A thing of awesome

I went to a thing at the Brookline Library on Tuesday. There were other adults there, but much of the themed-cupcake-eating audience consisted of teenagers who talked about books a lot and were very good at trivia about John Green novels.

The Evening of Awesome at Carnegie Hall is as hard to sum up as the Nerdfighter phenomenon that produced it. It was an event celebrating the first anniversary of the very serious but often also funny book The Fault in Our Stars, and there was talk about and a reading from the book, but a whole lot of other things happened. John and his equally talented brother Hank have used the conglomeration of interests that is the Internet to create a Thing where it makes sense for one event to include John's musings about his and everyone's purpose in life; Hank's songs about Harry Potter, quarks, and anglerfish; musical performances by the Mountain Goats and Kimya Dawson; and a questions-from-Twitter segment with questions read by Neil Gaiman and by Hannah Hart of "My Drunk Kitchen." In short, the Greens have enabled a hodgepodge.

A hodgepodge of awesome.

See? (Starts about 35 minutes in.)