On my very (very) long flight to Europe, I managed to digest a book by John Green called The Fault in Our Stars. Rather shamefully, I found it in the "Young Adults" section of the Kinokuniya in Sydney. Of course - the book is classified as young adult fiction and therefore would be in the teenager section (which is incidentally next to the brightly coloured kiddy section) - but it doesn't change the small amount of shame that a 20something year old alternative wannabe feels when taking a book from that shelf.
Why am I reading a book for teenagers? Other than the fact that the book was profoundly moving and made me emotional in a way that made me slightly embarrassed during the flight, John Green, along with his brother Hank Green represent the very essence of what makes awkwardness, geekiness and nerdiness so awesome.
Below is a video that combines two otherwise annoying things into one of my favourite past-times - Twilight and being a smartass:
Why am I reading a book for teenagers? Other than the fact that the book was profoundly moving and made me emotional in a way that made me slightly embarrassed during the flight, John Green, along with his brother Hank Green represent the very essence of what makes awkwardness, geekiness and nerdiness so awesome.
Below is a video that combines two otherwise annoying things into one of my favourite past-times - Twilight and being a smartass:
A brief history - in 2006 Hank and John Green started a project called Brotherhood 2.0. The aim of the project was for the two brothers was to abandon all forms of "textual communication" (being mail, SMS, E-Mail etc.) and to communicate purely via video blog posts on Youtube.
Such was the magnetic geeky charm of Hank and John Green that over the years of 2006 and 2007 the video channel gained popularity in it's own right - that is, beyond the novelty of the project. Thus evolved the Vlogbrothers. A quick skim of their youtube channel and it becomes clear how hard it is to resist their geeky charm. As their video blogging has evolved they've gotten a solid grasp on how to pace vlogs and keep people entertained.
More to the point though - to almost literally a legion of fans (dubbed "Nerdfighters"), they have become champions of geekiness and awkwardness everywhere. Hank and John were the awkward kids who sat in the corner, read books instead of playing sports, got beat up by the jocks and all those other nerd clichés. Except they grew up without growing up. Their Vlog is a celebration of harmless intellectualism. The kind of intellectualism that makes you wonder why barns are uniformly red and what happens when a completely physically inept human being attempts to tear down a wall.
Hell - it's worth subscribing to their channel just to get an explanation on the importance of the Higg's Boson that not only is entertaining, but actually stays somewhat true to the physics:
But back to where this post started - The Fault in Our Stars.
John Green (the elder brother) makes his living by writing novels - and good ones at that. And the reason why his novels are so good is for the aforementioned reasons for which his and Hank's Vlogging is so engaging.
The Fault in Our Stars portrays young teenage cancer patient, Hazel Grace and her romance with Augustus Waters, an equally young recently recovered cancer patient. What follows is a story that is brutally honest and quite profoundly moving on a very visceral and emotional level.
The beauty of the portrayal of the tragedy in Hazel's life is in the manner-of-fact way in which Green portrays her condition. The struggles of cancer take on a uniquely cynic-but-sweet twist which could only be achieved through the eyes of young sassy teenager. Hazel, despite her age, has come to a thorough acceptance of her condition. Even then, she isn't portrayed as the clichéd bright 'trooper' or the emotionally distraught heroine you might come to expect. She accepts that she will die, though she chooses not to give into becoming chipper and to attack every day 'like her last'. She treats her life with a maturity, that is incidentally made terribly fragile by how young she is. With this attitude, Green does an amazingly good job of making her honest and relatable whilst putting her through an experience that almost none of us have gone through.
What comes through in this novel, and his others (Looking for Alaska, Will Grayson, Will Grayson and others which I have still to read) is that same celebration of being the awkward teenager. Hazel Grace defeats the sadness of her situation with craziness and a weird, meandering imagination I get quite a lot. There's a subtle honest optimism to his writing which seems to resonate not only with myself but all of Nerdfighteria.
Even in a book with subject matter as potentially depressing as The Fault in Our Stars, John Green in his writing and his Vlogging scream a message of meaningful enthusiasm for the world. It's ok to be 30something year old nerd who loves Harry Potter and gets excited about science you don't understand. To Hank and John - the world is a giant playground where its ok for two married men to engage in a noodle war. More people could do with that kind of attitude.
The final pages of The Fault in Our Stars moved me to tears, but it left me with more faith in the ability for people to be happy than before I read it.
