Day 25: A Book You Wish More People Would’ve Read

I never thought about it. Do I wish that some one would read a book because I have liked it? Nah! Everyone has their own choices, their own desires, regarding the books that they want to read. So, I am going to mold the question to something like, “If some one asks for your suggestion regarding the books he/she shall read, which books would you suggest?”

If that is the case, then I would suggest Looking for Alaska or Paper Towns by John Green to be read particularly by those who are in the age group of 13-19 and 40-50: You would ask me why there is such a contrast in the age groups. I’d advise the teenagers to read it to understand their own thought-process and acknowledge the life situations coming forth for them. And I ask the parents of these teenagers (who are generally between 40-50 years of age) to read them so as to understand their kids better and support them appropriately as they are growing up.

Now, when I have suggested so. I will give a brief overview of these two books.

Looking for Alaska is a tale of friendship primarily but it is also a tale of how things are perceived at an age when you are no longer a child, neither are you an adult. Your thought processes change and you start to think about life and its sorrows. This book follows the narrator Miles as he goes to the boarding school and befriends new people, particularly Chip Martin (his room mate) and a personality named Alaska. This book is divided into two portions- Before and After and they are divided by an event that changes their lives.

That event has a lot of significance in the book but much more than the after effects of it, I liked how the viewpoints of these characters develop through time and their experiences, how they come out to be more understanding pupils. They ask questions and they search answers for them and they end up finding their own answers.

Paper Towns is another novel which explores the lifestyle of teenagers and how they see relationships. This time the book follows the story of narrator Quentin Jacobsen who is in love forever with his idea of a free spirit named Margo Roth Spiegelman. It has quite a lot of similarity with the earlier book but it follows a different plot line and explores some new things. I earlier wrote he is in love with the idea because that is true because he doesn’t even know the girl properly; he just has an idea of who she is and he is crazy about that idea only.

These perceptive ideas is what makes the basis of this book. After a night of adventure with Margo, he founds that she has disappeared and here he decides to go looking for her with the help of his friends. Behind this plot line hides certain stances in the story where our protagonist comes with a new understanding of who people are. They are not what they appear to be, they all have a side no one knows of but still it is there and it is a part of their life.

Isn’t it too much? I must end it now. Whoop! You must be tired reading it all. Thanks for reading. That is all I have got to share right now but for one other thing:

I have started yet another blog (no. of blogs I have- 5) particularly for my reading pursuits. You can visit and follow me at HA Reads Books. But since I started the 30 Day Challenge on this site, I will be completing it here only. But I will be posting the book reviews and other things related on the new blog from now on.

Happy Reading guys!

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Day 17: Favorite Quote from A Book

I have many favorite quotes that come from a variety of books. Some of them are:-

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (…) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

“But there was something I liked about the idea of those seeds buried so deep having at least a chance to emerge”
— Sarah Dessen

“We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.”
— Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go)

“What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.”
— Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

“No one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people. Oftentimes, we have no clue. Yet we push it just the same.”
— Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why)

“When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
— John Green (Paper Towns)

I will not write anything else but this:-

“A quote is something that grabs your heart; you feel its absence in your chest because it has been stolen by the words that you thought were written just for you.”

-HA