Zoo Station – a memoir of Christiane f.’s life

Zoo Station tells the story of Christiane, whose young life was consumed with addiction. It is not only an illustration of a little known social phenomenon, but a very accurate, and at times uncomfortable memoir. At twelve, Christane has already lived what, at the time, was an absolutely ordinary life if you happened to be living in the projects in Berlin. Her father was abusive, which resulted in her mother taking the girls and moving in with her new twenty year old boyfriend Klaus. At this point, the story is still moving pretty slowly, but it picks up rapidly when Christiane starts spending time with a new friend Kessi. They join a clique, which is a soft drug, marijuana and alcohol scene. And for Christiane, these things turn out to be only the gateway to her next phase. She starts to sneak off to clubs in the city. By the time she’s 14, she and her boyfriend are selling their bodies to feed their ever-growing heroin addiction.

Christiane’s memoir isn’t an easy read exactly. The language and jargon are pretty standard for a semi biographical work, but the material is sad and surreal, and shocking at times. Christiane tries multiple times to beat the addiction, and fails again and again. You rise and fall with her, and the ups and downs leave you, eventually, exhausted. This particular account is entirely unfiltered, and at times even a little boring, as life can often be. But this book leaves no story untold. Christiane’s failures and struggles are depicted accurately, and the feeling of rising and falling time after time can become monotonous.

Christiane lives a life that, sadly, many can understand. Drug addiction hasn’t gone away or decreased, and for many, Christiane’s life is only too close to their own. But everyone should read this book. The 1970′s heroin epidemic was heretofore unknown to me. And despite the fact that much of the subject material is foreign, I found myself empathizing with Christiane more than I thought I would. I think that, in the end, the reality of our lives is that we are all having this big human experience. It is rare for someone to drop so far out of our sphere of living that they cannot be related to; and that never happens to Christiane. She spends her young adult life circling the drain of addiction, and there is no finite ending to her story.

Prepare yourself for brutal honesty, and what seems at times to be a neverending parade of challenges that are thrown into Christiane’s face. This is a heart wrenching, sick to the stomach read. But it will leave you feeling grateful and hopeful, in unexpected ways.

“It seemed like she could be anything she wanted, but she didn’t want to be anything.”

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Everyone has a type; tomboys, girly girls, drama queens, bad boys, cool guys, techies. For the most part, though, at some point everyone discovers that saying that they have a “type” is a really limiting, and eventually heartbreaking, thing to do. Colin, the main character of An Abundance of Katherines, has a very, very specific type: girls named Katherine. He has dated 19 Katherines; each and every one has broken his heart, in their various ways. He knows every break up line in the book. And so, upon the loss of the 19th Katherine, Colin’s best friend Hassan drags him on a summer long road trip.

I’m not going to spoil the ending for you. The plot isn’t ridiculously complex. But, despite the simple plot, John Green has inserted a plethora of good advice and life lessons into this coming of age story about an anagramming, theorizing teen prodigy.

This book is quirky. Every other chapter holds something hilariously embarrassing or surprising. And, as with every good book, the sadness is there, plainly stated, but unrealized until you finally put it back on the shelf. There is real sadness in unrequited love. But as with all of John Green’s work, the story drags you in until the moment you finish it, and realize that you really understand what Colin is going through.

John Green is an expert in something that very few authors have accomplished; he is excellent at suspending emotion, at leaving you reading between the lines. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but being so drawn into a story that you forget that the emotions are not your own is entirely another.

In life, everyone has their ordinary losses, their drama, their unrequited love. But we keep going. We are perpetually swimming in sadness, and we rarely, if ever, acknowledge it. Most of us don’t look around, and feel hopelessly sad about other people’s pain. We are so used to seeing heartbreak or loss. We respond to deep losses. It is the human condition to dwell on what is not ordinary. But we forget the things that everyone goes through. We forget the first heartbreak, and we tell those who we see going through it that everyone has to, and that we promise it will be alright in the end. But we forget what it feels like to be that person. We forget what it feels like to forget to come up for air. We forget what it feels like to be drowning, because we are all drowning in our own ways. Not everyone is heartbroken. But everyone hurts. Some of us are just better at remembering to breathe.

In An Abundance of Katherines, John Green explores the life of a person who experiences his life in knowledge. Every event is tied to a fact, every person has a mundane story that seems important to Colin. Colin remembers everything he reads. He could tell you exactly what happened to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He can tell you how to tame a wild hog (yes, wild). But when he gets his heart broken by the 19th Katherine, he wants a way to predict the next heartbreak. And after hundreds of tries, he realizes that, while any theorem can predict the past perfectly, if tweaked enough times, a theorem can never predict the future perfectly. You can only get a probability from the future. The future is never here. It hangs in front of you forever. Living your life in trying to predict the future is making the decision to be a little bit broken.

An Abundance of Katherines is witty, charming, clever, and surprisingly full of lessons that you can learn only by reading between the lines. It is not a book that will immediately change your life, although everything you do does change your life to an extent. But the lessons that you learn only later are the ones that apply to this book.

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Review: Many people fear that should something bad happen to our planet, we would lose our sense of humanity and equality. James Dashner explores what desperation can do to our society, and how important it is to have a sense of  our future, and who, as humans, we are.

Science fiction is usually not my genre, but this book contains a compelling struggle and also an almost involuntary exploration of how inherent personality is. Many people would say that without our memories we are nothing, but in this novel, there is an interesting exploration of how ingrained the sense of self is.

This is a fantastic and entertaining story.

Summary:

Thomas wakes up in an elevator. When the elevator arrives at his destination, he steps out into The Glade, an enclosed living area containing forty other teenage boys. It is explained to him that they all woke up in the elevator, at first several, then only one per month as time passed. They get shipments of food, clothes, shoes, and whatever they need. Every day, the giant gate that keeps the Glade separate from whatever is outside. Each day, the runners run the maze outside the gates, trying to find a way out. But get stuck in the maze at night, and you soon have bigger problems than just being alone. Because you’re not alone. The Grievers, giant globs of goo and metal spikes will chase you with a vengeance. If they catch you, you’ll be injected with something that causes you to remember everything that happened to you before you came to the maze. Because upon your arrival, all you know is your own name. As if this weren’t enough, the day after Thomas arrives, the Gladers are faced with something they’ve never had to deal with before. A girl. A girl who triggers The End. And if they don’t find their way out of the maze, there won’t be a reason to worry anymore. Because each night, the Grievers will kill one of them.

Thomas and his friends must find a way to escape, and discover how to get out of the maze. Oh. And to find out who they are, and why they were chosen.

Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares – Rachel Cohn & David Levithan

appropriateness rating

Review:

Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares is one of those that makes you long for romance, and wish you had someone with whom you could pass back and forth a red moleskine notebook. Honestly, it makes everyone wish for something different, which is truly special.  Some people might wish for someone who knows what the word “philatelist” means. Some people might wish for someone who loves to think, or to read. Some people might wish for someone who would choose lebkuchen over rice krispies.

But in the end, what really matters, is that it makes you wish. Makes you ponder and think, and draws you in so completely that when it’s over you wish there was more. You wish that you could follow Lily and Dash through their lives, wish to be as daring, as kind, as brave. But in the end, what it shows you is that, inevitably, wishing just doesn’t measure up.

Summary:

When Lily’s parents decide they are going to Fiji during Christmas, Lily is shocked and horrified. She may have said it would be okay with her… but that doesn’t mean it is! Her older brother Langston, proposes that in order to find herself a boyfriend, she go the conventional path and find the as-yet-found boyfriend through a notebook. She writes a series of Dares to the yet to be discovered boy, and supplies many dares  some of which involve the books French Pianism, the Joys of Gay Sex, and Fat Hoochie Prom Queen. She had to choose unusual titles in order to scare off any boys who wouldn’t be worth dating.

Dash (short for Dashiell, as he will tell you), takes up Lily’s challenge. His ex-girlfriend, Sophia, has recently moved to Spain and while he never really liked Sophia so much, and certainly didn’t love her, he finds himself missing Sophia more than he would’ve expected. So Dash takes Lily’s notebook, and soon enough Lily and Dash find themselves daring each other into places they never would’ve expected to go.

If You Like: The Indigo Notebook, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (book or movie), How to be Bad, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, Mean Girls (the movie)