I didn’t know much about John Green’s “Paper Towns” before I started reading, but a few weird coincidences quickly presented themselves.

First, the story about a pair of kids, Quentin and Margo (and their friends), as they finish up high school in Orlando and do a bunch of “last” things together came as I was doing some last things with one of my closest friends before she moved to…Orlando.

Second, I started reading this book on May 5, and, well, this happened on page 27:

I could have read this book last year or four months from now, but apparently I got to it at exactly the right time.  And that time was following a couple of pretty heavy books, leaving me wanting something much less intense.

Margo convinces Quentin to go on a mission one night that he later learns involves getting a whole lot of revenge on a long list of her enemies.  But they have to stop for supplies:

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”
“Well, first we’re going to Publix.”

This was the most true statement in the entire book for me.  When I lived in Florida, Publix was my life, especially their mango yogurt.  I visited a few years ago, and my first stop upon arriving at my aunt’s house was to stock up at Publix.

Margo is easily the badass of the two, and the one prone to offering epic assessments of their situation.  At one point she throws a fish through a guy’s window, much to the shock of Quentin.

“I mean, you couldn’t have just left it in his car?  Or at least on his doorstep?”
“We bring the fucking rain, Q.  Not the scattered showers.”

I may be borrowing that line to inspire my softball team. 

Another favorite line of Margo’s came as Quentin questioned whether she was worried about the future and what was ahead, what he called “forever.”

“Forever is composed of nows,” Margo says.  No matter how long you have, no matter how you spend it, it’s all a bunch of nows that come one after another.  And while you can do things to alter your future nows, when you’re in those moments you get to decide how to make them count.

Ultimately that’s all about connecting with other people, something Quentin identifies as happening only when we let ourselves be seen instead of the projected selves we want others to see.

“But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart.  And it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs.”

Khaled Hosseini’s second book is called “A Thousand Splendid Suns” and his third could have been titled “A Thousand Times Your Heart Will Break.”

“And The Mountains Echoed” is a ridiculously gripping story about a brother and sister in Afghanistan who are separated by their struggling widower father, along with the often tragic circumstances of his wife, her sister and brother, and many others they all become interwoven with throughout their lives.

It is a beautiful story, there is no doubt about that, with the way Hosseini paints these relationships in a way that makes you care so much about each person.  At some points though, you want to beg him to stop and have one of them win the lottery or something instead of enduring the profoundly sad.  When Abdullah and Pari, the brother and sister, go to Kabul and Abdullah realizes only he is going home, I wanted to yell out on the Metro, “WHY DID YOU DO THAT TO THEM?!”

Nabi, the children’s uncle, has his own struggle with knowing he loves someone and can’t be with, and yet retains the hope that somewhere, somehow, he could.

“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us,” he says.

That kind of hope underpins a lot of the characters as they try to overcome what they’ve been dealt, to try to make others proud, or in some cases throw success in the face of those who doubt.

I think Pari is the best example of getting up every day and moving forward despite what’s in her past, and is the most sympathetic character with how she treats others, and yet late in life she feels like she is a disappointment.

“I should have been more kind,” she says.  “That is something a person will never regret.  You will never say to yourself when you are old, ‘Ah, I wish I was not good to that person.’  You will never think that.”

Exactly.

This is one of those books that when you finish, you just want to sit and think about it for a while.  And then maybe hug someone.  And do a thousand favors for people.  Generally do something to make the world a better place.

One more note, courtesy of a Greek doctor who ends up renting Nabi’s house:

“Thalia puts before me a glass of milk and a steaming plate of eggs on a bed of tomatoes. ‘Don’t worry, I already sugared the milk.'”

I read this shortly after having a postgame lunch with my work softball team where one member talked about how his mom only let the kids have soda with their dinner if they mixed it with milk.  I’m fairly certain he called the concoction “pop milk.”  I can’t decide if that was designed to be so gross the kids wouldn’t ask anymore, or some attempt to make the experience slightly healthier.  I have no desire to test for myself.