An Abundance of Katherines (in My Pants) by John Green

If you don't get why I added "in my pants" to the book's title, then I strongly suggest you check out the vlogbrothers on YouTube. I think you've all heard me extol the virtues of John Green enough, so I'll leave that be.

I think I'll start this review off with an anecdote: I took this book with me on my trip to Pittsburgh, and I was reading it on the sofa when my brother noticed the title. Our conversation was as follows (feel free to skip it if you like. I've outlined it in a different color so it's easier to spot.):

Soorya (S): "What's that about?"

Me: "...I'm not really good at summarizing things."

S: "What, you can't just tell me?"

Me (internally): No, Soorya, I cannot. The best books can't be summarized in a blurb. That's what makes them good.

Me (speaking): "It's about this guy who's been dumped by girls named Katherine 19 times, and now he's on a road trip with his friend to cool off after the latest breakup."

S: *snorts* "You actually read that kinda stuff?"

I am fully aware that I did not at all make that book sound cool. I can't. I'm not good at summarizing stories. If you asked me to sum up Harry Potter, I would say, "It's about a boy who never quite fit in to the real world, then found out that he was a wizard and fought the dark forces of evil with his friends." After a summary like that, most sane people would say: "Okay, let me just take a second to grab that clichéd plot by the throat and hurl it off a cliff." However, if you actually read Harry Potter (which, to be honest, you should be doing instead of just getting someone to summarize it for you), you'd know that it's about so much more than that. What makes the book enjoyable is Rowling's attention to characters, the care with which she crafts the world that they live in, and, of course, the occasional madcap quote ("Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!").

It's that same quality that makes An Abundance of Katherines so enjoyable. John Green takes what appears to be just another road-trip-to-discover your true self and fleshes it out with extremely enjoyable characters:

• Colin Singleton: He just graduated high school as valedictorian and is a prodigy who picks up knowledge extremely quickly and retains it. You can follow his thought process in footnotes, which are usually random and extremely tangential. His primary hobby is anagramming, and he does so at every possible opportunity. (The word "dingleberries" is, apparently, an anagrammatic jackpot.) Through his 18 years of life, he has been dumped 19 times, each time by a Katherine.
• Hassan [can't recall his last name at present]: He's an overweight Lebanese Muslim who basically acts as Colin's filter to the outside world. The dude is plenty smart (about Saratoga standard), but no prodigy. He injects most situations with his own awkward sense of humor.
• Lindsey Lee Wells: This girl is kind of interesting because, despite being the female that seems, in all likelihood, as though she's going to end up with Colin, she isn't the typical smartfunnypretty character that one comes to expect in these books. She's a pretty deceptive girl who stays stubbornly unremarkable ("because if nothing good happens to me, at least nothing bad will, either") <---[very, very paraphrased] until near the very end.
• The Other Colin: Lindsey's boyfriend. Oh yes. I said boyfriend. Lindsey is taken, and both seem smitten with each other, the little lovebirds. However, TOC himself seems a rather one-dimensional character. He's kind of the typical jock that people will find in The High School Novel that Meena so despises.
• Katrina: Hoo boy. This one...well, imagine a stick bug. Now imagine a more...buxom, blonde stick bug. That's Katrina. Katrina appears to fit into the typical, aggressively shallow popular girl that one has come to expect of these novels, but then...well, you'll have to read and find out. I won't spoil it for you.

You will be glad to know that the entire story doesn't consist of the two mucking about on the road. Colin is, throughout the story, attempting to work out his great epiphany in life, the Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability. Colin reasons that people are predictable, and so the future must be just as predictable. He makes a beautifully complicated equation that just gets more and more complicated as the book goes on, eventually fleshing out an equation that could tell a person how long two people would be together, and, more importantly, who would do the dumping.

Even more fun to read are the quotes. I can't even list all the instances at which this book made me laugh out loud, but here are just a few bones I'll toss you:

Colin did not laugh. Instead he thought, Tampons have strings? Why? Of all the major human mysteries - God, the nature of the universe, etc. - he knew the least about tampons. To Colin, tampons were a little bit like grizzly bears: he was aware of their existence, but he'd never seen one in the wild, and didn't really care to.

The moment Colin sat down, Hollis asked Hassan, "Would you like to say grace?"
"Sure thing." Hassan cleared his throat. "Bismallah." Then he picked up his fork.
"That's it?" Hollis wondered.
"That's it. We are terse people. Terse, and also hungry."

That's about it. I know I didn't do the greatest job of summing things up, and I certainly left a lot out to leave the plot unspoiled, but I think it's certainly a book worth reading. I would like to note that this is certainly not John Green's best book, but it's still a nice read, earning a total of ★★★. That's all for now!

~Taara