The Fault in Our Stars - John Green (1)

I've just read "The Fault in Our Stars" by John Green, a book that I wanted to read since last summer when I found out about it. I then pre-ordered it. I didn't know I was going to move to Berlin at this time so the book arrive back in Stockholm and got sent here from there. This book has traveled quite a bit.

I read it in one day. I got it yesterday afternoon and was done today afternoon. It's a great book. Writing about terminally ill cancer teenage and make it this fun, serious and good can't be easy but Green pulls it of. I laughed, I cried and I recognize places in Amsterdam, where parts of the books takes place.

And I have some many bookmarked pages, so let's start.

Augustus glanced away from the screen ever so briefly.

"You look nice," he said. I was wearing this just-past-the-knees dress I'd had forever.

"Girls think they're only allowed to wear dresses to formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I'm going to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him."

---

Augustus stepped toward him and looked down. "Feel better now?" he asked.

"No," Isaac mumbled, his chest heaving.

"That's the thing about pain," Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. "It demands to be felt."

---

"Why are breakfast foods breakfast foods?" I asked them. "Like, why don't we have curry for breakfast food?"

"Hazel, eat."

"But why?" I asked. "I mean, seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck in with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an eggs, boom, it's a breakfast sandwich."

Dad answered with his mouth full. "When you come back, we'll have breakfast for dinner. Deal?"

"I don't want to have 'breakfast for dinner,'" I answered, crossing knife and fork over my mostly full plate. "I want to have scrambled eggs for dinner without this ridiculous construction that scrambled eggs-inclusive meal is breakfast even when it occurs at dinnertime."

"You've gotta pick your battles in this world, Hazel," my mom said. "But if this is the issue you want to champion, we stand behind you."

"Quite a bit behind you," my dad added, and Mom laughed.

Anyway, I knew it was stupid, but I felt kind of bad for scrambled eggs.

The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (3)

"So Henry" Helen says, "we hear that you are a librarian. But you don't look like a librarian."

"Actually, I am a Calvin Klein underwear model. The librarian thing is just a front."

---

"How come you guys are up if it's nighttime?"

Alba sniffs.

"You're making coffee, so it's morning."

"Oh, it's the old coffee-equals-morning fallacy," Henry says. "There's a hole in your logic, buddy."

"What?" Alba asks. She hates to be wrong about anything.

"You are basing you conclusion on faulty data; that is, you are forgetting that your parents are coffee fiends of the first order, and that we just might have gotten out of bed in the middle of the night in order to drink MORE COFFEE."

He's roaring like a monster, maybe a Coffee Fiend.

"I want coffee," says Alba. "I'm a Coffee Fiend." She roars back at Henry. But he scoops her off of him and plops her down on her feet. Alba runs around the table to me and throws her arms around my shoulders.

"Roar!" she yells in my ear. I get up to pick up and pick Alba up. She's so heavy now.

"Roar, yourself."

I carry her down the hall and throw her onto her bed, and she shrieks with laughter. The clock on her nightstand says 4:16 a.m.

"See?" I show her. "It's too early for you to get up."

After the obligatory amount of fuss Alba settles back into bed, and I walk back to the kitchen. Henry has managed to pour us both coffee."

---

"You look perfect; a Nice Young Man."

"When in fact, I am the Punk Librarian Deluxe. Parents, beware."

The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (2)

The whole truth and nothing but the truth.

"I came from the future. I am a time traveler. In the future we a friends."

"People only time travel in movies."

"That's what we want you to believe."

"Why?"

"If everybody time traveled it would get too crowded. Like when you when to see your Grandma Abshire last Christmas and it was very, very crowded? We time travelers don't want to mess things up for ourselves, so we keep it quiet."

[...]

"You're making fun of me."

"I would never make fun of you. Why do you think I'm making fun of you?"

Clare is nothing if stubborn.

"Nobody time travels. You're lying."

"Santa time travels."

"What?"

"Sure. How do you think he gets all those presents delivered in one night? He just keeps turning back the clock a few hours until he gets down every one of those chimneys."
"Santa is magic. You're not Santa."

"Meaning I'm not magic? Geez, Louise, you're a tough customer."

"I'm not Louise."

Gone for Good - The Shins

The Shins is one of my favorite bands of all time. This is one of my favorite songs by them. Listen to it here.

Untie me, I've said no vows

The train is getting way too loud

I gotta leave here my girl

Get on with my lonely life

Just leave the ring on the rail

For the wheels to nullify

Until this turn in my head

I let you stay and you paid no rent

I spent twelve long months on the lam

That's enough sitting on the fence

For the fear of breaking dams

I find a fatal flaw

In the logic of love

And go out of my head

You love a sinking stone

That'll never elope

So get used to the lonesome

Girl, you must atone some

Don't leave me no phone number there

It took me all of a year

To put the poison pill to your ear

But now I stand on honest ground, on honest ground

You want to fight for this love

But honey you cannot wrestle a dove

So baby it's clear

You want to jump and dance

But you sat on your hands

And lost your only chance

Go back to your hometown

Get your feet on the ground

And stop floating around

I find a fatal flaw

In the logic of love

And go out of my head

You love a sinking stone

That'll never elope

So get used to used to the lonesome

Girl, you must atone some

Don't leave me no phone number there

No one belongs here more then you - Miranda July (2)

He walked around my living room, touching things that had once meant a lot to me but now seemed beside the point. I own many pieces of abstract art. He touched the art with his fingernails. He picked up a book that was lying on the floor and held it in the air between his two fingers. The subtitle of the book was Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships. I was working through it, word by word. So far I had done Keeping and was just starting on Love. I worried that by the time I got to Committed and Relationships, I would have forgotten Keeping. Not to mention Alive and all the other words. He carried the book like this, between two fingers, into the kitchen. He carefully laid it on the corner of the kitchen floor, and I said thank you and thank you and he nodded.

We don't have intercourse anymore. I'm not complaining, its my own fault. I lie there beside him and try to send signals to my vagina, but it's like trying to get cable channels on a TV that doesn't have cable. My mind requests sex, but my vagina is just waiting for the next time it has to pee. It thinks its whole job in life is to pee.

The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood (3)

I wonder which is preferable - to walk around all your life swollen up with your secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?

The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (1)

"Henry - do other people have sex as much as we do?"

Henry considers.

"Most people.. no, I imagine not. Only people who haven't known each other very long and still can't believe their luck, I would think. Is it too much?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

I say this looking at my plate. I can't believe I'm saying this; I spent my entire adolescence begging Henry to fuck me and now I'm telling him it's too much. Henry sits very still.

"Clare, I'm so sorry. I didn't realize; I wasn't thinking."

I look up; Henry look stricken. I burst out laughing. Henry smiles, a little guilty, but his eyes are twinkling.

"It's just - you know, there are days when I can't sit down."

"Well.. you just have to say. Say nothing, dear, we've already done it twenty-three times today and I would rather read Bleak House."

"And you will meekly cease and desist?"

"I did, just then didn't I? That was pretty meek."

"Yeah. But then I felt guilty."

Henry laughs.

"You can't expect me to help you out there. It may be my only hope: day after day, week after week, I will languish, starving for a kiss, withering away for want of a blow job, and after a while you will look up from your book and realize that I'm actually going to die at your feet if you don't fuck me immediately but I won't say a word. Maybe a few little whimpering noises."

"But - I don't know, I mean, I'm exhausted, and you seem...fine. Am I abnormal, or something?"

Henry leans across the table and holds out his hands. I place mine in his.

"Clare."

"Yes?"

"It may be indelicate to mention this, but if you will excuse me for saying so, your sex drive far outstrips that of almost all the women I've dated. Most woman would have cried Uncle and turned on their answering machines month ago. But I should have thought... you always seemed into it. But if it's too much, or you don't feel like it, you have to say so, because otherwise I'll be tiptoeing around, wondering if I'm burdening you with my hideous demands."

"But how much sex is enough?"

"For me? Oh, God. My idea of the perfect life would be if we just stayed in bed all the time. We could make love more or less continuously, and only get up to bring in supplies, you know, fresh water and fruit to prevent scurvy, and make occasional trips to the bathroom to shave before diving back into bed. And once in a while we could change the sheets. And go to the movies to prevent bedsores."

Dash & Lily's book of dares - Levithan & Cohn.

Some month ago I read this book. I love both Levithan(best young adult writer in our time!) and Cohn as writers and when they put their heads together they're even better. The Christmas in New York,the dares, Dash's yogurt addiction, that they spend much time at Stand and all that Levithan & Cohn write about is just genius.

I got remained about this book when I read a Swedish blog about it and also reminded about a quote in that book that I loved and laughed about way to long about in a train.

"You were in Sweden?" Boomer asked.

"No," I said. "The trip got called off at the last minute. Because of political the unrest."

"In Sweden?" Priya seemed skeptical.

"Yeah-isn't it strange how the Times isn't covering it? Half the country's on strike because of that thing the crown prince said about Pippi Longstocking, Which means no meatballs for Christmas, if you know what I mean."

"That's so sad!" Boomer said.”