Hello everyone, I told all of you recently that I would be reviewing my favorite book Looking For Alaska by the wonderfully, amazing, John Green. Now I have always been a fan of John Green, not only his writing, but his youtube channel, "Vlogbrothers". I have been a nerdfighter since, well, forever. The first time I read Looking for Alaska I knew what I was in for, All over tumblr all you ever hear about is this book and the journey it takes you on and all that crap. I didn't think much of it when I first bought it. I bought it at a little bookshop in Santa Barbara that I still love so dearly to this day.
To say the least, I have read this book almost 4 million times. Not actually, but you get my point. I have read all 221 fascinating pages of this book at least 8 times, I have annotated it front to back with at least 3 annotations on each page.
What this book is about is a boy named Miles, or Pudge if you want to get fancy. Anyways he basically has no life until he goes off to boarding school where he meets that wonderfully fascination Alaska Young. Now i'm going to be honest when I first saw the title of this book, I thought they were reffering to Alaska the state so I was a little taken off guard when I found out that Alaska was actually the name of a fairly beautiful girl down the hall. Pudge has a fascination for last words which I so kindly admire because I do as well, not I don't know every single persons last words but I find it quite interesting when I here some. My favorite from the book are "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth" -Simon Bolivar. Which then follows up with the theme of the story "The only way out of this labyrinth of suffering is to forgive" now this quote will always be my favorite quote of all time, no matter how many books I read I will only always remember this one, I also have done various art projects which are based around this quote. I am getting off track but yes that quote is super fab.
An Idea that is brought up pretty early on in this book is the idea of a great perhaps. Now I'm not sure why, but this is the aspect of the book that felt to have drawn me closer and closer to the text. It is something that I have always had in the back of my mind but I never found the words to articulate it. When I first read this book it took me a while to fall in love with all the quotes reguarding the great perhaps but now I see why I did. The idea the Pudge has about the great perhaps is that There is one amazing event that someone should do in their life and that should be their reason to be here, he is hoping that not only him but Alaska will also seek this great perhaps. The last words that inspired this idea were from Francois Rabelias "I go to seek a Great Perhaps"
Well to say the least. Pudge falls hard for Alaska, They spend lots of time together but she is sort of a nut which I kind of admire. She is depressed but lets face it, who isn't. Well here is when the "SPOILER" power kicks in. Alaska dies. She gets in a car accident and a big part of the book is the unknown, did she die by natural causes or did she kill herself. I really wish that there was some sort of unwinding the string at the end of the story to tell us what really happened with Alaska. Not even Miles knows, which probably killed me the most, (no pun intended). Now I did a lot of research on this book when I finished it because I was letting my curiousity get the best of me, but John Green said that this book was strictly based off of events in his life. Now i'm sure that he did not loose his first love to a tragedy but what I do know is that he went to boarding school and fell in love, all the places in the book, regarding the smoking hole, and the swing where Miles and Alaska have their first conversation, actually are true places. This book ended up having a pretty emotional tool on me because of my love for John Green as it is, but anybody who has read this book should know what i'm talking about. (You shouldn't even be this far down on the post if you haven't read it yet because it was clearly marked, "SPOILER". ) Thanks for reading:) I hope that you all enjoyed Looking for Alaska just as much as I did
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