The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
Details: Copyright 2006, Penguin Books LTD
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap: "Katherine V thought boys were gross
Katherine X just wanted to be friends
Katherine XVIII dumped him in an e-mail
K-19 broke his heart
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, washed-up 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."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Nearly two years ago, I finally gave John Green a chance with Looking For Alaska and I'm so glad I did. Last year I read The Fault in Our Stars and also really enjoyed it. Green's ability to write authentic, interesting teenagers has made me want to go through his bibliography, which is what I'm doing.
How I Liked It: It's happened again. Here we are, not even ten books in to this new year, and already the books (or more accurately, some of what I'm taking from them) are talking to one another. I recently explored the reputations authors can get for writing in a certain genre (and how the transition to a new genre can go) and here again is a case of a book with an author with a not insignificant reputation, particularly to me as so far the only books I've read of his are (apparently) his most successful, famous, and acclaimed. How does an apparently lesser-known (compared to Alaska and Stars, anyway) book like this fare? We shall see!
But first as always, let's meet our characters. WARNING FOR SPOILERS! Colin Singleton, child prodigy, recent high school graduate, and current dumped party (dumped in his nineteenth relationship with a Katherine, but there's not nineteen Katherines in all and he wasn't dumped by all of them-- you'll see) is miserable about his recent break-up. His parents don't know what to do and his best (and it's suggested only) friend Hassan, similarly smart but more socially adept than Colin, suggests a summer road trip to clear his mind. Colin is reluctant but eventually off they go.
Whilst driving somewhere, anywhere out of their Chicago suburbs, they run through the South (Hassan expresses concern for stopping given that he's Arab American and Muslim (he frequently introduces himself with "I'm not a terrorist.") and Colin is half-Jewish, with an oft-mentioned Jew-fro) and see an advertisement for the supposed final resting place of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This leads them even further into the rural sticks, in (wait for it) Gutshot, Tennessee.
Whilst pulling up to the generally unimpressive general store that supposedly houses the Archduke's remains, their tour guide turns out to be a teenage store clerk that's "not so much pretty as interesting-looking" (pg 31) but boy is she interesting (and charming). Her name is Lindsay Lee Wells, and her mom runs the store and most of the town. After an injury Colin sustains on the "tour", the three return to the general store and Lindsay's mother, Hollis recognizes Colin as the child genius from the obscure kids game show on which he briefly appeared (the idea of Keith, his first tutor, and father of the very first Katherine) and after speaking to Colin's parents, Colin and Hassan will stay with her and Lindsay (in their giant mansion of a house) and work for Hollis for the summer, earning a nice paycheck collecting oral history from the town's residents.
Colin, still coping with his break-up (he calls Katherine a few times and frantically checks his phone for missing calls) and trying to work out a theorem to explain his break-up, has enough time to wander through flashbacks of the Katherines as well as try to lobby Hassan to enter college, something Hassan (who has rich but strict parents) is reluctant to do. As for Lindsay, she's a bit of a cypher. She has a boyfriend, a handsome, not terribly bright athlete also called Colin who both Main Character Colin and Hassan deem The Other Colin (or TOC). She also has a personality that seems to change relevant to whom she's speaking. The residents of the town whom Colin and Hassan meet on their work all seem to love her and praise her good heart. Colin and Hassan find a younger picture of Lindsay, bedecked uncomfortably in a variety of sub-cultures, and she's so unrecognizable they think it's her sister. She's a giggling princess with TOC and his like-minded popular friends, and down to earth and geeky with Colin and Hassan. Which is the real Lindsay? Down the line in her friendship with Colin, Lindsay acknowledges this discrepancy and talks about being viciously bullied as a child by the very boy she would then set out to make her boyfriend (TOC). She tried out different identities before studying how to become popular (through a very geeky formula) and replicating it. But she realizes she's not attracted to TOC, and was just making a point in getting him to date and fawn over her when he once bullied her. Which is convenient, as he's been cheating on her with one of their friends, Popular Girl Katrina, who has shown an interest in Hassan and is the first girl Hassan has kissed, let alone made out with (due to his religious beliefs, he's waiting until marriage and before Katrina, didn't like the idea of dating a girl he wouldn't marry).
Colin, in his consideration of the Katherines (it's revealed that the first Katherine was also the nineteenth; they reconnected as teenagers and it's this Katherine Colin is missing throughout the book) realizes that he actually dumped one of the Katherines, thereby throwing off his whole theorem and general unhealthy way of coping with the breakup. Colin decides to take a chance with Lindsay, and Hassan decides to take a chance with college, and there's a minor reveal about Lindsay's mother and her relationship with the town.
The book attempts to run the theme of a missing piece throughout, including literally naming the beautiful (and FAR superior to The Giving Tree) Shel Silverstein book about relationships and fulfillment (which Colin as a child completely misunderstands), Colin feeling like he's been gutted since the break-up, the name of the town (Gutshot), and the literal Archduke Ferdinand (although interestingly, it was his wife, not mentioned in this book, that was shot in the abdomen). The themes of missing something and missing a piece of oneself run throughout the book. It could arguably be called a coming of age novel. But compared to the past two Green books I read, with the stakes being so much drastically lower, this was bound to be a bit of a slower read, even if done well.
And certainly there is a way to do well a break-up that causes you to reevaluate your young life, particularly when that young life involves an extremely sheltered, unhealthy environment of parents (at least one of them) eagerly grooming you to be a genius, at the extent of your social development.
But that's not this book. The pace plods ridiculously, and seemingly all the things for which I'd praised Green previously, including his startlingly realistic teenagers who have other interests than their high school's social structure, have mostly vanished from this book.
Colin Singleton just isn't a very likeable main character, to put it kindly. But hey, anti-heroes and not-particularly-likeable main characters can still be fascinating to read about, right? Yes, in theory! But Colin is just plain pretty insufferable, and any amount of sympathy you might garner for his rotten upbringing disappears at how obnoxious he is and his level of self-absorption.
John Green enters male author territory pretty hardcore in this book and possibly this is meant to be facet of Colin's character, but whether the fictional Colin Singleton thinks like this or 2006 John Green did, it's gross, particularly for a YA novel:
After a relentlessly greasy Monster Thickburger in the empty restaurant, Colin asked the woman behind the cash register, whose body seemed to have suffered from perhaps a few too many meals at her place of employment, how to get to Franz Ferdinand's grave. (pg 28)
Seriously. Ew.
"We get a lot of foreign tourists here," said the only girl besides Lindsay, who was tall and thoroughly Abercrombified in her tight tank top. The girl also had-- how to put this politely-- gigantic gazoombas. She was incredibly hot-in that popular-girl-with-bleached-teeth-and-ano
rexia kind of way, which was Colin's least favorite was of being hot. (pgs 51 and 52)
I'm actively rooting for Colin to keep getting hurt now. Also, not-very-fun-fact that anorexia doesn't singularly look a certain way, making that a physical descriptor that's at best useless and at worst really awful.
Lindsay explains her bout of unpopularity to Colin.
"So I was ugly. I was never fat, really, and I never wore headgear or had zits or anything. But I was ugly. I don't even know how ugly and pretty get decided-- maybe there's like a secret cabal of boys who meet in the locker room and decide who's ugly and who's hot, because as far as I can remember, there was no such thing as a hot fourth-grader."
"Clearly, you never met Katherine I," interrupted Colin. (pg 67)
Remember, it's only boys who get to decide girls' attractiveness! Seriously? After there was a massively overrated movie that was pretty much based on the ways teenage girls bully each other as outlined by the forgotten non-fiction source book that came out only a few years before this book and was a huge success?
The act of leaning in to kiss someone, or asking to kiss them, is fraught with the possibility of rejection, so the person least likely to get rejected should do the leaning in for the asking. And that person, at least in high school heterosexual relationship, is definitely the girl. Think about it: boys, basically, want to kiss girls. Guys want to make out. Always. Hassan aside, there's rarely a time when a boy is thinking, "Eh, I think I'd rather not kiss a girl today." Maybe if a guy is actually, literally, on fire he won't be thinking about hooking up. But that's about it. Whereas girls are very fickle about the business of kissing. Sometimes they want to make out; sometimes they don't. They're an impenetrable fortress of unknowability, really. (pg 76)
Extremely tired, sexist tropes bad for all genders and no amount of slapping "heterosexual" in there as an afterthought makes up for that, Mr. Green.
Colin noticed she looked different, but not quite how, and then he saw it. No makeup. She looked prettier than she ever had before-- Colin always preferred girls without make-up. (pg 98)
REALLY rooting for Colin to get hurt again. Quickly. Gross.
Few things make me want to put on make-up like hearing how men don't like women and girls wearing make-up.
No one looked more beautiful without makeup than Katherine. She never wore it, and never needed to. (pg 99)
Note the "never needed to" part. Hypocritical grossness! And this is the main character we're supposed to care about.
And then Colin started crying again, and Lindsey crawled into the backseat and put her arm around him, and Colin's head was up against the side of her head. He tried not to sob much, because the plain fact of the matter is that boy-sobbing is exceedingly unattractive. (pg 105)
Really? "Boy-sobbing"? Not just all sobbing is unattractive?
As he worked on the Theorem, Colin was so focused that the world outside his notebook seemed not to exist, so he jolted upright in surprise when he heard, from behind him, Lindsay say, "Time for dinner, dude." He turned around to see her head peeking through the open door. She wore a blue cotton tank top with tight blue jeans, Converse All Stars, and-- as if she knew what he liked-- no makeup. She looked, well, pretty-- even not smiling. (pg 137)
"As if she knew what he liked" and that part about her looking pretty even though she's not smiling-- seriously, another injury and quick. It's been awhile since I couldn't stand a fictional character this much.
Colin saw the waiter put out his cigarette, and then he came over to their table and asked if they wanted anything more. Katherine I said no, and then she turned to Colin and said, "Do you know anything about Pythagoras?"
And Colin said, "I know his Theorem."
And she said, "No, I mean the guy. He was weird. He thought that everything could be expressed numerically, that-- like-- math could unlock the word. I mean, everything."
"What, like, even love?" Colin asked, only vaguely annoyed that she knew something he didn't. (pg 142)
See, I think Green is intending for him to be obnoxious, at least a tiny bit? I might be trying to give Green too much credit given his other work, though.
"And then that summer at camp I met K-15, who had that kind of puppy-dog face with the big brown eyes and drooping eyelids that just sort of made you want to take care of her, only she didn't want me to take care of her, because she was a very empowered feminist who liked me because she thought I was the great mind of my generation, but then she decided I would never be-- and again I'm quoting-- 'an artist,' which was apparently cause for dismissal even though I had never claimed to be an artist-- and in fact if you have listened closely you have already heard me freely admit that I suck at pottery." (pg 206)
This from the author that gave us the literary creation of proudly feminist dream girl Alaska Young who seemed to be designed to smash the super tired straw feminist tropes (looking at you, Neil Gaiman).
Also, rather than be absorbed in the myriad of aspects that make up life (Colin's random bits of arcane trivia are explained in the text as part of his child prodigy training by his overbearing father and portrayed as the social flailings of a misfit trying to fit in, not the genuine weird interests of Alaska), even social life, especially when you're not yet an adult but on your way there, for the teens of An Abundance of Katherines, not even literally being out of high school and not in a high school setting is enough to quell the obsession with high school popularity constantly (popular hot people! The most entirely important thing ever, high school social structure, including high schools that aren't even yours!) which brings me to my second disappointment. In Alaska and Stars, Green's teenagers had realistic interests as well as realistic language. While writing dialog for teenagers can be hard, Green did a fair job before, something that suffers in Katherines:
"Is this your sister?" asked Colin.
"Uh, no," she said to Colin. "I'm an only child. Can't you tell by how adorably self-involved I am?" (pg 59)
Lindsay explains her popular transformation in a way that is incredibly distressing:
"And then high school started, and I decided to make them like me. I just decided. It was so easy, dude. It was so, so easy. I just became it. If it walks like a cool kid and talks like a cool kid and dresses like a cool kid and has the right mix of naughtyandnastyandnice [sic] like a cool kid, it becomes a cool kid. But I'm not an asshole to people. There's not even really popularity at my school." (pg 67)
This one actually isn't an example of bad dialog, it's a relevant lesson. Wait for it.
"'Sup?" asked Hassan.
"Sup is not a word," answered Colin without looking up.
"You're like sunshine on a cloudy day, Singleton. When it's cold outside, you're the month of May." (pg 128)
Why yes! Hassan is quoting a popular song from 1964 and this is presumably set the year it came out, 2006. But something Stephen King apparently struggles to understand when writing for different generations, some stuff is evergreen, some isn't (and thus it's rare/remarkable for someone of a certain generation to quote/be familiar with it). A song like "My Girl" that's been used constantly in media, including and especially commercials, is pretty evergreen and therefore easy to imagine a teenager in 2006 saying.
One of the more distinctive dialog in the book for me (so much so that it stuck with me after for too long) was the fact that both Colin and Hassan say "fug" when they mean "fuck". A lot.
"And a lot of prodigies who push and push and push end up even more fugged up than me. But a few of them end up like John Locke or Mozart of whatever." (pgs 38 and 39)
"What have I done? I've won a fugging game show a year ago? That's my indelible mark on human history?" (pg 39)
"FUG!" shouted Colin, wincing, and he looked up and saw her round, brown eyes blinking away sweat as she worked. (pg 42)
Colin nodded slowly. "Yeah," he said. "I know all the senators. Also, that's an easy one to remember-- because I always think about how much your parents have to fugging hate you to name you Bainbridge Wadleigh." (pg 42)
"You're anagramming, aren't you, motherfugger?" asked Hassan. (pg 72)
At first I assumed this was Green's way of getting around the fact a YA book that actually uses the language teens tend to use (swears are fun and practice for being an adult and also you're really sticking it to authority) but skirts the censorship issue. At least, until over a hundred pages of "fug" when it's finally explained.
"I can't believe he's calling in sick," said Colin, but he started the car. "I'm fugging exhausted from staying up half the night reading a fugging book about the invention of the television, and he gets to fugging call in sick?"
"Hey, why the fuck do you and Hassan say fug all the time?"
Colin exhaled slowly, his cheeks puffing out. "Have you ever read The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer?"
"I don't even know who that is."
"American novelist. Born in 1923. I was reading him when I first met Hassan. And then later Hassan ended up reading it because it's all about war and Hassan likes action books. Anyway, it's 872 pages, and it uses the word fug or fugging or fugger or whatever about thirty-seven thousand times. Every other word is a fug, pretty much. So anyway, after I read a novel, I like to read some literary criticism of it."
"Color me surprised," she said.
"Right. Well, when Mailer wrote the book, he didn't use 'fug.' But then he sent it to publisher and they were like, 'This is a really excellent book you've written, Mr. Mailer. But no one here in 1948 is going to buy it, because it contains even more F-bombs than it does Regular Bombs.' So Norman Mailer, as a kind of fug-you to the publisher, went through his 872-page book and changed every last F-word to 'fug.' So I told Hassan the story while he was reading the book and then he decided to start staying fug as an homage to Mailer-- and because you can say it in class without getting in trouble." (pgs 119 and 120)
Eh, I'm betting I'm still right with my first impulse. A book full of fugs with only one fuck keeps it YA-friendly, I assume.
But the halting relationship to authenticity aside in both dialog and subject matter, again, the book's pacing just flat out drudges along. Again, even just a few factors tweaked here and there would've made it more tolerable (Colin is more likeable, the subplot about the town run by Lindsay's mom is stronger, the ending has a better payoff) but as it was, it felt a lot longer than its run time of 272 pages, especially when compared to Alaska and Stars which are the sort of books that glue you to your seat until you've finished.
And perhaps, that's the problem: Green's reputation. If this were written by a different author, or under a pen name, or I hadn't only read Green's more acclaimed books, what would my opinion of this have been? If this was just another YA book, would the stabs towards interesting character development play better? Would I be lauding the author for trying to save the book with the Lindsay's mom subplot? Would I point out that at least you could point to the fact it's kind of, sort of, buried-in-there a coming-of-age novel, at least a little bit? Props for the attempt at a theme? Hard to say.
But ultimately, because I do know of the genius that Green is capable of producing, this book is a huge disappointment on a number of levels. The bottom line is that the author's reputation precedes him and in this case, lesser works are made far, far lesser by comparison.
Notable: This book was written (at the time of this writing) over a decade and a half ago. In that time, we've hopefully evolved on some things and ways of thinking. That said, Green makes some choices that might make you wince in either 2006 or 2023.
Hassan calls Colin a "sitzpinkler" which if you aren't familiar, the book's footnotes have you covered.
A German word, slang for "wimp," that literally means "a man who sits to pee." Those wacky Germans-- they've got a word for everything. (pg 8)
Ooof. That's a great one to let die on a number of levels.
Both Colin and Hassan speak multiple languages, and both speak Arabic. As I mentioned, Hassan is Muslim.
"La ureed an akhsar kulla wakti min ajl watheefa. Yajib an ashtaghil ala mas'alat al-riyadiat."23
23 "The road trip has kind of sucked anyway, but I don't want the job to take my time. I need to do the Theorem."
"Can we just make sure Singleton has time to doodle?" asked Hassan in English.
"Is that some kind of gibberish?" Lindsay interrupted, incredulous.
Colin ignored her, responding in English to Hassan. "It's not doodling, which you'd know if you--"
"Went to college, right. God, so predictable," Hassan said. Then he turned to Lindsay and said, "We are not speaking gibberish. We're speaking the sacred language of the Qur'an, the language of great calipha and Saladin, the most beautiful and intricate of all human tongues."
"Well, it sounds like a raccoon clearing its throat," Lindsay noted. Colin stopped for a moment to ponder that. (pg 65)
Yikes. Also, given what took up the news in the first half-decade of the new century, wouldn't Lindsay at least have some idea of what Arabic sounded like? Particularly since she's explained in text as being a quick study of human behavior and also pretty intelligent in her own right?
Colin congratulates Hassan on his first kiss, kind of.
"It's great," Colin said after awhile. "About Katrina, I mean. You fugging kissed a girl. A girl. I mean, I always sort of thought you were gay." Colin acknowledged.
"I might be gay if I had a better-looking best friend," said Hassan.
"And I might be gay if I could locate your penis under the fat rolls."
"Bitch, I could gain five hundred pounds and you could still see Thunderstick hanging to my knees."
Colin smiled. "She's a lucky girl."
"Too bad she'll never know just how lucky unless we get married."(pgs 132 and 133)
Do I think this is in part how teenagers talk? Okay. Do I think that at least not using gay directly as an insult in 2006 is some kind of progress? Okay. Did the whole thing still sound kinda gross, especially in a YA novel? Yes.
Green has an appendix in the book explaining some of the math used, written by mathematician Daniel Biss. A certain line caught my eye.
According to Colin's thesis, the horizontal line (which we call the x-axis) represents time. The first time the curve crosses the x-axis corresponds to the beginning of the relationship, and the second crossing indicates the conclusion of the relationship. If the curve spends the intermediate time above the x-axis (as is the case in our example), then the girl dumps the boy; if, instead, the curve passes below the x-axis, that means the boy dumps the girl. ("Boy" and "girl," for our purposes, contain no gender-specific meaning; for same-sex relationships, you could as easily call them "boy1" and "boy2" or "girl1" and "girl2".) So in our diagram, the couple's first kiss is on a Tuesday, and then the girl dumps the boy on a Wednesday,. (All in all, a fairly typical Colin-Katherine affair.) (pg 219)
Okay. I know this is 2006. But gender neutral terms existed before then and you could do better.
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The book is filled with footnotes of factoids, as I said. We're going to deconstruct some of them. I'm mindful of the fact this book was published over a decade and a half ago, I promise you.
While spotting homophobic graffiti, Hassan decides to correct it and Colin starts thinking:
While Hassan worked to make God hates baguettes, Colin's mind raced like this: (1) baguettes (2) Katherine XIX (3) the ruby necklace he'd bought her five months and seventeen days before (4) most rubies come from India, which (5) used to be under control of the United Kingdom, of which (6) Winston Churchill was the prime minister, and (7) isn't it interesting how a lot of good politicians, like Churchill and also Gandhi, were bald while (8) a lot of evil dictators, like Hitler and Stalin and Saddam Hussein, were mustachioed?(pg 22)
I don't know if Green intends that Colin have ADHD, but that's certainly what it feels like. Also, I realize you can point to any world leader and find horrible things, but calling (content warning for link: racism, colonialism) Winston Churchill and (content warning for link! child sexual abuse, antisemitism, antiBlack racism, abuse) Gandhi "good" feels a bit... shortsighted.
One no longer says AD or BC. It's just not hip anymore. These days, one says either CE (for Common Era) or BCE (for Before Common Era). (pg 46)
I realize Green is being glib, but as one of the billions of people who do not belong to Christianity, I really appreciate the CE/BCE distinction.
That's absolutely true, about the [drinking] eight glasses of water of day [having no basis in science]. There's no reason whatsoever to drink eight glasses of water a day unless you, for whatever reason, particularly like the taste of water. Most experts agree that unless there's something horribly wrong with you, you should just drink water whenever you're-- get this-- thirsty. (pg 68)
While eight glasses is a myth, "drinking when you're thirsty" isn't a good option for the overworked, distracted, and neurodivergent, none of which may notice that they are in fact, thirsty. Drink regularly and keep your fluids up. If you can't remember the last time you had water, drink!
"Watcha reading there, smartypants?" asked Lindsay. Colin held up the cover. "Don Juan," she said, pronouncing the Juan like Wan. "Trying to learn how to avoid getting dumped?"
"Jew-un," Colin corrected. "It's pronounced Don Jew-un," he said.40
40 That's true. Much of the meter in Don Juan only works if you read Juan as bi-syllabic. (pg 73)
Ehhhhh, possibly, but Lindsay's pronunciation is still acceptable and not worthy of rebuke, although rebuking other people, particularly girls, appears to be one of Colin's most defining personality traits.
"Did you know that in 1887, Nikola Tesla's hair stood on end for an entire week after he passed fifty thousand volts through his body to prove that elec-"
"Kafir," Hassan said, putting his fork down on his plate. "Absolutely, completely not interesting. Now if Nikola Tesla, whoever the hell that is, had a long-term love affair with a one-legged chicken, and his chicken-lust made his hair stand on end-- then yes, by all means, share with me this bounty of hilarious history. But not electricity, kafir. You know better." (pg 98)
I feel like in 2023, awareness of Nikola Tesla has substantially increased, in part due to the company and their cars, but also just in general. And yes, the author makes note of the fact Tesla was at some point in love with a pigeon.
"They say one of you is a genius."
"I'm not a genius," Colin said dispassionately.
"Well, you're the closest thing I've got and I've got a question. How come the shower curtain always blows in when the water should be blowing it out?"
"That," Hassan acknowledged, "is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the human condition."
"Actually," Colin said, "I know." Colin smiled. It felt good to be useful again.
"No!" Hassan said. "Seriously?"
"Yeah. What happens is the water spray creates a vortex, kind of like a hurricane. And the center of the vortex-- the eye of the hurricane-- is a low-pressure area, which sucks the shower curtain in and up. This guy did a study on it. Honestly." (pg 102)
Well, kind of, maybe.
[Thomas Edison] was not a child prodigy but did end up being something of a genius. Although a lot of Edison's discoveries were not actually made by Edison. Like the lightbulb, for instance, was technically invented by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1811, but his lightbulb sort of sucked and burned out all the time. Edison improved upon the idea. Edison also stole ideas from Nikola Tesla, the aforementioned pigeon lover. (pg 110)
Edison is another garbage person on a number of levels that has been unfairly revered for decades.
Take, for instance, the curious case of George Hodel. With one of the highest IQs in the [psychologist Lewis Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius] study [of gifted children beginning in the 1920s], one might have expected Hodel to discover the structure of DNA or something. Instead, he was a fairly successful doctor in California who later lived in Asia. He never became a genius, but Hodel did manage to become infamous; he was quite probably a serial killer.57 So much for the benefits of prodigy.
57 Hodel was likely guilty of the 1947 "Black Dahlia" murder, one of the most famous and long-unsolved murder cases in California history. (He was apparently pretty good at serial killing, as one might expect of a prodigy, since he never got caught and indeed probably no one would have ever known about Hodel except his son-- true story-- became a homicide detective in California, and through a series of amazing coincidences and some pretty solid police work, became convinced that his dad was a murderer. (pgs 112 and 113)
True story, at least in the fact that George Hodel was a child prodigy study and his son, a homicide detective, came to the conclusion that he not only was likely the Black Dahlia killer, but also the Lipstick Murderer, and the Zodiac Killer (there have been subsequent books). It's not quite as cut and dry as Green makes it out to be, though, and there are those who question that Steve Hodel went down a rabbit hole at best that's coloring his judgement, and at worst is deliberately bending facts for fame and money. But it is an interesting story and given the fact George Hodel was actually accused of something (in a legal capacity) horrific (the sexual assault of his underage daughter) but was acquitted, largely due to the fact the 1940s was a pretty terrible time to be the victim of any kind of sexual abuse, or abuse in general, it does lend credence to the theory.
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Hassan and Colin juggle faith and morality:
"Well, not to start an argument, but you do all kinds of shit that is haram."
Hassan nodded. "Yeah, but the haram shit I do is, like, having a dog. It's not like smoking crack or talking behind people's backs or stealing or lying to my mom or fugging girls."
"Moral relativism," Colin said.
"No it's not. I don't think God gives a shit if we have a dog or it a woman wears shorts. I think He gives a shit about whether you're a good person." (pg 87)
I'm hoping Hassan continued on his track of questioning, so he'll see that smoking crack isn't a character flaw, it's an addiction to be treated, and having sex with girls before marriage is also not a character flaw, it's a personal choice. Lying and stealing and betraying people are character flaws and would call into question whether or not you were a good person.
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Hassan reflects on his brief time with a girlfriend and trying it again:
"Uh-uh, dude. I tried it your way with the dating and the girls and the kissing and the drama, and man, I didn't like it. Plus, my best friend is a walking cautionary tale of what happens to you when romantic relationships don't involve marriage. Like you always say, kafir, everything ends in breakup, divorce, or death. I want to narrow my misery options to divorce or death-- that's all. That said, you could do [the theorem] for me and Lindsay Lohan. I wouldn't mind converting her to Islam, if you catch my drift." (pgs 187 and 188)
The Lindsay Lohan lust is something a better book blog than this one might call "SIGNS THIS WAS PUBLISHED IN 2006".
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Much is made of Colin's former child prodigy status, but an undercurrent, and a good one that points to the author being much better than this book (and he is) is the character of Colin's father. While it's suggested his mother might be more accepting of him living a normal, certainly healthier life for his social development, it's his father that's the primary instigator of the more damaging aspects to Colin's identity, and quite possibly the reason why Colin is so insufferable and suffering. With a lesser author this might skew into cartoon cruelty (a term I use to mean over-the-top cartoonishly cruel behavior to a character to cheaply illicit sympathy) but with Green, it just rings true to too many parents, particularly of gifted/talented children.
As a sociologist, Colin's dad studied people, and he had a theory on how to transform a prodigy into a grown-up genius. He believed Colin's development ought to indicate a delicate interplay between what he called "active, result-oriented parenting" and Colin's natural predisposition to studying. This basically meant letting Colin study and setting "markers", which were exactly like goals except they were called markers. Colin's father believed that this kind of prodigy-- born and then made smarter by the right environment and education-- could become considerable genius, remembered forever. He told Colin this sometimes, when Colin would come home from school sullen, tired of the [bullying], tired of pretending that his abject friendlessness didn't bother him.
"But you'll win," his dad would say. "You have to imagine that, Colin, that one day they will all look back on their lives and wish they'd been you. You'll have what everyone wants in the end." (pg 113)
Colin hated not being able to accomplish his "markers." He'd hated it since he was four and his dad set learning the Latin conjugations for twenty-five irregular verbs as a "daily marker," but by the end of the day, Colin only knew twenty-three. His dad didn't chastise him, but Colin knew he'd failed. And now the markers were more complicated, maybe, but they were still pretty simple: he wanted a best friend, a Katherine, and a Theorum. And after almost three weeks in Gutshot, it seemed he was becoming worse off than when he'd started. (pg 130)
Incidentally, Colin also grimly mentions that he tries to read a certain number of words a day, a truly joyless soul-sucking-sounding endeavor that we can only assume from the other context given came from his father.
Final Grade: C
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