Sure, I quickly learned he was named “Hazel,” but maybe it was one of those name like Marion or Andrea or Robin that sound like female names but guys can have them too. Interesting! My colleague had said that it wasn’t what I’d expect, and indeed it wasn’t: a gay love interest in a best-selling young adult novel. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. Then I got to the scene where the main love interest shows up at the cancer support group. He had the right blend of detachment and teen-engagement, and I quickly got absorbed in the story. James’s voice meshed well with the snarky, knowing voice of the book’s narrator. When I don’t know anything about a book - as was the case with The Fault in Our Stars, I opt for the gender identity of the author, so my narrator would be “James” because the author was John Green. Still, I appreciate having a choice between a male and a female voice. Synthetic voices have improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years, and I’m one of those folks who likes them to sound somewhat human but not too human because I like to read fast. I settled into my seat and considered which voice I wanted to have read it to me. It’s still a recent phenomenon for those of us who rely on alternative formats to have immediate access to such a wide variety of books, including popular ones that I might teach in a disability studies class. “The students love it, and it’s not what they expect either.”

“It’s not at all what you’d expect,” she said. A colleague at the conference mentioned the bestseller as a good read that has a great take on disability. Facing a long flight home from the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians in Toronto, I downloaded the novel from the amazing, a service that offers those with medically-certified print-reading disabilities instant access to hundreds of thousands of scanned books that we can read using text-to-speech software. Ok, I'm probably one of the last people to hear of what is now the smash-hit book and movie, about the love between two teenagers struggling with cancer.

The fault in our stars by john green