Watch the movie and go on the Ultimate Road Trip this summer with the cast of Paper Towns.
They cast is doing an actual tour and voting ended June 15th. Cross our fingers that your state got enough votes for a visit.
You should really check out the Paper Towns Movie Website because it has many cool things to explore about the movie.
Paper Towns is rated PG-13 and I for one am really excited for this one. John Green is the Author and he also wrote The Fault In Our Starsand he was very involved with the making of the movie. I think all movies where the author is more involved are always better than if they are not.
The same two guys who wrote the screenplay for The Fault in Our Stars also wrote this screenplay, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. And it is said on IMDB that John Green's other bookLooking for Alaska is currently "in development" so this book might also become a move.
Cross your fingers.
"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."
—The Fault in Our Stars
I found this rad website where they pull "LOOKS FROM BOOKS" and I just had to share Hazels "outfit" inspired by the picnic with Augustus and dinner in Amsterdam!
See all of the outfits inspired by The Fault in Our Stars at College Fashion!
Side note: I used half portabella mushrooms and half shitake mushrooms and I also added green peas at the end for a bit of color.The user comments say to cut the mushroom amount in half I did that. Omit the dry wine, I didn't want it to have a fermented after taste. Celestial salad:
Lisa was the big quiz winner and won a gift certificate to "Oranjee!" THAT would have been awesome right? The certificate was actually for ORANGE LEAF but I thought it was a genius alternative to the real restaurant. ;)
"This is a book that breaks your heart -- not be wearing it down, but by making it bigger and bigger until it bursts."
Q: I read The Fault in Our Stars right when it came out and it has really stuck with me. It's just an incredibly challenging topic to write about, and I thought it was done very intelligently and empathetically. But I'm curious why you wanted to even try to write a book about young people who have cancer, and how that idea got lodged in your head.
A: Well many years ago I worked as a student chaplain at a children's hospital, and I think it got lodged in my head then. The kids I met were funny and bright and angry and dark and just as human as anybody else. And I really wanted to try to capture that, I guess, and I felt that the stories that I was reading sort of oversimplified and sometimes even dehumanized them. And I think generally we have a habit of imagining the very sick or the dying as being kind of fundamentally other. I guess I wanted to argue for their humanity, their complete humanity.
So that was the initial inspiration.
That took 12 years. I was very intimidated by it.
Q: I am wondering whether, since the book came out, you've gotten any reactions from young people who are sick with a terminal illness. Have they read the book? What have you heard from them?
A: Yeah. They've been very generous. That was something that really scared me -- was thinking about what sick kids in particular would think about the book, and whether they would feel like it was just another, for lack of a better term, bullshit cancer book. And they've been really generous. You know, I tried really hard to listen to as many voices as I could as closely as possible during the many years that I was working on this book, and to pay attention and not to bring my own expectations too much into the story.
A lot of them have felt like there were things that I got right that were important to them, and that means a lot to me. That's in some ways the most rewarding part of having written the book is being able to meet a lot of young people who are struggling with this and knowing that their life expectancy is different from what we in our contemporary culture associate a rich or full or good life.
The truth is, or at least the argument of the book is, I think, that a short life can also be a good life.
I was crying when I wrote it too.
Q: You said that TFIOS was once a very different book. What was it like? Was it always about two kids with cancer?
A: It was about like a dozen kids with cancer who created a club called the Dead Person’s Society in a cave (ridiculous) near the children’s hospital (doubly ridiculous) and they’d sneak out of the hospital together and visit the cave and convene the DPS (triply ridiculous).
It was basically a very flimsy, high-concept way of allowing me to think through my own thoughts and angers about death and suffering and so on. It was not good.
Q: You have in both Gus and Hazel characters who come off as kind of "wise beyond their years," I guess would be the cliche. Do you think that is a response to the experiences that they've had, or do you think we just tend to underestimate young people in general?
A: I will say that the people who say that Gus and Hazel come off as wise beyond their years are invariably adults. I've literally never heard that from a teenager -- not just about these kids but about any kids in my books. Yeah, my interest as a writer is not in reflecting actual human speech, which, of course, does not occur in sentences and is totally undiagrammable. That's not my interest. My interest is in trying to reflect the reality of experience -- how we feel when we talk to each other, how we feel when we're engaging with questions that interest us.
So, yeah, certainly, teenagers don't sound that way when they talk to us. Like, they don't sound that way *to us*. But they do sound that way to themselves. And that's what interests me. I'm trying to capture that, because I'm not really interested in capturing how they actually sound, because that's not their experience.
The reality of experience is ultimately a lot more interesting to me than what I think is sort of wrongly called "objective reality." Because I don't actually think objective reality is a thing -- certainly not a very interesting thing for fiction, I don't think.
Q: I saw that there is a movie version in the works. I'd like to know your thoughts on it, whether you've been involved in any of the early stages ...
A: Yeah, I'm involved. They've shared every draft of the script with me -- the script is amazing, so I don't have a ton to say about it. I mean, I have a ton to say about it, but ... They've certainly listened to everything that I've said really closely. I feel like I've gotten to know the screenwriters quite well. And I'm really, really, really a huge fan of the director... I think he's brilliant. I think he understands the book in a really profound way. I think he's really committed to the stories, and that's a special and rare thing out there in Hollywood.
Q: And I was wondering, beyond family expansion, whether you have any up-and-coming projects you're working on right now that you think Fault in Our Stars fans would like to hear about.
A: I'm sure you'd like to hear about me writing another book, but I'm not writing one. I'm working a lot on YouTube stuff. We have an educational program called Crash Course that my brother and I have both really thrown ourselves into in the last year, and that we're really passionate about. That's taking up a lot of my time. I'm just starting to write -- I've been saying that for six months but it's true now -- so hopefully I'll finish something in the next few years.
The next few questions were taken from John Greens Q&A about TFIOS
Q. Deep down, do you have a sense of when Hazel dies? (Since the book ends abruptly)
Do you picture her inevitably dying young or living to be older?
A: No.
It’s not my book. It’s your book. I don’t make decisions about things that happen outside the text of the book; I can’t read something that isn’t there any more than you can.
Anyway, there is no definitive way to end it or any other book. No story is ever over, because every human life ripples into every other one, and there is no way to end a story definitively and the search for a definitive end is (imho) the wrong search.
Q. How do I convince someone to read TFIOS of they are convinced that it will be too sad?
A: Yeah, this is going to be a big problem for the life of the book, particularly because what people say about the book is, “I cried so much.” Well, a lot of potential readers hear that and think, “Huh, well I don’t like crying, so I think I’ll pass on this one.” Of course, it’s all about the KIND of crying one is doing, and whether one is grateful to have had the experience of reading the book. (I mean, I guess TFiOS is sad, but I hope that it is also funny and joyful etc.)
I would tell them that if they don’t enjoy reading the book they can punch you hard once in the stomach.
Q. How do I explain to someone that this is more than just a book about cancer?
A: It seems like this will be the biggest obstacle the book faces in terms of reaching new readers. A lot of people (myself included) don’t like to read sad books that will make them cry. They figure, not wrongly, that there is plenty of sadness and crying in real life.
This is why I advocate the “If you don’t like this book, you can punch me in the stomach” tactic for sharing The Fault in Our Stars with your friends.
“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.”
-from Fault in our Stars-
TITLE OF THE BOOK: The Fault in Our Stars AUTHOR: John Green NUMBER OF PAGES: 336 YEAR PUBLISHED: 2012 READING LEVEL: Young Adult (Ages 14 +) GENRE: Realistic Fiction
SUMMARY:At
16, Hazel Grace Lancaster, a three-year stage IV–cancer survivor,
is clinically depressed. To help her deal with this, her doctor sends
her to a weekly support group where she meets Augustus Waters, a
fellow cancer survivor, and the two fall in love. Both kids are
preternaturally intelligent, and Hazel is fascinated with a novel
about cancer called An Imperial Affliction. Most particularly, she
longs to know what happened to its characters after an ambiguous
ending. To find out, the enterprising Augustus makes it possible for
them to travel to Amsterdam, where Imperial’s author, an expatriate
American, lives.
Delicious Reads Star Rating: 4.25 out of 5
OUR GROUP REVIEW:Brittanie presented us with a fabulous PowerPoint presentation (see it here) including a 10 question quiz, review of the main characters (Hazel and Augustus), photos of Amsterdam and the Anne Frank House, and great discussion questions. After eating our fabulous meal, we got down to business.
Overall, the group loved the book, some
even giving it a 5 star rating. We were glad to hear that it will be
soon made into a movie (2014).We thought it was interesting that the
author John Green worked as a chaplain at a children's hospital.
John's experiences with patients and their families during intense
crises solidified his desire to write for teens about the challenge
of confronting loss.
Here are the questions we discussed and our group's answers:
1. Augustus inquires about Hazel's
background and tells her, "Don't tell me you're one of those
people who becomes their disease." In what ways do Augustus,
Hazel and Isaac fight to keep cancer from defining who they are? How
do they work to prevent it from consuming all aspects of them?
They used sarcasm as a means to cope.
They were veterans of disease - didn't
want it to be who they were.
Sense of humor: They joked about
things being a "side effect" of …
Brittany talked
about her mother-in-law's battle with cancer
2. Why does Hazel feel so desperate to find out what happens
beyond the ending of An Imperial Affliction? What does this indicate
about her need for understanding about what comes "after"?
Hazel needed to know what would happen
to her family (worried about her mom "I'm not going to be a mom
anymore")
She projects the book on her own life.
3. John Green derives his book's title from a famous line in
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in
our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." What
does the line mean, and why would Green have used it for his title?
Even more important, why would he have altered it to read, "The
fault in our stars" rather than ourselves? How does Green's
meaning differ from Shakespeare's?
We didn't choose to
have cancer (some do). No one is immune, we can't blame, we just
have to accept it .
4. What do you think about Peter Van
Houten, the fictional author of An Imperial Affliction?
John Green, has said that Van Houten is a "horrible, horrible
person but I have an affection for him." Why might Green have
said that? What do you think of Van Houten?
He was like a cartoon character, not
real person.
He was kind of a weirdo.
You felt pity once you
found out about his daughter.
He was the opposite of
hazel/Augustus.
Touched on the topic of parents splitting up when
children die.
5. What do you think of Hazel's idea of being a "grenade"?
Do you think it's better of her to not involve herself more so to
incur less casualties?
It's crazy to think that they are all
just kids and have to face this. We liked this metaphor, but felt
bad for Hazel.
Even though they are so young, Gus stuck by
Caroline (his past girlfriend) through her bad attitude and
behavioral changes the tumor caused her.
Some people can't face
grenades - We all loved the egging of Isaac's girlfriends car.
(Side question: What about
Augustus/Hazel making love in Amsterdam?
Everyone loved it –
especially Hazel's note with the circles.)
6. What did you make of the book's humor? Is it appropriate...or
inappropriate? Green has said he "didn't want to use humor to
lighten the mood" or "to pull out the easy joke" when
things got hard. But, he said, he likes to write about "clever
kids, [and they] tend to be funny even when things are rough."
Is his use of humor successful? How did it affect the way you read
the book?
I was our favorite part of book –
refreshing. Humor can be a good way to handle it. We all got a kick
out of the “literal heart of Jesus” therapy group - joking about
Ball-less Patrick.
7. Why does Augustus write Hazel a eulogy before he dies? Why
doesn't he present her with the ending of An Imperial Affliction
instead?
We write the end of our own story. He
wanted her live her life in the now (not be worried about mom or
dad).
We enjoyed the quote: “The marks humans leave are too often
scars.”
8. Does Peter Van Houten actually care about
Hazel and Augustus? Why do you think he feels the need to go to
Gus's funeral at the end?
He may be beyond feeling (he lost his
daughter, gave up on life, used drinking to cope). He felt guilty.
Even though we didn't like him, we were glad he came to funeral just
to get closure. We were also happy Hazel didn't need the end of the
story from him.
9. What does Hazel learn from her relationship with Augustus? Is
it a deeper relationship than most teenage first loves, or does it
just feel that way because they have such limited time?
She learn its ok to be a grenade
(“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.”)
It was deeper than just a teenage crush.
A “side
effect of cancer” is growing up earlier.
Another loved quote:
“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.”
10. Talk about how you experienced this book? Is it too sad, too
tragic to contemplate? Or did you find it in some way uplifting?
It helped me appreciate everyday. It
was uplifting. We all will/have experienced cancer, death. The book
helped take away the awkwardness of cancer. It was just a part of their
life. We all want to live, love, feel normal.
Some of
our favorite quotes:
“Grief does not change you,
Hazel. It reveals you.”
“I fell in love the way you fall
asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
“Some people don't understand the
promises they're making when they make them," I said. "Right,
of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is.
Love is keeping the promise anyway.”
“There are infinite numbers
between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite
collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of
numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities
are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us
that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my
unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God,
I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my
love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I
wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the
numbered days, and I'm grateful.
CONTENT:
LANGUAGE/PROFANITY: Heavy (30+
swear words, sh**, f***, etc.) SEXUALITY: Moderate/Heavy (Not
necessarily explicit, but one sex scene, lots of talk of losing
virginity and joking about getting laid)
DRUG/ALCOHOL USE: Moderate
(Augustus always has cigarette in mouth, though he never actually
smokes it, underage drinking)
INTENSE/SCARY SCENES: Heavy (Not
freaky scary, just intense issues with cancer and dying)
