The Stranger by Albert Camus

Cover via Goodreads.

Rating: 3/5 stars.

On a plot level, reading The Stranger is as exciting as watching your grandmother eat potatoes. It’s a simple story about a nondescript man who does things randomly and routinely, and he eventually goes to trial for an incident caused by the heat.

Though I didn’t care about the characters or the plot, The Stranger did prove intellectually stimulating.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Cover via Goodreads.

Rating: 4/5 stars.

“‘That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. ‘It demands to be felt.’”

Okay, dang. That’s deep. I hang out with some of the smartest kids at my school, and we do engage in sophisticated debate from time to time, but none of us really produce such philosophical insight in everyday conversation. How unrealistic John Green’s characters tend to be has turned me off from most of his other books – the characters in this one suffered slightly from it too – but The Fault in Our Stars as a whole is John Green’s best book to date.