An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Ever since my childhood, being stuck home sick meant one thing... reading. I used to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland over and over when I was sick. Something about reading surreal literature while suffering a fever is pleasurable. I read other things now. Sometimes I manage some really excellent insights. Maybe it's the boredom.

I finished off An Abundance of Katherines today.

Colin Singleton was a child prodigy and has date (and been dumped by) 19 Katherines. After the most recent dumping tosses Colin into a morass of existential despair, his friend Hassan decides the best cure is an aimless road trip. Colin agrees and so off they go.

They leave Chicago and end up in Tennessee, so they didn't get very far. However, they get unlikely jobs recording the stories of the citizens of Gutshot, Tennessee and living in their bosses mansion.

Colin's a strange kid. He's incredibly morose for a main character and obsessed with anagrams and "being somebody." Having been a prodigy, he now wants to be a genius and create something with a lasting value. I can sympathize. However, he's so obsessed that he could easily become an irritation, if it weren't for the footnotes. A lot of the novel's humor is in the footnotes which are entirely in Colin's voice. Apparently, in this book prodigy means font of interesting facts and statistics.

My grand insight for An Abundance of Katherines is that John Green seems to really like the idea of a road trip as a plot device. Both An Abundance of Katherines and Paper Towns feature a road trip of some sort and there's a lot of travel by car in his other books as well. I suppose metaphorically a road trip could represent a break with the status quo or from old patterns. Symbolically, the act of leaving one's home (or childhood) could be a literal trip or voyage. Most of Green's novels can be read as coming of age stories, so perhaps that last one is the most valid.