Delirium by Lauren Oliver

Oh, my God! This book has been setting in my "to read" stack for at least three weeks - maybe even a month - and I can't believe I waited this long to read it! It should have been pulsing with awesome or something! My God, this was it! The perfect book! It's set in a dystopian future where love has been declared a disease and everyone is given a "cure" at age eighteen (basically like a lobotomy). The story centers on Lena, who meets a man, Alex, who is from the Wilds, i.e. the unregulated lands.

My Thoughts

1. This book is to die for! I don't even want to dissect it, but here we go!
2. This book was so enthralling and engaging and heartwrenching and ravaging and ravishing and raw and real and wonderful and amazing and beautiful!
3. The world of this book is so meticulously created to parallel our own - Romeo and Juliet is still read in freshman English classes - and I really, really love that. The way that the author uses quotes and such from official government publications at the beginning is really phenomenal in terms of world creation. 
4. Lena! Oh, wow! I loved Lena! She thinks of herself as no one special, then she lets herself fall in love and feel and think and be and, my God, is she a wonderful character!
5. Alex!!!!! Oh, he is perfection! I cannot get enough of the way the author describes his hair as a crown of fire/thorns/glory etc. It is just phenomenal. He is just phenomenal. He opens Lena's eyes to the world, but he is also such a real guy. I also LOVE that he shares Shakespearean sonnets and Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems with her. That's how you know you've got a good guy. I cannot gush about him enough!
6. As someone who has never been in love, I found the idea of experiencing love through the perspective of one who has never even considered "love" as an option to be beyond magnificent. It was amazing! Honestly, the entire time I was reading this book, I was getting that feeling that you get, when you feel like your heart is too full and you can't talk and you think your heart might just burst through your chest? That might just be me, but you get the idea. 
7. One of my favorite scenes was in Alex's home in the Wilds, when Lena asks him what poetry is, and he reads some. Even though I'm no stranger to poetry, it's also a really rapturous experience to see something like that through the eyes of a person like Lena. It's like, you read a poem, you go "that's a good poem" and you think, well, of course it's good, it's poetry that's endured forever. But, Lena's reaction just made me appreciate it all the more, things like poetry and beauty and stuff. Like, I genuinely stopped to muse on how grateful I am to own several books of poetry and how beautiful things can be. 
8. Speaking of beautiful things, the imagery in this book and the author's writing style was beyond magnificence, into full-fledged glory. A recurring theme is Lena's emergence from the fog of her previous life, into the awe of the world around her (the real world)  and her appreciation for passion and love and that is something that really appeals to me. Just, the metaphors - particularly the fire ones - and the raw, seething, teeming emotion was just incomparable. And, that last image of Alex, oh, God is was art. 
9. This book was my book. Lena, a girl who is, by her own reckoning nothing special, is shown the way by Alex, the most magnificent guy, and follows her passions and awakens to the beauty of the world and poetry and sonnets and love. Okay, that last bit hasn't happened. I'm still technically a random nondescript girl, but, still, Lena reminded me that I want to throw myself on the mercy of some great passion, have one of those epic romances, take the romance with the tragedy, appreciate, wonder, awe, live, love - I could go on. This book spoke to me so deeply, you don't even know how much this affected me. 
10. As I was reading this, all I could think was "My God, this is literature - this is love!" This is what it's supposed to be. What everything was supposed to be. This made me cry and laugh and sigh and love and hope and dream and wonder and gush and long and yearn and desire and need and all sorts of other things. This book reminded me of goals I've had that had really been lost as impossible or immature. Apart from the Harry Potter series, I can't think of another book that influenced me as much as a person. 

Who Should Read It: 

• Everyone! This is a book for all time. 

Final Score: All that is great and good and wonderful in this world/10 

Read this! You won't be disappointed! I cannot tell you how much I loved this book, but you need to read it!

Next I'll be reading Pandemonium, the sequel! Woooooo!