Two book reviews in one! Except they are not really reviews, even less so than my usual book-related posts. Just some brief observations then.

I read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams, mainly due to my love for the new television show based loosely on the book and its sequel. I am fairly sure that I have read this before, a decade or so ago, around the same I time I read all of HHGTTG. But my memory of it was a bit fuzzy so it was almost like reading it for the first time, except I knew that it was going to be good. It is funny and clever and weird and very, very good.

I also read Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan. I recently read Green’s book Paper Towns and the advice following my post about that was that his best book was The Fault In Our Stars and I should read that one next. But I am not sure of the logic behind that. With my favourite author Iain M. Banks/Iain Banks (both of them!) I deliberately read all of his most highly regarded books first, and now I am left with two or three books of his that are generally regarded as sub-par and I am not sure when I will get around to reading them. So I figured that if I am going to read more of Green’s books then I should leave the best until last. Actually I wasn’t really planning to pick up another of his books so quickly but I saw this in the bookshop and I was taken in by the shiny cover and by the fact that it was written by two people, which I find quite an interesting thing. Anyway, it was okay, not as good as Paper Towns, but readable enough (I got through it in one go). The main drawback for me if that it was just a plain YA novel, which is not really to my tastes, but that does not detract from the quality of the book itself. I will probably read another John Green novel at some point (maybe Looking for Alaska or The Fault In Our Stars) but not immediately.

I’m not sure what I’ll read next. I have an urge for some proper grown up science fiction. I’ve been reading a lot of lighter stuff recently and a lot of YA (genre or otherwise) and while most of those books have been good, I do want something with a bit more weight to it. The only problem is that I am so swamped with studying that perhaps something light is all I can handle for the moment! I shall have to look at my bookshelves and my Amazon wishlist and see what looks tempting…

I recently finished reading Paper Towns by John Green. The narrator is a high school student named Quentin who has a crush on his neighbour Margo Roth Spiegelman. One night she shows up at his window and takes him on an adventure around town. The next day she disappears, leaving some clues behind about where she has gone. Quentin becomes obsessed with tracking her down, with the help of his friends.

The book is a bit far away from my usual tastes - I normally only read YA if it crosses into my preferred genre of science fiction. So I wouldn’t really have chosen to read this book up until recently when I got caught up in nerdfighteria and decided that I should check out at least one of John Green’s books. My choice of this one was rather arbitrary, it came up first in the Kindle store when I was searching for him!

I did enjoy the book though, more so perhaps than I had expected I would. It was very well written with interesting characters, and I loved the mystery aspect of the plot. I can definitely see why John Green is so highly acclaimed. Indeed, I will probably read another of his novels (not sure which one yet) in the near future, because I liked this one a lot and I would like to see what else he has done.

I have spent probably too much time today watching Vlogbrothers videos on YouTube (apologies for the poor quality screencap). I’d heard of them before and seen a few videos here and there as they popped up on Tumblr, but honestly I was not too familiar with them. Then today I followed another random link to one of their videos and got sucked in. They make funny and interesting videos and I have really enjoyed what I’ve seen so far. I’m also intrigued by the whole YouTube celebrity thing in general, as I haven’t really watched any other video blogs either, but I know there are some massively popular ones, and Hank and John Green in particular seem to have become incredibly popular and built up a pretty amazing fan base. Based on the videos, I can see why. I am looking forward to watching through more of their videos in the future, they will certainly be good for taking short breaks when I am studying (just as long as I stick to one video and don’t get sucked in to watching tons of them like I did today!).