I keep delivering long lectures about this book in my head -- I'm not sure who I'm supposed to be lecturing, only that I feel most urgently that there are Things That Must Be Said! This suggests to me that my review was inadequate, and I'd better just try again so that this book will finally leave me the hell alone. 
 Here's what I keep jabbering to myself while I walk the dog or do the dishes: in my opinion, the most important question we can ask is "How do I live this life?" The answer to that question is an endlessly moving target; it's the sort of question that is less about answering than it is about asking, and it needs to be asked again and again. 
 I ask it every day. For serious. Of course, I also spend time almost every day visualizing my own neurons as tangled hair and (imagining) combing them out, so I may not be entirely typical. 
 My favourite books are inevitably books where the author (through characters, yes, but that's not the only way to do it) is operating on this level: asking the question, trying to figure out what's good in life (hey, even Conan the Barbarian answered that question!), evaluating and reevaluating, examining things from different angles. In my ideal book, it would be subtly and artfully done, but I'd rather it be done ham-fistedly than not be done at all. 
 I am reading for MIND, my friends. I want to see the author behind the words. I want to see a fellow human there, striving and caring and questioning. 
 I found Looking for Alaska a bit too shiny, somehow; I saw what he was trying to say (and credited him for thinking; I gave it three stars, even though I found it pretty dull), but I didn't feel like I saw HIM. With this book, I have seen John Green. He is my friend, whether he knows it or not. 
 Which brings me to the second part of my in-head dishwashing lecture: "The John Green Formula". 
 Friends. Romans. C'mon now. When you read this book, did Colin's relationship formula strike you as a bit simplistic and reductive? Silly, even? So what, we're going to graph Green's books, too? Nerdy narrator + fat funny friend + Manic Pixie Dream Girl = John Green's latest? Is that ANY less silly? 
 His books feature all the same characters just like chess games feature all the same pieces. Variation on a theme is a perfectly legitimate way to go about creating art (to say nothing of exploring ideas); certainly he's said something different here than he said in Alaska (I have not yet read Paper Towns). It's not the same book. Lindsey isn't even a proper MPDG. 
 John Green's strength is not necessarily the characters themselves. It's how he uses them to talk about ideas. In this particular book, he's exploring questions about personal history: how do we remember and make sense of it? How does the past shape who we are now, and how do we keep ourselves from being trapped there forever? How do we ascribe meaning to ourselves? 
 The moment that hit me hardest and made me say, "Yes, John, you are a member of my tribe" was when Colin discovers that he has MISREMEMBERED one of his relationships. With Katherine III, HE was the dumper. It shakes him to his very core, because his excellent memory is one of the things that DEFINES him. Who is he, if that isn't what he thought it was? 
 These are the moments I read for. Screw plot. I wanna see people realizing life is a very weird place to live. I wanna see the author's preoccupations played through from multiple angles. I wanna point at the text and say, "That is what it's like to be a human, that there, THAT!" 
 So. This is eccentric, and I'm sure it's gone on long enough. I will end with the last line of the book, because it really does sum up how I feel: "...he was feeling not-unique in the very best possible way." That is how my favourite books leave me feeling: not-unique. Not alone. Connected across space and time to another mind like mine.