Anyone have a book that they are super glad that they gave a second (or third) read?
Maybe you understood it better the second time, maybe it reflected where you where in your life at the time, maybe it lighted your heart right when you needed it.

I have one, actually I have many, but I’ll tell you about how giving a book a second chance helped me through my lovely teenage identiy crisis.

So I’d heard about a book, a book that never “forgot to be awesome,” a book so good it would make me cry, make me laugh, cry again and have a desire to listen to Swedish hip hop. So I read it and I liked it, but right when I was getting to the weepy stuff, my grandma died, and suddenly the descriptive writing style that I had loved and though had shown emotion so well just seemed fake, I couldn’t look at it and empathise with the characters, why care about these fake people when gwenda was gone, when my granddad suddenly looked so alone, no longer a part of the pair that had seemed so inseparable. When I cursed the disease that I thought had taken her from me years before,
So for a while I hated this book, Hated it. But I was a teenager, I was surfing for my identity and I thought I could find it by being ‘a nerdfighter’ and I thought that description meant having to love ‘that book’ so I reread it.

And I found that the characters didn’t seem so fake anymore, and hazels struggle about her mum not being a mother anymore hit me a little bit. Gwenda Joy had not been taken by MND, I had,
I realised that I had been scared, and I had chosen to see her a almost gone, each time the disease took something else from her, her knitting, her bowling, her cooking she had seemed less like My grandma, but right at the end she was still herself because it wasn’t the things she did that made her who she was.
The last thing she said/wrote to me was that me and all her grandkids could never be naughty, and that she would always love us even when we misbehaved , because she was our grandma, A comment I had made about how I was being nerdy, had been misheard to give me a piece of advice I will always hope to remember,
Rachel was wrong when she told batman “it’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you” our actions, our roles or image are importat but they are not us.

So that is why I like The fault in our stars now, why I’m glad I gave it another chance, because it helped to be who I am, and not just because I happily identify as a nerdfighter now :)