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"Looking for Alaska is a 2005 young adult novel by American author John Green. Based on his time at Indian Springs School, Green wrote the novel as a result of his desire to create meaningful young adult fiction. The characters and events of the plot are grounded in Green's life, while the story itself is fictional." -Wikipedia
john green is my favorite author, and it's not for his romance novels. he's an author that i relate to deeply, and i know a lot about him based off of his latest novel / podcast series, "the anthropocene, reviewed." like other novelists, i doubt that he'll ever need to write an autobiography. his entire life is already encoded in a million different stories. reading them, i feel real and raw and my heart aches because it's me in there, over and over i am in his stories, and goddamn it, john!
john green wrote looking for alaska after 9/11, where he noticed that 'one night watching cable news, i heard a psychologist say that americans would organize their memories around that terrible day: before and after.' so he wanted to write a story about 'young people whose lives are so transformed by an experience that they can only respond by reimagining time itself.' but that's not why i like the story.
what i like is this: i am reminded that there are very very few things that i should be scared of in this life which is too short to be wasted. but then i repeat the word wasted, wasted, wasted and i feel also inadequate. instead, the book reminds me to be greatly afraid of shallow living. i am at once pudge, who is too timid and complacent, and alaska, who creates life out of what was uninteresting.
for now, i am in the labyrinth. i am lost in the labyrinth and it is also me.
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the new leaves
"I found myself thinking about President William MnKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and toward the end, his wfe started crying and screaming, "I want to go, too! I want to go, too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going." (page 149)
the new leaves
"But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane." (page 110)
the new leaves
"And lying there, amid the tall, still grass and beneath the star-drunk sky, listening to the just-this-side-of-inaudible sound of her rhythmic breathing and the noisy silence of the bullfrogs, the grasshoppers, the distant cars rushing endlessly on I-65, I thought it might be a fine time to say the Three Little Words." (page 102)