The collective catharsis a sad book can bring doesn’t require that it be read aloud. The mania has faded now, but at the end of my time teaching high school, many of my students were besotted with John Green’s YA novel The Fault in Our Stars, which came out in early 2012. That book... Well, let me just say tears will be jerked. It’s a very good, very sad book about kids with cancer. Copies of The Fault in Our Stars were passed around among the readers of my little school, and because the book is unputdownable, for a few weeks, I would frequently spot someone reading it in class, ineffectively
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