Anna and the French Kiss

I began reading this book last night, though it is 2:30 in the morning so to me it's still the same day. John Green has raved about it. People on Twitter have raved about it. And guess what? I'll be raving about it as well. I'm not nearly finished with it but there's some stuff in it that I adore already.

The friendship between Anna and St. Clair. (It's super weird to be writing about a character with whom I share a name. I don't think I've ever read a book where I have the same name as a character.) Their friendship mirrors one of the great friendships in my own life: the one I have with Matthew. (Fancy that, Anna's ex-boyfriend in the book is named Matt.) The way they interact reminds me so much of my own relationship with Matthew. In the book, Anna and her man are a bit more flirtatious, always on the brink of something more. Though Matthew and I aren't that way, I notice so many similarities in how we act and how the pair in the book acts.

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At this point I have now finished the book. And let me just say: Wow. It was quite good. On par with John Green goodness. It was witty and personal and kind of predictable but in the way that you don't care because the writing is fantastic.

So back to the topic of best friends . . . When I find a book that mirrors so well a small part of my life, I instantly analyze the crap out of my life in an attempt to find all the similarities between the characters and who they would be in my own life; when I say character I don't mean the literal character, I mean the general role they play in the novel. Does that make sense? And so when the plot is driven by the interactions of a girl and a boy who become best friends, I put a lot of work into my thoughts.

Isn't it great how books make you do these things? Analyze, consider and reflect. With my best friend, the aforementioned Matthew, gone for just over another year, it makes the reading of various books much different. The way I consider a novel when he's around is very different from how I consider it when he is not. Your situation in life often dictates how you react to things, entertainment included. The fact that I have another close friend, one with whom I am getting even closer, out of the picture for one more year, makes it even more involved as far as the analyzing and reflecting is concerned; I'll just say this: if we had truly met, me and this other friend, and talked earlier in the year, Matthew and I wouldn't be as close as we were. Books always have a best friend type character, and when it's a girl with a boy as her best friend, things are much more interesting. The existence of a best friend in the novel makes me think about my own best friend(s) automatically. But when the novelization best friends start doing things I would do with my own best friend, acting in ways that my best friend and I have acted, suddenly it's much more apparent that my best friend is not around, any of them, though particularly the boys since they've been gone so much longer than anyone else in my life at this point.

So yeah, I think that's where I was going with this . . . I honestly don't remember what I actually wanted this to be about when I started it at 2:30 in the morning. No matter what, you should all read Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins. It's quality.

Since I finished this BEDA post so early, I won't have to worry about it come 11 at night! Yay. I think today I'm going to longboard and play tennis. I need some outdoors time and it's finally not raining. Tonight I'll probably clean my room, too. Clean is the wrong word, actually. I'm going to rearrange. I still have a lot of clothes and books that need to be put away. Just because I enjoy unpacking doesn't mean I do it quickly.

Last YouTube video I watched: BEST ROAD TRIP SONGS EVER