Looking For Alaska by John Green

After reading John Green's Paper Towns, I definitely wanted to try his debut novel- Looking For Alaska. Typically, I am not interested in books filled with depravity and this one had it all- drinking, smoking, sex, and reckless pranks. However, what pulled me into this book was its intellectual and articulate ease, especially its deep philosophical basis. Miles Halter knows countless peoples' last words- what he doesn't know is how to have fun, make friends, and live life to the fullest at home. He leaves to go to Culver Creek, a boarding school, in order to find what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps." Miles finally learns how to experience life with help from his roommate Chip and his clever, beautiful, self-destructive friend, Alaska.

K.L. Going described Looking For Alaska:
"John Green has written a powerful novel-one that plunges headlong into the labyrinth of life, love, and the mysteries of being human. This is a book that will touch your life, so don't read it sitting down. Stand up, and take a step into the Great Perhaps."

This was the type of book that had me thinking about it days later. Although, I would not do even half of the crazy things that these characters experienced, their thirst for life made me think about how I could make my life a bit less predictable and unexpected.

"Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war."

Paper Towns

Paper Towns by John Green is book about the imagination, curiosity, high school stereotypes that can be broken, young adventures, and Walt Whitman. Quentin Jacobsen has always admired his next door neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar, until the girl that he has always imagined and fantasized about shows up at his window dressed like a ninja, ready to take him on her latest adventure. It is the bes night of his life and he cannot wait for the morning when life will be different after his night with Margo. But she has disappeared.

Quentin discovers countless clues that she left for him to find. He frantically tries to piece the clues together and find the girl that changed his life. Will he be able to find her, or is she just a figment of his imagination, a girl that he never really knew as well as he thought he did.

This book was witty, mysterious, and unexpected. It was a quick read that kept the reader's attention with its humor, bur also dug deeper into the emotions of the young characters. You begin to imagine Margo as this fantastic creature just as Q imagines her, but at the end, you realize along with him that she is just a regular person. I especially liked the Walt Whitman quotes throughout the book and the references to the paper towns.

"It's a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters."

Did Margo leave to escape the paper town? If so, did she intend for Q to follow her?

"Missing me one place search another,

I stop some where waiting for you"

-"Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman