who says you have to be crowded into the living room, kitchen, and/or dining room to hold a book club? we are ladies of the 21st century. we don’t need no stinkin’ couches. so pull up a blog and join in the conversation.
the members of the BOOK HUNGRY are (alphabetically): patty blount, kelly breakey, karla nellenbach, vanessa noble, alyson peterson, cynthia reese, elizabeth ryann, and myself. here’s the deal. we pick a book to read. we discuss via email. we post a review on our individual blogs on the same day (3rd thursday of the month). we link to each other. done. i know, genius. click on each one of their names (above) and it’ll take you to their review. browse. enjoy.
this month’s BOOK HUNGRY selection is:
AN ABUNDANCE OF KATHERINES by john green
what it’s about from amazon: When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton’s type is girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact. On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washedup child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy–loving best friend riding shotgun—but no Katherines. Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl. Love, friendship, and a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke add up to surprising and heart-changing conclusions in this ingeniously layered comic novel about reinventing oneself.
my opinion: i’m glad i finished this book, but i have to admit, getting to the end took some work. i’ve read a couple of john green books, but the only one i liked so far was the one he wrote with david levithan (WILL GRAYSON, WILL GRAYSON). this story was interesting and colin was quirky in a very endearing way, but there was a lot of math in this book. i don’t like math and i’m certainly not a prodigy like colin is, so a lot of what he said was over my head.
it’s a good thing colin’s best friend hassan was a trip. the perfect foil for colin. he kept the story from getting too serious and yet, he was part of a scene that was one of the deepest in the book. AND I LIKED IT.
the pacing of the story was rather slow, but it was more that i wasn’t interested per say in the story. i could put the book down (and i did) and i wasn’t tempted to pick it back up. in fact, i read three books on my kindle app (ON MY PHONE) before i could bring myself to finish this story. however, as i said in the beginning, it was the end that made this book worth it. the transformations were well earned and even though i saw the ending from a mile away (and i rarely ever know what’s going to happen before it does), it still brought a smile to my face.
and this is why i love being part of a book group. even though i wasn’t in love with the book, it was challenging and knowing the other ladies were reading it too got me to finish this book, which ultimately, i did like.
p.s. i love the cover. just had to point that out.
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Abigail Mumford 
Yeah, but…math. I dunno about this one. Might have to give it a pass after all.
it is daunting at first, but john green does a wonderful job of containing it colin’s character and thinking back upon it, the math is kind of awesome in how it’s used — aka, colin tries to create a formula to predict how a romance (between two specific people) will turn out. he’s applying his strengths (math) to his weaknesses (girls named katherine, romance) and the result is a surprising combination of both.
wow, now i sound like i’m for this book!
see…i kind of liked the math in the book. it gave this extra insight into how Colin looked at himself, the world, and life.
but, well. that’s me.
this book did surprise me because, as i mentioned in the phone call, i felt all sorts of nostalgia for it when we were talking about it. it caught me off guard. and yes, even the math parts seemed logical and romantical and awesome after the fact. john green, how did you do that?