An Abundance of Katherines

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.