Looking For Alaska

By John Green
★★★★★

Five Things I Like About Looking for Alaska:
1. Alaska’s “life library”
2. Boarding school
3. Pranking
4. Quotable quotes
5. Realistic romanticism

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of John Green, person and author. I’ve read Looking for Alaska before. But lately my copy has been making the rounds as I’ve been recommending it to uninitiated friends and family, and I started to feel a little sheepish about enthusiastically pressing my copy into other people’s hands while unable to rehash the finer details afterward. So I decided to reread it.

Miles “Pudge” Halter is a bit of a nonentity at his public high school in Florida. With no social life to speak of, the only things he’s got going for him are good grades and a penchant for memorizing the last words of famous people (pretty cool things, true, but not super satisfying to a 16-year-old). In order to seek the “Great Perhaps” that will hopefully add an air of mystery and/or excitement into his mundane existence, Pudge transfers to Culver Creek boarding school for his junior year. There, he meets the manic, alluring, inimitable Alaska Young. Alaska takes Miles by the hand and pulls him into her labyrinth, spins him around until he’s sick from dizziness, then leaves him there to find his way out alone, with nothing but inscrutable riddles of clues – “How will we ever get out of this labyrinth?” “Straight and fast” – to guide him (metaphorically speaking).

A fan of Young Adult literature, I will freely admit that the vast majority of books in the genre pander to the shallow side of young adult taste. Not John Green. John’s books appeal to the adult side of young adults; the side that’s starting to ask existential questions; the side that’s becoming disillusioned in a genuine way (not that angst-ridden “No one understands me” phase that so many teens seem to go through); the side that’s trying to make sense of a world unfiltered by the rosy lenses of childhood as they weather the transition from childlike naiveté to the realities of adulthood without losing hope or becoming wholly disenchanted. John Green introduces teens to the less idealistic adult world without being overly escapist – by introducing fantastical loopholes – or demoralizing – by painting a bleaker picture than necessary.

Conversation Starter: Have you ever had an Alaska in your life? What happened?

Books Read This Year: 94

Top 100 Progress: 48/100

Zombicorns

By John Green
★★★★☆

Four Things I Like About Zombicorns:
1. John Green*
2. Mia’s dog having an existential crisis
3. Chicago/The Bean
4. Using a library as a hideout from zombie ambush

Zombicorns is not just another clever story penned (or rather, typed) by young adult author/rock-star John Green. It’s not just a zombie apocalypse novella. It is not even just a zombie apocalypse novel written by a rock-star.

It’s a profound statement about corn**. And souls. And what makes humans human. And whether that makes us better than other living things. And what, ultimately, we live for. Pretty heavy stuff for any novella, much less one with a zombie unicorn on the cover, if you ask me.

Also, despite appearances, it’s not at all about unicorns (see disclaimer beneath title). Sorry if that revelation just dealt you a heavy blow of disappointment. You’ll get over it. I promise. Just read the real story.

Mia is one of the last of her kind – that is, our kind: humans. She has cloistered herself in a Chicago cellar, eating Spam, drinking expensive wine by the bottle, and writing her memoirs about the aftermath of the sudden outbreak of D131Y – a virus spread through corn that Z’s up (aka zombifies) all who ingest it – while she debates whether continued survival is really worth the effort, or whether she should just give up and commit Zuicide. The only living, loving soul left to her in the world is her dog, Mr. President. You know, the one who suffers an existential crisis. Which was probably just Mia projecting, but I prefer to pretend it was all Mr. President. (Incidentally, I can’t blame her for the wine. I’d probably be in the cups, too, if I survived the zombie apocalypse only to have to ‘complete’ my Z’d up family so they wouldn’t force-feed me zombie corn.)

Only John Green can make a zombie apocalypse novella a profound statement of any kind.

Exhibit A: “I came to the conclusion a while ago that there is nothing romantic or supernatural about loving someone: Love is the privilege of being responsible for another.”

Exhibit B: “Being a person, I had come to realize, is a communal activity. Dogs know how to be dogs. But people do not know how to be people unless and until they learn from other people. Which got me to wondering whether it’s possible to learn how to be a person in a world where all the people are dead.”

And these are just examples short enough to include. There were several other marvelous multi-paragraph examples of John’s evidently innate ability to profoundify anything.

Also, only John Green could make me ever want to read a zombie apocalypse novella. And like it.

That being said, it’s not perfect. But it’s not supposed to be. He wrote it for fun, he didn’t ruthlessly edit the way you do before Official Publication, and he’s disseminating it for free on the Internet purely for the enjoyment of his fans. Which I think is pretty dang cool, so I am more than happy to overlook a few typos and inconsistencies and tangents here and there.

If the idea of a novella about corn and zombies intrigues you, you can watch John read the first chapter here.

You can download your very own personal copy of Zombicorns here.

* If you know anything about John Green, you know this counts as a thing to like about something he’s written. His name on the cover of a book is like a big official seal that says “This Book Is Guaranteed To Be Both Entertaining and Intelligent,” only better, because you can trust John Green’s name more than you can trust the kind of seals they slap on to try to sell more copies of subpar bestsellers.
** You know, like how it keeps cropping up in the most unlikely of places. Sugar, fuel, plastic…

Books Read This Year: 24
Top 100 Progress: 40/100

Anna and the French Kiss

By Stephanie Perkins

★★★★★

Ado:

Before I begin, let’s clear the air by acknowledging what we’re all thinking: the title is lamentably lame, the cover affectedly cute, and the whole package insipidly cliché. In a bookstore setting, I probably would have dismissed this as one of countless similar books marketed to pander to the generically sentimental demographic of teenage girls. If it happened to snag my attention as I scanned the shelves, it would probably have been quickly forgotten as I moved to stroke the spines of beloved books that had already proven their worth several times over, who’s only shortcoming was their inability to spontaneously generate new releases in response to my longing.

“So what happened?” you ask. John Green (an author who’s work I avidly enjoy and admire, and whose word and opinion I respect highly) happened, as he’s wont to do. In fact, I had not even heard of this book until John enthusiastically advocated it in a recent vlog post*. John does not recommend books very often; this was clearly not to be taken lightly. I went directly from Youtube to Amazon (without passing Facebook or collecting notifications) and Anna and the French Kiss arrived in my student P.O. box two days later.

Without Further Ado:

If I could rescript my own senior year spent as an expat in Germany, it would probably go a little something like this: Anna is enrolled in the School of America in Paris (SOAP, for short) against her will (?!) because her Nicholas Sparks wannabe of a father thinks she could use some culturing around the edges. Cue The Boy: he’s fluent in French, speaks in a British accent, and has an American passport. Sound too good to be true? It probably is; but that’s what fiction is for – giving us a taste of life’s extremes, the better and the worse than our everyday lives. The book being what it is (and I can’t deny that on the surface, it is exactly what it seems), we know the moment she bumps into him – literally, of course – her first night on campus, that when it comes to Étienne St. Clair, Anna is doomed. But the road to that inevitable end is as charming, intricate, candid, and chic as the streets of Paris.

I have three favorite things about this book. One: the setting. Stephanie never once forgets that she chose to set the novel in Paris. The city is not just a backdrop, it’s a character in itself, intrinsically woven into each scene. She also doesn’t forget the nature of Anna’s presence in Paris. As an expat not speaking a word of French, Anna feels at times alienated both from the foreign city around her as well as the familiar world she left back home, feelings that ring especially true to me, having experienced them myself last year. Two: the realism. One of the ways Stephanie extricates hers story from the stereotype is by not smothering it in the perfection drivel common to so many young adult romances. Not only are the characters not perfect, they’re actively flawed – to the point that it’s their flaws alone, rather than fatalist outside forces, that forestall the Happy Ending. Three: the romance. Of course. But with a unique twist of depth. Anna and the French Kiss is as much a journey of friendship and self-understanding as it is of romance. Even as you’re swooning with Anna and Étienne atop Notre Dame (possibly praying you won’t topple off mid-swoon), picnicking in Père Lachaise cemetery, braving the crypt of the Pantheon, or reveling in springtime in the Luxembourg gardens, you know the romance owes its resonance and sincerity to the friendship founded first.

This is one of those books that so immerses you in its story and its characters and its world that you almost want to commence furious blinking when you’re forced to surface, as if emerging from a movie theater into harsh afternoon sunlight. And then you want to crawl back inside and stay for a while. If you’ve been to Paris, you will be overwhelmed with nostalgia, and if you haven’t, I’m quite sure you’ll long to book the next flight, perhaps settling to console yourself with some frozen pain au chocolat instead.

Concluding Ado:

Here’s where I meet with a dilemma I’ve sort of subconsciously wrestled with throughout my teen years, ever since my reading repertoire began to see recurring appearances by both classic or literarily acclaimed works and popular modern bestsellers. Maybe I’m the only one who struggles with this dichotomy, but I doubt it. How do you reconcile giving both a book like The Shadow of the Wind and Anna and the French Kiss five stars? Ought you to reconcile it? Should Anna be delegated to only three on the grounds of lacking the scope and innovation of Shadow? By what standards ought you to appraise them, anyway? Or should they even be judged based on the same set of standards, given how wildly different they are? I’ve come to a working conclusion that the authors put pen to paper with such different intentions of storytelling in mind that it’s not fair or even constructive to make a direct comparison. But consider this a non-rhetorical question: According to what criteria should literature be measured, and should the standards be universal amongst genres?

* Incidentally, this is pretty much every aspiring author's dream come true (or at least mine), because John Green was an idol of Stephanie's long before she had even begun Anna, and he ended up becoming of fan of hers. Wow. If you're as jealous as I am or just plain interested, she explains the story here at her own blog.

Books Read This Year: 1

Top 100 Status: 38/100