When I have just read a good book, I feel incredibly infinite and alive. I wish I could take this feeling everywhere, carry it in my pocket and put it on when I feel battered and bruised by life.

The novel responsible for my feelings right now is John Greene’s The Fault in Our Stars. It is a cancer book that is not a cancer book, a love story without a happy ending, and a great big existential question. In short, it is exactly the kind of book that has been calculated to step on all my tenderest buttons of emotion and pretty much dissolve me into a puddle of tears. It is a book that makes me live.

Not that living is only achieved by puddles of tears, but puddles are pretty lively things to begin with.

I digress.

When I have read a book like this (and the last was Confessions of a Wallflower) I simultaneously want to tell the whole world about it, and keep it all to myself. This sentiment is shared by the protagonist. When I have read a book I connect with so intimately I get a weird kind of impulse for both PDA and secret kisses.

I will settle for telling the world that it must always, always try to feel like ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ and precious few other books have made me feel after reading them. It must be the purpose of human life to achieve this feeling: a curious mix of certainty and wonder that has been previously been described as serenity. Probably. Serenity may not mean the same thing for you as it does for me.

All I know is my fingers are trembling from a heat in my heart that refuses to be put into words, I feel a reassuring connection to the rest of the universe, and, despite having spent the last hour crying my eyes out, I am the happiest I have been in a long, long time.