Looking For Alaska

Book #19: Looking for Alaska by John Green

I woke up this morning to a phone call from school saying it's a SNOW DAY! I'm delighted - but I am going to have to shorten up the requirements for the multigenre research paper, or we'll never finish it by the end of the marking period. Yikes. I wish I could just give an extension - but it messes up my students' grades to have a big project cross over into the next marking period. I've tried that before, and my students told me NEVER to do that again. So I won't.

Over breakfast this morning, I finished Looking for Alaska. Maybe finished is the wrong word - I think I'm going to have it in my head a long time. Errand #1 for today: go buy everything else John Green has ever written. I loved this book. I've been meaning to read it since last year when a friend recommended it to me, and then I was curious because when I checked out his blog John said his book was being challenged at a high school in New York.

When I was reading the first half of his book, I saw why. There is, as John says, some "edgy" material, and I wasn't sure what I thought yet.

Then I finished the book. And I get it. I get why those two teachers want to teach this book in their 11th grade (English?) class. I get why my students will love this book.

The first paragraph: "one hundred thirty-six days before / The week before I left my family and Florida and the rest of my minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama, my mother insisted on throwing me a going-away party. To say that I had low expectations would be to underestimate the matter dramatically. Although I was more or less forced to invite all my 'school friends,' i.e., the ragtag bunch of drama people and English geeks I sat with by social necessity in the cavernous cafeteria of my public school, I knew they wouldn't come. Still, my mother persevered, awash in the delusion that I had kept my popularity secret from her all these years. She cooked a small mountain of artichoke dip. She festooned our living room in green and yellow streamers, the colors of my new school. She bought two dozen champagne poppers and placed them around the edge of our coffee table."

There's a bunch of "bonus material" at the end of the book, which includes an interview with John. I couldn't put the book down at the last page, so I read it all before I admitted that I was actually done. Here's a quote from the last answer: "...I believe in hope, in what is sometimes called 'radical hope.' I believe that there is hope for us all, even amid the suffering - and maybe even inside the suffering. And that's why I write fiction, probably. It's my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to build a fire in the darkness."

Yes.