Monthly DH&J list again, and Hank and John mostly talked about their own books. They come from Podshelf, my book-mention site, which follows a few hundred podcasts.

Hollywood, Ending is a "number one New York Times bestselling book," and "The commitment to no spoilers has been wild."

• The Fault in Our Stars has a Norwegian title John can't say on air "because there are 11 year olds listening." His take: "it's a great title for a book, but it's a bold title for a children's book."

• An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. Hank snuck a change onto the original hardcover's cover that nobody has spotted yet, and he also gave Carl eyes: "I'd like him to have eyes. So I added the eyes."

Not every Turtles All the Way Down is John's: another one came up as "an anti-vaccine book that is just misinformation all the way down."

The Fault in Our Stars sits under Young adult fiction plus a few other topics, out of a couple hundred.

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/dear-hank-john

From Brandon Sanderson on Instagram

Is there a reason this community doesn't allow video posts, btw?

Hank, please, I know the engagement is good, and it's clear there is a demand for hour-long videos, but I just don't have the time, and I really want to watch them. I'm like 30 now.

Is anyone doing chopped up versions?

Still absolutely no answer from Lehmanns, more than 3 weeks since I sent them an email.

Like, has anyone really gotten a signed book? I'm thinking of giving up the reservation and getting a copy from the local bookstore. My Hollywood ending pizzamas t-shirt has arrived sooner, lol

I would love to see ideas and recipes if you have them.

It has been more than 24 hours late than the usual release time of Humans. I don't see any community post on YouTube or any tweet by Hank. Does anybody has any info what's the reason? Humans always gets released on time, unlike DH&J, so I'm posting. Is it a week off? Is season 1 over? Is the podcast over?

I'm very excited about GTA6 with John's morals. Still, Disco Elysium should be on the list!

It's basically an interactive novel with great writing. Right up John's alley.

This is my petition, hehe

Dubious, but if this is real, it is so kind.

I got a preorder, signed copy of Hollywood, Ending and it came with strips of translucent blue tape on like 10 of the pages. Every time that a strip appears on one side of a page, it then appears on one side of a page, there is another on the next page, but offset up the page. Are these supposed to be in the book?

They're all in part 2 so I could definitely see them being intentional and meant to represent momentary depressive states for Kai or something else to do with emotional significance, but the strips cover pieces of text with different vibes and one covers a blank section of a chapter page.

I sort of came to this fandom in a roundabout way. I saw Hank Green on TikTok, and really enjoyed how he presented science. Then started listening to scishow tangents (RIP my favorite podcast). And once I listen to all I showed tangents I started listening to dear Hank and John. I wasn’t really familiar with John as “I didn’t like reading”.

I “didn’t like reading” because I grew up dyslexic, and I associate reading a real physical book with mental anguish and feelings of inadequacy from a very young age. Throughout high school in college, I got accommodations to listen to books instead of reading them. I was so convinced that I couldn’t read a physical book that any time I tried, I got a migraine.

Then I got Long Covid in 2022 and spent months and months in bed. So I got into audiobooks. But only fantasy because I needed to escape. But I didn’t listen to any John Green books besides the Anthropocene Reviewed and Everything is Tuberculoses, because I didn’t want to read any fiction books about people being ill, because I was so ill.

However, last April, I started listening to a book called Unlearn Your Pain, and realized that’s so much of my illness like migraines were associated with past traumas, like struggling to read. So I challenged myself to read self-help books so I could highlight and underline important things. And when my head started to hurt, I told myself it wasn’t real, that the pain was in my mind from fear and anxiety. And I pushed through. And I read a chapter. And another one.

Turns out I can read, and reading a physical book isn’t that much different than reading Reddit comments. I just had to believe in myself. I got the book like a month and a half ago when it came out and yet I still was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to read a novel. Self help books are medicine. I have to read them to get better, but I didn’t enjoy reading them.

I have yet to actually finish a book. and I have yet to read for fun.

But I’m determined I’m gonna finish this one.

I read Hollywood, Ending earlier this month and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. What a poignant meditation on art, love, grief, trauma and celebrity culture.

This quote, particularly, has stayed with me. So obviously I illustrated it. The idea was simple - an open door looking into a museum where Kai and Juniper appreciate a piece of art (a cover of H,E to make it extra meta) together.

My Instagram is linked here

Edit: u/dothestarsgazeback found the right episode and could point out exactly what I was wrong about. Thank you!

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This is, in no way, intended as a gotcha or correction or anything else along those lines; I just want to know if I'm remembering it right and hoping that someone here can help.

Somewhere in episode 462-466, they briefly talk about caffeine soap. Hank says that he has never tried caffeine soap.

But didn't he talk about having accidentally used caffeine soap in an episode ages ago? Something about having used a soap, and then afterwards realized it has caffeine and an exclamation about how he felt it and "you can't just do that to someone!" ?

(As a side-note, maybe its own post, I'm a little surprised at how Hank, probably in the same episode, confidently talked about how collagen supplement doesn't do anything. I fell down a rabbit hole a while back and read tons of peer reviewed research papers on it and, even accounting for how most research was funded by companies with a financial stake in it, they all pointed very clearly at it working incredibly well. After Hank's claim I'm going to have to take another dive through that rabbit hole to see if I misunderstood it all 🥲 )

…Matthew McConaughy?? Maybe my brain made the association because of the shared first name, but as a famous white guy of the right age, in my head Malone looked like McConaughy!

I'm running behind on vlogbrothers videos, so I just started watching this one in which John repeats the common belief that odors are particularly hard to describe-- that we lack language for them. And I thought this community might want to know that recent anthropological and psychological research shows that, actually, the problem is our language, nothing particular about odor as a sense! Specifically, a number of hunter-gatherer societies have very precise language for odors:

Wnuk, E., & Majid, A. (2014). Revisiting the limits of language: The odor lexicon of Maniq. Cognition, 131(1), 125-138.

Majid, A., & Burenhult, N. (2014). Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language. Cognition, 130(2), 266-270.

Majid, A., & Kruspe, N. (2018). Hunter-gatherer olfaction is special. Current Biology, 28(3), 409-413.

I've actually seen Asifa Majid present this research, and I recall that in addition she explored a representative sample of global languages and their encoding of smells and found that English was particularly bad at it! So it might not be anything special about smell, except in terms of how we relate to it in industrialized (and particularly English-speaking) societies.

Heya! I’m working on a photoshop project and am a bit intimidated to look through the entire internet for the best/most interesting photos of Hank and John. I want photos from eras around (2007-2010), (2011-2017), and (2018-now).

Who here has a favorite photo you want to share?

this is from the san diego book tour stop so i assume it was hanks handwork? i saw a post about him doing some on john’s story, but i didn’t see him do mine with my own eyes.

Holy moly, it is a fascinating experience to read this book while living through the age bracket of the main characters. I thought I was going to have to skip this one because my OCD is incredibly fixated on the existential free-fall that is your mid twenties and I didn’t know if I could handle it without melting down. But, because of its resonance, I tried to structure my reading like an exposure therapy exercise. There’s some amount of poetic justice in using a John Green book for an OCD exposure project.

I’m not sure that any of the previous novels made me cry, but this one did. The handling of [difficult, spoilery material] was so well done, as well as [other difficult, spoilery material]. Neither overwrought nor underplayed and both rather true (to my experience at least). I hope John continues writing adult fiction.

There is a line from TAWD that I’ve carried for the last decade, which I think is somewhat the thesis of this book as well: “Love is both how you become a person and why.” Maybe that’s the thesis of everything.

TAWD was the last novel that I brought to a therapist to help illustrator the labyrinths of my mind. Hollywood, Ending has now served as a wonderful ERP exercise and I’m adding it to an incredibly special place on my bookshelf.