Reading Response: Looking For Alaska

This blog contains spoilers. You have been warned.

I have a confession to make: yesterday, I was that bad substitute that mostly ignores the kids while he sits and reads because of this book. I had started reading it a tiny bit at a time during the week, but during a planning period yesterday (which combined with lunch to form a 90-minute block of freedom in the middle of my day) I had my first chance to start reading in earnest, and when the kids came back to class I couldn't quite pull myself away.

At first, it was the humor in John Green's narrator, Miles "Pudge" Halter, that hooked me. Pudge and his friends are quintessential teenagers with the intelligence to make their teenage-ness really hilarious. My private high school in Jersey certainly didn't have everything in common with Pudge's Alabama boarding school, but I felt a lot more connection to that experience than to the ECE class I was charged with for the day--populated by kids who mostly seemed smart enough for comprehensive classes but too resigned to failure and too determined to hate everything about school to prove it to anyone. I do love the way that teenagers see the world and interpret it; that's one of the bigger reasons I'm going into high school. What I love more is teenagers who can back up their attitude with brains, who aren't all backtalk and self-absorption. These are the characters John Green creates in Looking For Alaska, and that got me.

Then the book stopped being funny, and it hit really close to home. I had a friend in high school who was a mystery like Alaska. She was that dark, sad, beautiful girl who smoked to die but laughed and smiled in a way that made me want the first day I spent with her to last forever and made me act a fool that whole day just to keep her laughing. She only used payphones and usually hung out with a group of people I didn't want to be around, and so we mostly lost touch when she left my school and went to live with her father. A week before her 18th birthday, she took a train into New York City with some friends for a night on the town. Late that night, she overdosed and died at the hospital. I hadn't seen or talked to her in seven months, but the day she died I was thinking about calling her--I couldn't remember her number.

After Jill died, my friends and I were left with a lot of the same questions and feelings as Pudge and his friends. Like Pudge, I had had an infatuation with Jill that never had a chance to blossom. Even as distanced as I had become from her before she died, I had guilt to deal with; maybe if I hadn't let her slip away things would have been different, maybe if I'd been a better friend to her she wouldn't have spent so much time with those friends I never liked. More than anything, I had to deal with the fact that I'd been clumsy with our relationship and would never know if she died knowing how much I'd loved her--and with never knowing how she really felt about me.

Another confession (or two): While six ECE students alternately slept at their desks, toyed with the idea of actually doing their assignments, and watched rap videos on YouTube, I teared up behind the teacher's desk reading this book. After dismissal, I cleaned up the room a bit and sat down to read for a few more minutes before writing a note to the teacher about my day. So yeah, I liked the book. A lot. One of the quotes on the back cover says, "The spirit of Holden Caulfield lives on," but Holden Caulfield was not this reflective, not this purposeful. Looking For Alaska asks the questions teenagers have to start thinking about for the first time and admits to them that they will probably never have any more answers than what they choose to believe. It is literature as much as it is adolescent, if not more, and I wish I had had this book eight years ago, when I was dreaming of my lost friend's uncatchable ghost and kicking myself in the ass for never pulling her as close or holding her as tight as I always wanted.