Looking for Alaska Book Review

The Review

In Short

Looking for Alaska is a young adult novel about a boy named Miles Halter ("Pudge") who decides to begin his "Great Perhaps" by attending Culver Creek Preparatory High School, where he meets Alaska Young, whom the idea of becomes the pivotal concept from which the novel swings from Before to After.

Reading My Own Biography

I didn't go to boarding school. I did not experience what "Pudge" and his friends experience during their junior year. However, the faculty and staff remind me of my own high schools', and Pudge's friends remind me of my own friends. Most, very most, importantly: the questions the protagonist poses and the conclusions he comes to are questions and conclusions I am still presenting years after high school. And love: tragically, Looking for Alaska reminds me of my loves.

Innocence and Experience

Alaska is written in two parts, Before and After, starting at 136 days before and ending at appropriately 136 days after. I've come to look at these separate parts as compared to William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. In Blake's poems, the poems of innocence are full of hope and perhaps naivety, whereas the poems of experience are more despairing and filled with a sense of realism. Before, Pudge is falling and falling for Alaska, but after, as the back cover of my edition suggests, "Nothing is ever the same." Unfortunately, it takes Pudge's experience to bring him to his own sense of realism. It's this experience and subsequent experiences that help form his questions and also to form his final conclusion.

What It's Worth

Alaska is a beautiful book. There's vulgar language, pranking, smoking, drinking, and sex, all of which are balanced by it's religious undertones, philosophy, coming-of-age set up, and over all life lessons. In the middle I was crying. Not during, but after; and not because of the idea or event itself, but because of how Pudge reacts. And in the end I was crying. Because I was able to feel it all, even if I've never been in those shoes. That is the talent of an arguably skilled author and artist. I could still feel the emotion days after reading. I don't plan to read many books a second time, but this one is a rare find. I can see myself reading it not only a second time, but a third and fourth. Alaska is positively a beautiful masterpiece.

10/10

Quotes from Looking for Alaska

• "When adults say, 'Teenagers think they are invincible' with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."
• "Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were 'I go to seek a Great Perhaps.' That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.
• "Thomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over there.' I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful."
• "[...] if people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane."

P.S.:

Talking to a friend I haven't spoken to in a some time made me happy today.