523. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Genre: Fiction, Young Adult
359 pages, published February 21, 2012
Reading Format: Audiobook on Overdrive
Summary
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe tells the story of teenage friends Aristotle,an angry teen with a brother in prison, and Dante, the loner child of a professor who is gay. As the boys start spending time together, they discover that they share a special friendship.
Quotes
“Words were different when they lived inside of you.”
“I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get–and never would get.”
“Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.”
“The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.”
“I wanted to tell them that I’d never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren’t meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn’t have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. “Dante’s my friend.”
“I hated being volunteered. The problem with my life was that it was someone else’s idea.”
“I renamed myself Ari. If I switched the letter, my name was Air. I thought it might be a great thing to be the air. I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.”
“Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you’re thinking but because you’re feeling. Because you’re feeling too much. And you can’t always control the things you do when you’re feeling too much.”
“I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.”
“I had a rule that it was better to be bored by yourself than to be bored with someone else. I pretty much lived by that rule. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have any friends.”
“Scars. A sign that you had been hurt. A sign that you had healed.”
“Senior year. And then life. Maybe that’s the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you — but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher’s pens and your parents’ pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn’t that be sweet?”
My Take
While I mostly enjoyed Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, I found it to be a bit pedestrian. As a fiction novel for young adults, I’m not the target audience. It’s not bad, just not great.
