An Abundance of Katherines

John Green is one of those authors whose name keeps popping up on the blogosphere. I admit I didn't take much interest initially. Then my husband pointed me in the direction of John Green's blog and his video-reviews. Suddenly, I knew I had to read at least one John Green novel. But which one? Upon Elizabeth's recommendation, I decided to start with An Abundance of Katherines. And what a treat it was!

I knew from his blog that John Green was a funny person and it comes through in his writing as well. What I especially liked about John Green's An Abundance of Katherines is that it was smart and funny. It was also an endearing story, one about two friends who have just graduated from high school: Colin Singleton, the prodigy with a show more penchant for anagrams, whose heart has been broken for the nineteenth time by the nineteenth Katherine, and Hassan, his always joking best friend who doesn't want to go to college despite the pressures from his family. Hassan suggests a road trip is in order that summer and the two friends head off, leaving behind Chicago. While Colin passed on the opportunity to see the world's largest crucifix in Kentucky, his curiosity got the better of him when he saw the sign for the Eternal Resting Place of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The two friends make their way to the small town of Gutshot, Tennessee as a result.

After a fall while on the way to the gravesite of the Archduke, Colin has the "Eureka!" moment he has been waiting for all his life. He is sure he can work out a mathematical equation to predict the outcome of any relationship. He calls it The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability.

Hassan and Colin agree to stick around Gutshot for a little while, after being offered a job and a place to stay. There they meet the beautiful chameleon Lindsay Lee Wells, her mother, Hollis, The Other Colin, and various other interesting characters.

Colin is not the easiest person to like, but then, he is more at home with facts and figures than he is with people. He can be very literal at times and occasionally comes across as self-centered. That self-centeredness stems more from insecurity, however, than arrogance. As smart as Colin is, he never quite believes he's good enough and needs constant reassurance.

His best friend, Hassan, on the other hand, is instantly likable. He is funny and charming. He offers a good balance to Colin. Whereas Colin takes life so seriously, Hassan has a tendency to do the opposite. Where Colin is driven, Hassan lacks ambition. At least on the surface.

The funniest moments in the novel involved both Colin and Hassan. I loved how they played off each other. The story itself was one I think many of us can relate to: the sting of heartbreak and the search for direction in our lives. Not everything always works out as we might hope, and sometimes the answers we are searching for are right in front of us. I enjoyed An Abundance of Katherines quite a bit and look forward to reading more by John Green in the future.

DFTBA fellow Nerdfighters! show less

Oh! Such fun! I can’t believe I left this sitting in my TBR pile for probably about four freaking years! What kind of an idiot am I?! GAH. Like seriously, it has been sitting there for years and I always meant to read it but never actually did until now and goodness do you know how horrid that is?

Anyway!

So obviously I enjoyed it. I knew I would, so that wasn’t a surprise. I didn’t expect it to be quite so geeky for some reason though, and I should have, and that made it so much better. There were footnotes and footnotes in novels are always crazy awesome! Plus, one of the footnotes was about William Loyn Mackenzie King! Go random Canadian history tidbit in an American novel!

Okay, so I love books with character development, if that show more isn’t already obvious. And this whole book is pretty much jammed packed full of character development – I mean, not just with Colin but also with Hassan and Lindsay, and it’s not usual that you really see the development within some of the secondary characters as well. That said, Colin did the most exciting transformation.

Some people are so smart bookwise, and yet some dumb socially, and Colin seems to be very much one of those people. He is a brilliant child prodigy, but he just doesn’t know how to relate to other people, and doesn’t understand how other people think or what drives them… By the end, I’m not entirely sure how much that has really changed with people other than Lindsay… but just seeing his insight into her thoughts, the fact that he knows where she’s run off to, well, it shows that he’s more in tuned with the world around him, and not so self-involved with what is going on in his own life. (I do wonder, though, how on earth he managed to score nineteen girlfriends beforehand, since he was so self-involved and socially inept.)

Another thing I really liked about Colin and the secondary characters was how well they balanced each other out. Hassan, especially. Aside from the fact that neither is too popular in high school, they seem to be very much opposites – one is always emo, while the other is always cracking jokes. One worries that he won’t be anything more than a child prodigy, while the other would be content sitting in front of the tv at his parents’ house for the rest of his life…. Their differences played off each other quite well, which I think made this novel even better.

As for the plot twist, well, I had heard the bit revelation in regards to all the Katherines before I read the book, so that didn’t particularly come as a surprise to me. It seemed like it was setting it up that way all along, but that could’ve been entirely because I was looking for the clues to tell me what was going to happen.

The Bottom Line
Definitely a fun read – highly recommended to other YA fans who haven’t read it yet. If there are any of those left out there. show less

Colin Singleton is a washout at the age of 17. A child prodigy, he has never been able to find his "Eureka" moment -- the one that will move him from prodigy to genius. His only claims to fame are winning an obscure game show called Cranial Kidz, and being dumped by a succession of girls named Katherine. Colin has been dumped by 19 girls named Katherine, starting with Katherine I in third grade, all the way up to Katherine XIX on the eve of his high-school graduation. Left emotionally and physically bereft by his loss, Colin and his best friend, a Judge Judy loving slacker named Hassan, take a road trip.

Colin and Hassan wind up in Gutshot, TN, at the final resting place of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. While there, they meet an show more irrepressible girl named Lindsey Lee, and get roped into an oral history project by Lindsey Lee's mom. While they interview the residents of Gutshot, Colin works on what he hopes will be his Eureka -- The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Probability, which will mathematically determine the success or failure of all relationships,

This is a wonderful, richly layered comic novel, with quirky, yet believable characters. Colin is a painfully average prodigy, whose genius lies not in any one particular area, but in his ability to make connections between the random. The supporting cast, Hassan, Lindsey Lee and Hollis are just as beautifully drawn. If the novel stretches the bounds of plausibility, well, just go with it, as the humor and gentle spirit of this book demands it. A romance for people who don't like romances, this was one of my favorite books of 2006. show less

Colin Singleton was a child prodigy, but he's not quite a child anymore, and the most prodigious thing about him is this: He's been dumped by nineteen girls, all of them named Katherine.

An Abundance of Katherines follows brainy Colin as he takes a road trip with his friend Hassan to get over his nineteenth nervous breakdown. They end up in a Tennessee town called Gutshot. There they meet Lindsay Lee Wells, a pretty pre-paramedic whose mother owns the town's economic engine, a factory that makes tampon strings. Colin finds her intriguing, but mostly he's engrossed by his attempt to come up with a mathematical equation that can predict the course of any relationship: who will dump whom, and when...

I'm a sucker for stories about braniacs. show more An Abundance of Katherines has plenty of nerd appeal -- Colin's attempts at the equation are actually provided, and he tends to immediately anagram any name he encounters -- but the book is really a conventional, lively coming-of-age story full of solid characters. And crackling dialogue: given his first taste of moonshine, Colin says "It's like French-kissing a dragon." If they make a movie out of this book, Michael Cera will have to star in it. show less

(I now maintain a blog just for my kid-lit reviews. Find it at http://kidlit4adults.blogspot.com .)

A friend has convinced me to try my hand this year for the first time at writing children's literature; but I don't actually know anything about children's literature, so am starting the process among other ways by first reading a stack of popular books that have been recommended to me. This is my first of the contemporary "superstar" young-adult (YA) books, a whole series of post-9/11 titles now in my reading list that have each sold millions of copies, usually without most of us adults being any the wiser; and indeed, after finishing it myself, I could easily see why John Green has in just the past few years rapidly grown into one of the show more most popular YA authors in history. And that's because this character-based relationship comedy and coming-of-age tale is literally as complicated and witty as any better-than-average adult novel out there, sort of a teen version of a Michael Chabon or David Foster Wallace book (complete with superfluous footnotes, no less), which of course is going to get eaten up by a crowd that's usually fed a steady stream of parent-friendly morality tales and vampire soap operas.

In fact, that's the best compliment I can give this novel, that it literally made me flash back to some of the deepest, most private moments I had in my own teen years (25 years ago now for me), moments I had completely forgotten about, a laser-precise look sometimes at the weird ways intelligence and naivety and hormones mix in the high-school years; and that's always a special and remarkable thing, when an adult author can tap back into those emotions as if they were there again, and especially astonishing when you add it to Green's natural mastery over plot, ultra-realistic dialogue, and creation of all kinds of fascinatingly unique elements while still adhering to the "rules" of YA fiction (like: find a plausible way to get rid of the adults as much as possible; be dark but not too dark; make the plot at least slightly more adventurous than most teens get a chance to experience in real life; examine sex mostly by way of examining sexual tension; etc). Green has a whole series of passionately loved character dramadies out now (to say nothing of the first project that got him a lot of notice, the million-person-watching "Brotherhood 2.0" online video experiment), and I'm highly looking forward now to reading more.

Additional thoughts, as far as my struggle to become a better YA author myself...

--So far in my research, this is the book I've most pictured as the kind of novel I myself will probably write; but that said, I happily admit that Green is a much better writer than I will ever be, which I actually find oddly inspirational for some reason, the fact that a guy this funny and smart is being so rewarded by his industry right now. (He's also a multiple award-winner, and the film rights to several of his books have now been purchased by Hollywood studios.) That's another big compliment I can give, that I really want Green to write a book for grown-ups now, so that an adult audience can also discover what a wonderful writer he is.

--For being a multiple award winner, I was surprised by how much subversive material there is in here: all the teens curse like sailors, most of them get drunk at one point or another without any repercussions, and there's even a scene where two teen boys come across another teen couple making love in a field completely naked, and end up watching them for a bit before making their presence known. I'm sure it's another reason why these books are so massively popular among teens themselves. Also, I was happily reminded while reading this that teens actually have a much more nuanced understanding of things like relationships than we tend to remember by the time we're in our forties; the characters seen here can get surprisingly jaded and adult in their observations about romance and the like. This is one of the nice things, of course, about a book like this becoming so popular, that it confirms that teen readers really are intimately connecting with the highly sophisticated writing style seen on display here. It's one of the things I'm starting to realize these days, that the entire YA industry is a much different thing than when I was a young adult myself in the early 1980s, and that the most popular YA novels out there (the ones specifically for ages 14 and up, that is) are routinely as large, complex and realistic as any adult book, just with teenage characters.

--Did I mention yet all the infinitely unique and utterly charming details that Green comes up with for this book, all while servicing the traditional blueprint for what a contemporary novel should contain? This is why he reminds me so much of the adult-lit author Michael Chabon, and especially that author's early hit Wonder Boys. I love how Green starts us out in Chicago, for example (in fact, just around the corner from where I live in real life), but somehow comes up with an entirely plausible way for our teen heroes to end up spending the rest of the novel in a tiny little hillbilly town in Tennessee, one that they just happened to randomly come across during an impromptu road trip. I love that the comic-relief best friend is an overweight slacker Muslim, filthy-mouthed and addicted to daytime television and who introduces himself to everyone with, "Hi, I'm not a terrorist." I love how the story ends up centering around a factory that makes the pull-out strings for tampons, and I love how that ends up providing this lovely, completely surprising, visually magical moment at the book's climax. I love how the main conceit is that our male hero has had 19 romantic relationships since the age of eight, and that every single one of them was with a girl named Katherine with a "K;" and I love how Green uses this quirky fact as an excuse for these long, (500) Days of Summer style reminiscences about them, all in the service of this science nerd trying throughout the course of the book to perfect a mathematical formula that can be used to predict the outcome of any new relationship. There's a hundred other details like these I could mention, but I won't.

--And finally, definitely one of the reasons Green has grown so absurdly popular is that he has a brilliant handle over teen stereotypes, and of all the massively complicated layers of personality that actually reside under that top stereotype in real life. Just to cite one example (and again, I could do more if I wanted), look at how our main female character Lindsey comes across at first as a typical redneck with too much makeup and who dates the town quarterback (literally); but how as we get to know her, we come to realize that she's actually an emotional chameleon, whose personality and even dialect changes radically based on who she's around; and how under that, there's actually a very rebellious creature who was once an angry junior-high goth; and how underneath all THAT, what really lurks is the heart of an intelligence-loving nerd, which is how it is that she and our nerdy male hero click so profoundly, despite the surface-level details of their lives being almost diametrically opposite. It's easy for adult readers to look at a character like Lindsey and imagine her as the sassy graphic-designer ingenue or cultishly loved punk-rock bassist she's fated to be; it's absolutely wonderful to watch Green so completely peg this type in the years before she grows into the person she was always meant to be. (And speaking of all this, that's the secret behind Green's miraculous feat of writing a relationship book that somehow appeals to boys as well: he makes the male hero an antisocial, book-obsessed former child prodigy who nonetheless has an insanely busy love life, manages to get the hot white-trash girl by the end, and actually beats up the town quarterback, a wish-fulfillment wet dream for nerdy boy book-lovers if I've ever heard of one.) show less

My first John Green book; I'm really looking forward to Looking for Alaska now. This book has three great central characters: Chicago natives Colin Singleton (he who has dated the abundance of Katherines); his friend Hassan, who is a fleshed-out (pun intended) character in his own right, not a just a sidekick or a foil (though he does help Colin navigate socially); and Lindsey Lee Wells, who they meet in Gutshot, Tennessee, where their road trip rolls to an end (rather toward the beginning of the book; it is less a road trip story and more of a coming-of-age-in-one-place story).

As former child prodigy Colin attempts to develop a Theorem of Dumpers and Dumpees, he also develops insight into himself and others. Despite his intellectual show more intelligence, he isn't too socially intelligent; yet he, Hassan, and Lindsay illustrate the point that often, it is not the popular kids, but those on the fringes who are the most interesting. Yet, An Abundance of Katherines is not all Theorems and theorizing; there are also wild boars, angry hornets, and the remains of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The nerd-humor throughout the story is fantastic; Green's use of footnotes is quite effective. (The funny-footnote strategy was also used to good effect by Lisa Lutz in The Spellman Files.) Overall an enjoyable read in an unconventional setting; both the characters and the setting defy what might be expected of them.

...authors always wrote things in ways other than how they actually happened. Authors never included the whole story, they just got to the point. Colin thought the truth should matter as much as the point, and he figured that was why he couldn't tell good stories. (p. 70)

...and eventually he stopped thinking about the Theorem and wondered only how something that isn't there can hurt you. (p. 101)

You can love people so much, he thought. But you can never love people as much as you can miss them. (p. 105)

But he always had books. Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back. (p. 110)

"I don't really know how," he said. "How do you just stop being terrified of getting left behind and ending up by yourself forever and not meaning anything to the world?" (p. 132)

"I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost....I don't think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing. Like Katherine. That's what I realized: if I did get her back somehow, she wouldn't fill the hole that losing her created." (p. 201)

"And the moral of the story is that you don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened." (p. 208) show less

DNF: stopped on page 45

To be fair, I tried. I really really did. I had such high hopes for this book. I had been wanting to read it and every other book by John Green since the DAY I read and finished The Fault In Our Stars because it blew me away.

But An Abundance of Katherines was about as much fun as scraping your nails across a chalkboard. From the start we are introduced to Colin who has just been dumped for the 19th time by the 19th Katherine. Not Katie. Not Kat. Not Kittie. Not Cathy, or Rynns or Trinas, or Kays or even Kate. Nope. just K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E.

That last bit annoyed you right? Well, that is page 15 for you. To make matters worse, from page one Colin is so freaking WHINY! I am talking, you will want to scream and rip show more your hair out. I have spent hours trying to find the perfect way to describe him and the ONLY word I can think is just plain PATHETIC! I literally could not stand it.

You know back in like 2006 when EVERYONE was a emo kid because it was THE THING to be? That is what he reminds me of. If you also remember, there was that HORRIBLE gosh awful song "I must be emo" ... that would be Colin's theme song. *cues up the hate and pitchforks* I know, I am a bad bad person for that, but... whatever, I guess.

If you think this book couldn't get worse, flip to chapter 2, page 8. *Enter Hassan*
If you think there is no possible way on earth to planet Pluto (yes, PLANET Pluto, if it was good enough to be a planet when I was growing up, it is good enough to be a planet now.) that nothing can be worse that Colin, you are dead wrong. You are dead now. Here is a rose. *tosses rose*

anyway, you know those old creepy guys who are always somehow covered in dirt from head to toe smelling of old alcohol and vomit even though they never seem to leave their front porch? That is how I really imagine Hassan as a grown-up.

The exact second he steps on scene, we see him for the disgusting pig he is, I really have no other words for him. it's like he's one of those steroid using high school jocks that scream "hay sexy! y u not dancin up on dis dick?!" ugh, You know the ones I mean, the ones that just make your skin crawl and leave you wondering how they manage to figure out how to BREATHE.

I could go on about the characters, but I choose to spare you.
The writing was exhausting. I felt like I was dragging my eyeballs across the page and I will not lie, I was dragging my eyes so much, I must have checked out a few times because I would have passed 5 pages and have not read a single word, but man, it sure felt like I did. And what the hell is the point of all the damn charts and footnotes? They weren't annoying, they were way way way beyond annoying. It was like I was reading a straight math book for shits and giggles. (pardon my french there)

So, yeah, not one I would recommend.

But, if you don't mind pathetic, annoying characters... This just might be for you.
If you don't mind reading a math book for FUN... This book might be for you.
If you don't mind blood pouring from your eyeballs... This book might be for you.
If you don't mind your brain turning into liquid ... This book might be for you.

Good luck. May the odds be every in your favor, live long and prosper and the force be with you. show less