours. The author drops into the lives of many different characters and we get to learn through the eyes of the main character A. This is a love story. a coming of age story and a fantasy of a very different kind. I really enjoyed it.… (more)
Everyone keeps raving about The Fault in Our Stars but I actually enjoyed Looking for Alaska much more. I liked the characters in that one better, and I liked the story better. The Fault in Our Stars felt like something I had already experienced literature-wise, while Looking for Alaska felt more new, like its own thing. I did enjoy the experience of reading this book though, it's good. But Looking for Alaska is better. ( )
When one's grand-daugher says to you "Grandpa, you should really read this book. It's really good." who am I to refuse a personal recommendations. Yes, I can see how this short novel can be attractive to a 13-year-old. From my perspective the medical detail was accurate, and the religious and philosophical musings were such that my interest kept getting piqued. Overall, a well-written vehicle for a rapid ride into the life of the central characters, with piquant passages tweaking at the readers heartstrings. ( )
As the tide washed in, the Dutch Tulip Man faced the ocean: "Conjoiner rejoinder poisoner concealer revelator. Look at it, rising up and rising down, taking everything with it."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Water," the Dutchman said. "Well, and time."
-PETER VAN HOUTEN, An Imperial Affliction
Dedication
To Esther Earl
First words
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed.
Quotations
My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn't like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.
It wasn't even that the book was so good or anything; it was just that the author, Peter Van Houten, seemed to understand me in weird and impossible ways. An Imperial Affliction was my book, in the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts.
There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. Got knows that's what everyone else does.
You are buying into the cross-stitched sentiments of your parents' throw pillows. You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it.
What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner.
We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. Augustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer. He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim—as you will be—of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible.
You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.
Apparently, the world is not a wish granting factory.
There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.
Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.
“I'm in love with you," he said quietly.
"Augustus," I said.
"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.
That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence.
Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.
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Book description
Haiku summary
Cancer teens in love --
You might want to have a box
of tissues on hand.
LibraryThing Author
John Green is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing.
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