This week I am reading the much-anticipated new novel by YouTuber, unpaid intern at Good.Store, and best-selling author, John Green.

Although John is one of my favorite people, he’s not actually one of my favorite authors. I adore The Anthropocene Reviewed, but I’ve felt only lukewarm about his young adult fiction. To be fair, I read them in my 30s. I don’t read his young adult novels to enjoy them, but instead as an act of love for a person who I deeply respect. But Hollywood, Ending is not a young adult novel.

I’m only going to talk about the first chapter here, which is 4 quick pages. If you want, you can listen to John read them to you, as is his pre-release tradition. I did so, but when I got the book I reread them anyway, and somehow noticed several more things.

I’m in a phase of my life where I’m annotating books by default. It’s not very natural for me to annotate — indeed, to write things down. (If I’ve already had a thought, why do I need to write it down? If it was true or useful I’ll probably remember it, or regenerate it next time I read this.) So usually my books end up with just a handful of annotations scattered across three hundred or so pages.

But with Hollywood, Ending (or H,E as the Nerdfighters are calling it) I seem to be doing something closer to Bible study. “If this sentence had a secret message for me, what would it be?” or “Didn’t so-and-so say something that contradicted that earlier?” or “Why did John choose to tell us this detail, in this place?”

Here are some things I noticed in the first chapter. The book is about some actors during the filming of a movie about Andy Warhol. So while the book isn’t about Warhol, he’s a major presence.

• The very first line gives the very first name in the book, Matthew Malone, which is the actor playing Warhol. I noticed that “Matthew Malone” sounds a lot like “Marylin Monroe”, the subject of one of Warhol’s most famous works.
• On the second line, we get the name of the movie; Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Presumably this refers to the fact that Warhol has remained iconic. But (I see from reading Warhol’s wikipedia page) Warhol died at the age of 58. This is arguably before “old age”, so he arguably never got old.
• The introduction of a character on the second page sprinkles the paragraph with color. Andy Warhol’s work is known for being very colorful.
• Two pages in, and I notice that there have been a lot of brand names: Uber, Altoids, Moleskine, AirPods. Warhol’s work is known for bringing branding and consumerism into the realm of art, and causing us to question their presence in our lives. Is Green doing the same?

This is a pretty fun way to read a book. I crank up the pattern-matching, puzzle-solving part of my brain.

I’ll just give you one more; the first-person narrator, Juniper, is not unambiguously gendered. There are plenty of indicators of Juniper’s gender, but no one says a pronoun, nor “girl”, “boy”, etc. But we also don’t get any indication that this book is about transness, or even gender. John tends to do some kind of easter egg thing in each of his books, so I can’t help but wonder if the easter egg for H,E is that Juniper is never gendered.

I’m thrilled to read this book, and I hope you will too. It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to participate in a book release as a cultural event.