The Abundance of Katherines (John Green)

Summary:
Colin is a new high school graduate with an obsession with anagrams and girls named Katherine. His first girlfriend was Katherine, then his second happened to be Katherine too. And every girl afterward, too, right up to his nineteenth Katherine. Each one of them broke up with him, and after the nineteenth break-up, he feels he's doomed to repeat the same mistake forever. His plump Middle-eastern best friend Hassan decides that they are going to spend the summer doing something not depressing, and going on a road trip. They wind up in a town called Gutshot. They meet a cute girl named Lindsey, her boyfriend Colin (The Other Colin, or TOC for short), and her mom, Hollis. They wind up staying in Gutshot for the summer, helping Hollis out in their little general store, and interviewing the townspeople about the world of Gutshot, and Colin decides to work out a mathematical equation for how long his relationships went on with all the Katherines. His singular focus is admirable to a point, but becomes sadly over-obsessed. Will he ever get over Katherine XIX, and be able to move on?

Thoughts:
Not the best John Green book I've read. I've become fairly enamored with his writing, to be sure, but this was not his best. The main character is annoying about his obsession, and while reading, I just wanted to smack him upside the head most of the time. Sure, the kid's brilliant. He's got a thing for anagrams, and he was a child prodigy. Great. So you're a smart kid. That doesn't mean you have to obsess over the littlest things. But that's how Green wrote him, and it wound up working. But the book dragged for far too long before we get to the good plot bits inside. I trudged through this one far more than I did with either Will Grayson, Will Grayson or The Fault in Our Stars. I'm disappointed, but not every book by a favored author can be fabulous. Just most of them. Oh, and one other minor, nitpicking thing that drove me completely mad. The physical inside the book was annoying. I don't know if it was Green's decision, the publisher, or a little of both, but there were page numbers only on the right side pages, which wound up being the odd numbers. This would have been fine for the most part, but the book dragged, and I kept wanting to know how much more until the end. What made it especially difficult was when the first page of a new chapter fell on an odd page. There were no page numbers on the page because the top of the page was an attractive, wide open space. Looks nice, but if you're only numbering every other page to begin with, this makes it hard to find a page or keep track of anything. As I said, nitpicky, but damn, I couldn't stand it.

Book 55 of 70

Pages: 215, 228 if you count the appendix
Genre: teen lit, romance
Grade: C
Would I Recommend?: Read the other two Green books I mentioned above over this one. I was disappointed. But if you're being a completionist about Green's work, I have read far worse books, so it's not completely unreadable.