'Too bad you didn't,' I deadpanned, and they laughed. 'I just wanted to kiss you and make it better.'

I was shocked at how differently I read the book what I held dear as a story of teen shenanigans revealed layers about heartbreak and the futility of longing, and here I was needing comfort about exactly those things! Where I first read the book relating to Pudge’s thirst for adventure, this time I pored over the passages where he can’t stop thinking about the layers between him and Alaska as they lay next to each other about how she acts differently when she’s drunk about the tiny infinitesimal moments that he clings to, and the many more where it is hopeless. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.Īlaska earned a reread during college, when I made the classic mistake of falling in love with someone who didn’t love me back. I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. Miles moves across states and switches schools to find his Great Perhaps, his life-altering adventure, and he does he finds the Culver Creek Preparatory High School, he finds Colonel and Alaska and Takumi and they drink cheap wine and pull pranks and live like they’re part of something grand and important. I got hooked on something Miles is fixated on from the outset of the novel he’s inspired by the last words of the French poet François Rabelais (allegedly): “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.” I first read it when I, like the protagonists, was 17, and I too was desperate for adventure. My journey with Alaska started back in 2008, but over the years I've been amazed by how well it holds up and resonates with things I'm going through. I plucked it off the shelf, flipped to the page I wanted, and read him what was then my favorite passage.He bought the book.

Perhaps that's what gives the book its longevity they're more precocious than pretentious - I couldn't relate to them on the same level emotionally as a teen, but I grew into it. In Alaska, Miles and his friends are blisteringly smart, quoting Gabriel García Marquez between long drags of cigarettes. Even the characters speak less deliberately than in TFiOS or early samples of Turtles, which points to Green improving as a writer but his teen protagonists growing dubiously more eloquent. There’s an incompleteness to Alaska, and even to Paper Towns, that makes me value those books more.

Watch John Green read the first chapter of his new book

John green turtles