Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

From the first time I read this, a review that never made it onto anything but Riffle:

'Bring a commonplace book or BuJo/BulletJournal, whatever you use to write down quotes. There are a lot of good ones. I'm not saying your typical YA writer is a bad writer, but this guy has got some really good prose, and stuff that can stand out on it's own. Like you look at that, and go "wow, that's profound, I'm writing that down, and I'm gonna stew on it."

I read it in one night, and it caused an existential crisis that night. I just wanted to read a gay romance. Put -that- on the back of the book!'

Now, the second time I read this:

I love this book so much. I'm sure someone could argue little happens, or how it feels very episodic, but that's sort of the point: 1. It's about an inner struggle that reflects itself in an outer struggle.
2. It's about a relationship building itself up. 3. Ari is a very unreliable narrator, because he's suppressing so much emotion. If you come away with any takeaways from this book, at least one of them should be "emotions are good". Mister Rogers had at least one song about emotions, and I trust Mister Rogers.

I already own this book (digitally), but if they put out an anniversary edition with more content in the future, I will most definitely buy that, hint hint.

By the way, if you were wondering what the existential crisis was, it was a wake-up call that I was unhappy in Anthropology. I can say if nothing else, for reasons that don't make sense, this caused me not to pursue an Anthropology Master's degree. No crises the second time I read it, but I don't make that a requirement in reading books.

I do not like surprises of any kind, be it birthday surprises or surprises in books and movies. I always read the plot of the book or movie before starting it.
Knowing the plot never affected me, I laughed, cried, loved, got scared, felt sick, felt excited and lived through the narrative never the less. I guess the way the story is written appealed to me more than the plot. I have never regretted being this way until yesterday when I picked this book, of course after reading the plot on Wikipedia. (Damn even the wiki plot was beautiful)
This book was beautiful in my most favourite kind of way, by being simple.

And for the first time, I felt maybe if I had not known the plot I might have experienced this book differently, but I guess I will never know.

Anyways, this is an extremely simple, beautiful and short read :)

Eh. I had heard a lot of great things about this book, so I may have come into it with too-high expectations.

There were some parts that I loved, most specifically the descriptions of healthy family relationships, including those that were still in progress. The writing and narration were also good.

However, my one-sentence synopsis would be: moody teenager spends 98% of the book being moody, and then ✨the magic of love✨ magically fixes his entire life.

Not my thing. I can't really figure out the critical acclaim, and have to wonder if it would be as widely praised if the main relationship was heterosexual.

To be clear, my gripe is not with the gender(s) of the main characters or their relationship in the abstract, just the magical-fixing. I suspect if we were talking about a girl getting a boyfriend who was perfect and suddenly made everything perfect and fixed all her insecurities, it wouldn't have made it out of the slush-pile, good writing notwithstanding.

It's cute, sehr cute, und ich mochte dass hier mal n junger Protagonist ist, der sich sehr viele Fragen stellt, gerade auch zu Männlichkeit und wie er zu anderen Männern steht
Was für mich nicht geklappt hat, war was die Handlung vorantreiben sollte: einmal war die Hauptperson krank, kurz danach im Krankenhaus wegen einem Unfall, am Ende dann war sein bester Freund im Krankenhaus. Das war ein bisschen merkwürdig und fühlte sich sehr gezwungen an.
Auch war mir der Erzähler doch zu schwermütig-philosophisch, zu abgeklärt-altklug, das hätte klappen können, aber manchmal hab ich schon gemerkt, da sind Sätze, die hat ein Erwachsener ihm in den Mund gelegt, das sind nicht seine eigenen.
Dass (nicht in der Handlung des Buches selber, sondern zeitlich davor) eine trans Frau getötet wird, die dann im Buch als Typ genannt wurde, ist vermutlich dem zeitlichen Rahmen angemessen, trotzdem fand ich das schwierig. Niemand hat sich weiter gefragt, wer diese Person war, oder war bekümmert; das war irgendwie schade.

Und #SPOILER

Ich mochte auch nicht, dass Ari sich am Schluss seine ganze Persönlichkeit, sein Wesen damit erklärt, dass er schwul ist. Das schien ihm die Lösung zu all den Fragen zu sein, die er auf dem Herzen hatte, all die philosophischen Fragen, die ihn bewegten. NEIN NEIN bitte nicht, möchte ich ihm da sagen, das ist doch nur ein Teil deines Begehrens, das ist doch nicht dein ganzes Ich.

Aristotle and Dante is a book that I have been hearing about for a long time but just finally listened to. This is a coming of age story of two Mexican-American boys set in El Paso Texas in the 1980s.

Ari is a loner with many questions about his family. He has a much older brother who went to jail when Ari was four. He doesn't know why and his family refuses to talk about it. Ari's father is a Vietnam veteran struggling with PTSD who is having difficulty communicating with his family.

Dante is the extroverted only child of expressive and loving parents. He loves poetry. He offers to teach Ari to swim when they meet at a public pool. Over the summer they become friends and then very gradually start to realize that they may be falling in love.

This is the story of Ari and Dante's lives through one summer, the school year, and the next summer. There are everyday milestones like getting a driver's license and having your first job in addition to larger issues.

• How do you stand up to your parents so they start to see you as an adult?


• How do you deal with unrequited love?


• How do you most effectively face homophobia, including violence?


• How do you learn to let yourself learn to feel and act on your emotions?


• How do you deal with being too American for your Mexican relatives and too Mexican for other Americans?