Paper Towns & The Rosie Project

I can't decide which one of these books to talk about first. The Rosie Project was by far my favorite of anything I've read in 2014, so I think I'll talk about that one first.

The Rosie Project is another book I read with a very different narrator than any other story I've read before! I'm reading a lot of those lately! See my post on The One and Only Ivan, where the narrator is a gorilla, and then I'm currently reading The Book Thief, where the narrator is Death. So this book is narrated by Don Tillman. The way he is described in the book's description is "a brilliant yet socially challenged professor of genetics who has decided it's time he found a wife." It sounds kinda weird, but if you watch Big Bang Theory, you will immediately identify with him as someone similar to Sheldon Cooper, except with a little more flexibility and understanding of appropriate social cues, even if he doesn't always follow them. Maybe I loved this because I love Sheldon on Big Bang so much, I'm not sure, but I just found the whole story so endearing! He decided to take a wife and then created a questionnaire to use to eliminate people who just aren't compatible. The process of finding a wife and in the middle of developing this friendship with Rosie, who doesn't fit anything he's looking for in a wife, is just so fun and adorable. I really enjoyed it. I can't say enough about it. I loved seeing the world through Don's eyes for a while and I found him just really funny! I laughed out loud when Rosie takes him on an impromptu drive to the coast in a convertible and he just starts telling you that he's going to enter that pattern of thinking that he only uses when he's at the dentist. I just found all of his little quirks to be so funny. I really loved this and I think you will, too - whoever you are!!

Paper Towns is my first book I've ever read by John Green. It was on the NPR Best Young Adult Novels list, which is where I have to find several books for my annotated bibliography in my Young Adult and Children's Literature grad school class. So I have a couple more John Green novels on my list to read. I'm not sure what attracted me to this book as far as which one to start with of his, but I think it had something to do with the mystery aspect of it and the search to find someone who has disappeared. I did enjoy following all the clues and figuring out what had happened to Margo Roth Spiegelman, but more than anything, I enjoyed the idea that the book is about discovering who we really are and about discovering the truth about people who have maybe idealized in our minds. We all remember high school and having this perfect picture in our mind of our crush and what they are really like. This book just dove into what it looks like when that picture unravels and not because there is anything specifically wrong with them, but because there's something wrong with everybody. We're all flawed. Nobody is really perfect and learning to love and appreciate people is learning to see them for who they really are and accept them there. I loved that theme in this book. I enjoyed reading about the change in relationships between some of the characters and just about the discovery of who we all really are in general. It makes me excited to pick up another one of his books!

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion Paper Towns by John Green