Paper Towns - Just Maybe the Best Book I’ve ever Read

I don’t say this lightly. I don’t say this because I’m getting paid to say it. I’m saying this because I mean it. If you read one book this year, read Paper Towns by John Green.

I’ve been watching John and his brother Hank on their YouTube channel, vlogbrothers, for almost two years now. Maybe you know what it feels like when you become attached to your favorite sitcom cast (like Friends or Seinfeld) or you believe you intimately know the characters of your favorite book series (like Harry Potter); real or not, you. know. them. Half way through the Brotherhood 2.0 project I did begin to think of John and Hank as friends. I may not know the inner workings of their mind, but I felt happy every time their little faces popped up on my youtube subscriptions page.

Paper Towns came alive for me like no other book has before it. I could pick out the intimate parts of John and the superficial ones. I can remember pieces over the course of last year from Brotherhood 2.0 that in some fashion made their way into the landscape of Paper Towns.

That’s not to say that Paper Towns won’t come alive if you’ve never seen a John Green video. It will and it does.

I don’t at all want to focus on plot, because I don’t want to give too much away. I want to focus on theme. How well can you know a person? Sympathy and Empathy are the tools, but there are always understandings and misrepresentations in what you believe about someone else. This starts with the cover of the book. There are two, and they’re two very different emotions and representations of the same model. Neither are wholly accurate a picture of the character she represents – Margo Roth Spiegelman.

In reality, we all have a Margo Roth Spiegelman. Someone who perhaps we hold a little too high on a platform. Someone who we believe to know the inner workings of their mind. A person who we believe we know better than the person him/herself.

We have people who are shades of Margo. People who we judge and put into categories. We do this regardless of what age we are; from the moment we’re able to form our own opinions we begin to organize people into their “proper” groups. Rarely are these groups accurate.

There are twists and turns along the journey to discover that truth, to discover the meaning behind Paper Towns. During one part in particular, I was crying on one page and immensely angry at John for what I was reading, only to turn the page and have my tears turned into laughter. I felt surprise and wonder at how closely my reactions to the words on the page mirrored the characters and their emotions.

John’s writing works like few young adult writers are able to do. Usually, you can see how the story ends before the book does. Usually, you’re pulling from knowledge of story devices and story clichés to come to your conclusions. I’m a well educated reader and writer, but every time I pulled from my previous story experiences I was wrong.

Read Paper Towns. Discover Paper Towns. Then, look around and see your world come to life.