Paper Towns, Paper Lives, Paper Everything

   "From here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town."
     -Paper Towns page 57

A city from above.

     Paper Towns by John Green is a book about a high-school boy, Quentin, who lives his whole life watching his neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman become popular and live a life that everybody in his school can only imagine they could possibly live. Quentin Jacobsen has given up on ever becoming good friends with Margo. But one night, Margo enters his room through his window and after much convincing, gets him to go on an adventure that will altogether change his life. The quote above is when the two of them are on the top of the Sun Trust building. I chose the quote because I thought that it really describes this book. You might think, well duh, of course it describes the book, the title is Paper Towns and the quote is about paper towns, but this quote describes this book as a whole. A boy growing up in a bland home in a bland family, his life is a paper life. But when he goes on this adventure with Margo, his world was now three dimensional. I think that in life a very important thing is to stay three dimensional. If you just focus on one thing you are living a paper life. 

   I am a very big procrastinator, but the problem about my procrastinating is that while I am putting something off, I am doing nothing. I think that the point John Green is trying to get off by writing this book is that we all have one or two dimensional things in our lives, and he wants us to do something about that. And like the quote above states, from above, you don't see the rust or the graffiti or the things that people think of as ugly. But you can see that it's fake. That's why the real things in life are never perfect.

    I'm not going to say that this book changed the way I look at things forever, but I will say that for a couple of days after I read this book I looked at the world and loved its imperfections. I think that in those few days I was in a better mood that I usually am. Because when you walk into your room and you look at the clothes lying on the floor and the pieces of paper all over your desk, it's better than seeing a perfect room. Because a perfect room is a paper room. "It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic."