Reading

The best gift you can give a person is the gift of unconditional love. I think that's what someone said one time. 

But right after that, the greatest gift you can give is the one of reading and knowledge. 

Seriously, a book is the best gift in the entire world. It's an adventure that can fit in your pocket (or purse). It's a friend you can turn to. It's a story that never grows old. 

Reading is one of the great joys of life. Right behind napping. And, we should probably throw eating in there too, because seriously, who doesn't enjoy eating? 

Only lately, I find it hard to. Enjoy reading that is. I've been so starved for pleasure reading lately that I devour it as soon as it's handed to me, like a homeless and starving man eating his first meal in years. Literally, that's how I've felt while reading the last two works of fiction that I read. 

I like to read though provoking books--at least, I think they're thought provoking, others might disagree. Oftentimes though, these thoughtful, provocative, insightful story lines are often quite sad, and between the pages of my found friend, I often encounter disease, destruction, and death. 

A common theme/sample story line is as follows: person is living life, person is thrown some sort of terrible curveball, person either overcomes obstacle, dies, or does both, end of story. 

This bothers me. Why is it that to be remembered or revered in our society, one must first die? Why can't we celebrate and commemorate the living as well? For that matter, why can't we simply appreciate the normal lives as well as the extraordinary ones? 

But, I digress. I just finished John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. And what a lovely book. Although, I'm sure my boyfriend who sat on the couch next to me while I read (and sobbed) on Saturday night would disagree, it was beautiful and brilliant. Really, to simply say it's a "lovely book" is jipping it. I remember beeing barely a hundred pages in and already feeling like I was living another life, like I was friends with Augustus and Hazel Grace. I was on the edge of my seat, flipping the pages ferociously, glancing at the clock as the morning passed, knowing I need to go but being unable to tear myself away from the saga of their lives. 

TFIOS is about living. It's also about cancer and dying, but to steal a line from the book "dying is simply a side effect of living . . . there will come a time when we're all dead . . ." And that resonated with me. I don't know why really, I guess it's just that in the last year my whole perspective on dying has changed. It used to be this abstract concept that I knew existed, but never really thought about it effecting me, you know? It was something that eventually happened, sure, but that eventually was far off and something that didn't need to be addressed anytime soon. 

Lately, things have happened in my own life though that have made me realize that death is a lot closer than we may realize at times and that our own morality is a lot more frail than we could (or would like to) imagine. And that's a scary and heavy thought. But it's even scarier and a harder pill to swallow when you're not prepared for it. Not only prepared for your own morality, but also accepting and prepared for the morality of others. That's advice from someone in my life I respect and love very much--"you gotta prepare or you'll go crazy". I'm not sure it's possible to prepare as much as that person makes it out to be . . . but I'll give it a shot anyway. 

This next part is going to sound selfish, but this whole new perspective I'm talking about? I'm not so sure it's a great thing. It makes me feel like a jaded, pessimistic, and defeated person. And also, it's made it extremely hard to enjoy a book like TFIOS. There was a time where I would have once gobbled this book up like it was my last meal or like a toddler eats a melting ice cream sundae (see how I'm tying the food in with the reading from earlier? Both essential to life, I'm telling ya), now I can only gently sip on it, just like Hazel Grace sips and sucks on those ice cubes at one point in the book, reading something like this is difficult now. 

At the beginning of the book we first meet Hazel Grace who originally had thyroid cancer that since the original diagnosis, has spread to her lungs. She instantly made me laugh with her dry wit and dark humor. She acts so blase; yet (thanks to the nature of reading) we as readers are allowed a raw insight to her mind and we realize she's actually dying inside (okay, maybe not the best choice of words right there . . .). 

There's this line in the book where she states that she doesn't "want to be anyone's grenade". Hazel Grace doesn't let very many people in. She constantly is shutting people out and not allowing anyone to grow close to her, so that when she finally does "dip out", her death will hurt the least amount of people possible. That resonated with me. 

We all feel this way at times, don't we? We work so hard our entire lives to please people and make the people we love happy, sometimes at the sacrifice of our own happiness (think of how you want to please your parents or teachers growing up). Then, we grow up and suddenly we're allowed to make our own decisions and such and . . . well, it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming as we start realizing the full implications of our decisions and how much of a domino effect each aspect of our lives can have on another. I think we all try our hardest to keep those dominoes from falling and knocking into a grenade. Whether we're dying or not (although, Hazel Grace is quick to remind us we're all dying technically), one of the main goals in our human lives and due to our human nature is to not hurt the people around us that we love the most and hold dear. 

Then, the book took a turn. The entire time I'd been mentally preparing myself for Hazel Grace to kick it. But this is suddenly when we learn that Augustus' cancer (that was eighty percent curable and remission) is back. I wasn't prepared for this at all. Darn you, John Green! But, it's great that Augustus' death snuck up on me so quickly that I barely had time to prepare because in my opinion--regardless (and contradictory to a previous statement about preparation)--that's life. You can't adequately prepare for it. It'll never be enough. Life will still best you every single time. 

This real, resonating feeling . . . I think that that's exactly the sort of feeling a book should leave you with. After finishing, one should feel a rush of excitement  a satisfying feeling of being full and content. Even that feeling of confusion, sadness, and of lost innocence (which sucks at times) all all important and necessary. A good book should linger, the lessons it taught should stag with you forever, just like the memories of a tantalizing meal stick with taste-buds (and you waste-line) forevermore.