An Abundance of Katherines

This was the first John Green book I read - back when I was 15 - making this read a re-read. It took a while for me to get into the book, I personally felt the first part a little draggy. But I grew to love Colin, in all his nerdyness, after I got over him being sucha whiney baby. I especially liked the Katherine stories near the end! There were two distinct parts of the book I remembered from the last time I read it: 1) the part where he pointed to his head when Lindsey asked where it hurt and 2) her letter to him. Which probably sums up what this book is about.

This book got on my nerves at the beginning, and I assumed I'd stop reading it. But I kept going, and somehow it ended up charming me just enough for me to finish.

My thoughts about the book were very positive as I finished it. But I can't ignore everything I hated along the way. The humor often tried too hard, it reminded me of a weaker version of The Rosie Project, and it just had a lot of little things that grated on my nerves.

It improved, but I can't give it anything higher than 3 stars when I think about everything I disliked about it.

I just couldn't finish this book. Normally, I can devour a book within a couple of days, if even that, and I started reading this a MONTH ago. I gave it 2 stars because I've read worse books and it wasn't completely annoying, it just wasn't interesting to me. I just couldn't buy into the whole Katherine thing, and some of the language was just so immature. Fugging? Really? I haven't said that since I was 12.

I also decided to read a summary of the rest of this book which confirms that I've made the right decision in abandoning this book, instead of wasting my time.

I am definitely in the minority on this book. Everyone seems to love it. I had a very hard time getting into it. The equations and footnotes at the bottom of the pages were distracting, and I couldn't connect with the main character. I wasn't able to finish it. However, I know I'm in the minority here, and that many people loved this book. I'm sorry I wasn't one of them. :(

Road trip stories are always interesting ones, because they never really seem to end up being about the road trip themselves; they're more about the characters learning more about themselves and their relationships with each other, and this one isn't really any different in that regard.

That being said, it's a REALLY funny, really heartfelt story about Colin and Hassan, and this girl named Lindsay that they meet in the town of Gutshot, Tennessee. Colin's a child prodigy who fears he's, at 17, in danger of becoming washed-up, and who's been dumped by 19 girls named Katherine. He figures that the best way to overcome this washupedness is to develop a unified Katherine Theorem, which will be able to explain the course of any romantic relationship.

This book has ‘cult hit' written all over it. A lot of the humour requires a certain appreciation for math, footnotes, and language (including foreign language and anagramming), but if you have an interest in those things, and don't mind YA books, you just might love it.

If I could give this book seven stars, I fugging would.

Have I ever told anyone how much I like math? I love math so much it should be illegal! It is unnerving for a 17 year-old to love something at least 3000 years old. Thankfully, that will be remedied in exactly one month time! (I Accept early birthday wishes) .
The plot of this story is very cool and I like it plenty but John Green once again ruined it with clichés and cheesy lines and a very cheesy ending. Of course an equation can't predict the future and of course the future goes towards infinity... But not for the reasons John thinks. You can't really draw a function or predict its curve 100% when x goes towards infinity but we can expect a sort of behaviour but no one really tried out a function when x and y reach for example 1273727172737337271717717273 did they? That is the point. His equation is not wrong, but he used the variable ‘time' for mostly months so when it reaches several years, x will become a very big number. So no, John Green. No need to turn beautiful ,mathematics to something very cheesy ... Hence the 3.5 stars . But this is really better than looking for Alaska and Will Grayson .

I love so much this book, i was a little “afraid” because i read the fault in our stars which is one of my favorite book but i also read looking for Alaska and.. i was desapointed not because it's not a good story or because i don't like the way it was write but because i find it a little similar. But an abundance of Katherine is my favorite with TFIOS ! it's just so funny and even if i hate math it was interesting and Colin is different compared to other character like him. i love this road trip !

I guess I will have to abandon this romantic notion that, since I really like the author of the novel, I'll also really really like the novels themselves.
I liked the Abundance of Katherines, but it never crossed my mind that it could be a book for me. I would have probably enjoyed it at his best when I was 14 or something.

I liked all the footnotes, though. Not only because they are a smart narrative device, but also because they do a good job in showing how a mind like Colin's works.
And the math.

See ya again on youtube, John Green. I love you, but as in a writer/reader-out-of-recommended-age-group kind of relationship. So I'm dumping you.

Love, Katherine.

An interesting and clever read, in the John-Green kind of way. Although it's not really my favorite genre (i.e. young adult fiction), it was an entertaining distraction during a tougher week. I think after 3 of John Green's books, I'm okay with not being as compelled to read the rest of his works but particularly appreciated the anagrams, random trivia, and quirky humor.

This book had me chuckling on the first page. I follow John Green's Vlog Brothers, and looked forward to that intellectual snark that keeps me coming back for more, and I was not disappointed. First, let's address the main character's name: Colin Singleton.

Any computer programmer or mathematician would recognize the joke at once: here is a young man who is desperate to be known, to be recognized as unique and special. A singleton, in object-oriented programming, is a one-of-a-kind object. You can have a class of an object, say, Car, and then have different objects that belong to the class of Car: Honda, Ford, Toyota, etc. A singleton has only one element in its class or set: it is unique, special. Nerd!Belinda was ridiculously happy to see the intellectual snark and jokes went this far.

Read this book for a contemporary satire on the road trip story, while at the same time feeling heartfelt and snarky, as we all were in high school. A quick read, followed with an appendix where Green asked his mathematics professor friend to go through the math of Colin's Underlying Katherine Predictability. With graphs and everything. I've never been so happy to see a parabola in my life.

So, this is my third attempt at reading this book. I read the first few chapters in those original attempts, and I was never able to connect, but for some reason it really DID this time. I loved the characters. I laughed, I cried, I smiled... The math related stuff I still sort of skimmed over, but I really did enjoy the novel.

Summary: Child prodigy Colin has just been dumped by his nineteenth girlfriend named Katherine. He is heartbroken over the loss of the relationship, and he is frustrated that he has not—as he sees it—fulfilled his potential by becoming a bona fide genius and coming up with something brilliantly original. To ease his troubled mind, he and his best friend Hassan go on a road trip that leads them to the small town of Gutshot, where they will make some surprising discoveries about life and themselves.

Short Review: I like coming of age novels. It is interesting to me how many different types of coming of age novels that there are. This is a ‘what it means to find purpose in your life' coming of age novel. Colin is depressed because he is an aging child prodigy and doesn't think he will ever really grow into an adult genius that makes a difference in the world. He has recently been dumped the the 19th Katherine that he has dated (he only has dated girls named Katherine, with a K). On a road trip to discover himself, he and his friend Hassan end up in Gutshot, TN doing oral histories of the people of the small town as a summer job. Colin tries to figure out how to create a formula to predetermine who will be the dumper and the dumpee in a relationship.

There is a lot of humor, a decent bit of language, and a very restrained amount of sex and romance. Much to like about the book, I really recommend it and immediately started another book by the same author.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/an-abundance-of-katherines/

I probably would have liked this book a lot more if I had read it when it was published in 2006 (when I was still in college). Now, it felt a bit too “young” for me. But I definitely empathized with Colin, a young socially-awkward prodigy who tries to decipher love using mathematical formulas. And the Chicago setting didn't hurt either.