341. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
Rating: ☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Hank Green
Genre: Fiction, Science Fiction, Young Adult
352 pages, published September 25, 2018
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing starts out with the appearance of the Carls, giant alien sculptures that resemble ten-foot-tall Transformers wearing suits of samurai armor, throughout the world. 23 year old April May and her friend Andy make a video with the Carl located in New York City and post it on YouTube. The video goes viral and April and Andy find themselves at the center of an intense international media spotlight which has enormous consequences for their lives.
Quotes
“I had a very happy childhood; I just wasn’t a very happy child.”
“I’d heard all this before, but I also knew that this line of argument worked. If you tell people that they’re being attacked for their beliefs, then suddenly they want to defend their beliefs, even if they didn’t really believe them before. It’s pretty amazing, really.”
“You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.”
“Maya was the most effective talker I knew. It was like she wrote essays in her brain and then recited them verbatim. She once explained to me that she thought this was part of being Black in America. “Every black person who spends time with a lot of white people eventually ends up being asked to speak for every black person,” she told me one night after it was too late to still be talking, “and I hate that. It’s really stupid. And everyone gets to respond to that idiocy however they want. But my anxiety eventually made me extremely careful about everything I said, because of course I don’t represent capital-B Black People, but if people think I do, then I still feel a responsibility to try to do it well.”
“It turns out pundits don’t want to talk about what’s happened; they want to use what’s happened to talk about the same things they talk about every day.”
“I don’t think any of us are blameless when we all, more and more often, see ourselves not as members of a culture but as weapons in a war.”
“What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way?”
“As is often the case, it was the easier choice to make and the more difficult choice to live with.”
My Take
While Green makes a few interesting observations about fame, celebrity and social media and the larger media, I found myself mostly bored by this novel. Skip.
