37) An Abundance of Katherines 38) The Well of Loneliness

37) An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Already a fan of The Fault in Our Stars, I had been pre-warned that the rest of John Green's books weren't as good, and I have to agree. I'm sure sure whether it's the subject matter; a book about a girl with cancer lends itself better to being emotionally profound than a book about a guy who's dated a whole series of girls with the same names, but I definitely connected with this book a lot less than TFIOS. You could also argue that that's due to there being a male protagonist rather than a female one, but having a male protagonist didn't stop me from connecting with Christopher in Haddon's The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-time, who in fact shares a lot of traits with Colin, the protagonist of this book, so I strongly suspect of having Asperger's Syndrome. While I lacked a personal connection with the story, I did enjoy it a lot, and found both Colin and Hassan amusing and interesting characters, although I was less convinced by Lindsey. I enjoyed the way in which the plot slowly revealed Colin's back story with all the different Katherines, which developed along with his "theorem" for predicting relationships, but that doesn't stop me from finding it highly unrealistic that 1) Colin would have had so many girlfriends (especially given his dedication to improving his mind, which seems to leave little time for other things) and 2) that they would have all been called Katherine. Overall I recommend this book if you enjoyed The Fault in Our Stars, but don't expect it to stay with you in the same way.


38) The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

This is another book on my course "the Girl in the Book". For a book written in the 1920s, I was surprised at how candid this novel was about lesbianism, or "inversion" as it was then called, though I think that rather than being a lesbian novel, it could nowadays been seen as a transgender one, as Stephen repeatedly wishes to be a man (and yes, her parents chose to call her Stephen, even though she was a girl, don't ask me why) when she's younger, and aspires to look like one when she is older. I think that if given the option to transition then she probably would have. Even though there's nothing more explicit than"and that night, they were not divided" in the novel, it was judged obscene by a British court and the publisher was forced to have it printed France and secretly shipped over to England. Just as Stephen was censored by her family and the society in which she lived, Hall was censored for daring to broach such a controversial subject. This makes me realise how lucky we are these days (in the UK at least) to live in a society where there is freedom of speech and people can access all the information they want at the touch of a button.