“Life is a gift horse in my opinion.”
April 2014
, p. 181Currently Reading: Eleanor & Park
I was poetically introduced to Eleanor & Park
when I saw it displayed on the YA table at a quaint, local bookstore called Barnes & Noble. It was sitting alongside everything that John Green has ever breathed on. (Mr. Green also penned the The New York Times review for Eleanor & Park.) I liked the cover, the headphones intertwined to form an ampersand. I was then distracted by the bright blue emanating from the endless copies of The Fault in Our Stars and moved on.
Months later I read The Interestings, a story of six characters who meet at a summer camp under the haze of young talent. The story spans from their teenage years to their 50s, and sadly, many of them prove happiest as teenagers at a summer camp. Adulthood makes everything serious and complicated. While reading, I found myself continuously reminiscing to the beginning of the book, when everyone was young, secretly hopeful, and didn’t yet know what would happen with their lives. I wanted to focus on that single period in life, to be stuck in the amber of youth. Re-enter Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell.
Eleanor & Park takes place over the course of a single school year. It is a love story between Eleanor, unkindly nicknamed Big Red by classmates, and Park, a comic book and music lover. They meet on the school bus. They fall in love. I’ve been promised a powerful read. Here’s to stories of the forever young.
when I saw it displayed on the YA table at a quaint, local bookstore called Barnes & Noble. It was sitting alongside everything that John Green has ever breathed on. (Mr. Green also penned the The New York Times review for Eleanor & Park.) I liked the cover, the headphones intertwined to form an ampersand. I was then distracted by the bright blue emanating from the endless copies of The Fault in Our Stars and moved on.Months later I read The Interestings, a story of six characters who meet at a summer camp under the haze of young talent. The story spans from their teenage years to their 50s, and sadly, many of them prove happiest as teenagers at a summer camp. Adulthood makes everything serious and complicated. While reading, I found myself continuously reminiscing to the beginning of the book, when everyone was young, secretly hopeful, and didn’t yet know what would happen with their lives. I wanted to focus on that single period in life, to be stuck in the amber of youth. Re-enter Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell.
Eleanor & Park takes place over the course of a single school year. It is a love story between Eleanor, unkindly nicknamed Big Red by classmates, and Park, a comic book and music lover. They meet on the school bus. They fall in love. I’ve been promised a powerful read. Here’s to stories of the forever young.
The Interestings
“This was a time of life, she understood, in which you might not know what you were, but that was all right. You judged people not on their success ― almost no one they knew was successful at age twenty-two, and no one had a nice apartment, owned anything of value, dressed in expensive clothes, or had any interest in making money ― but on their appeal. The time period between the ages of, roughly, twenty to thirty was often amazingly fertile. Great work might get done during this ten-year slice of time. Just out of college, they were gearing up, ambitious not in a calculating way, but simply eager, not yet tired.”