Looking for Alaska reading response
Title: Looking for Alaska
Author: John Green
Text type: Young adult; Fiction
“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
John Green’s ‘Looking for Alaska’, tells a story about self-discovery, first experiences and the deep impact someone can have on a life. Miles Halter is fascinated by last words, and he is tired of his safe, boring life. He begins at Culver Creek boarding school, going in search of what the dying poet Francois Rebelais called ‘The Great Perhaps’. It is at the Creek that he has many first experiences – his first drink, first smoke, first feeling of love and first real, shattering heartbreak.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. From the very first page – the very first line in fact – it captured me. The first chapter of the book is titled ‘one hundred and thirty six days before’. I felt extremely curious upon reading that, as I questioned what we were leading up to, and what myself as the reader was waiting for. ‘One hundred and thirty six days before what?’, I asked myself. This made me extremely eager to continue reading. For me, as I was coming to the chapters that are a few days ‘before’, I was in total suspense, and could not put the book down. I think that this was a wonderful way to lead up to the climax of the book, the event that we are ‘before’, as it keeps the reader engaged and just waiting for what will happen. In part two of the book, the first chapter is labelled ‘the day after’, and it makes sense as to why the chapters were labelled that way. I really do admire the way John Green titled the chapters in this way, because I feel like it kept me in much more suspense than other books I have read. Also, I sometimes tend to jump ahead in books, just to catch a little bit of what happens near the end to reassure myself, or to see if a
Author: John Green
Text type: Young adult; Fiction
“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
John Green’s ‘Looking for Alaska’, tells a story about self-discovery, first experiences and the deep impact someone can have on a life. Miles Halter is fascinated by last words, and he is tired of his safe, boring life. He begins at Culver Creek boarding school, going in search of what the dying poet Francois Rebelais called ‘The Great Perhaps’. It is at the Creek that he has many first experiences – his first drink, first smoke, first feeling of love and first real, shattering heartbreak.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. From the very first page – the very first line in fact – it captured me. The first chapter of the book is titled ‘one hundred and thirty six days before’. I felt extremely curious upon reading that, as I questioned what we were leading up to, and what myself as the reader was waiting for. ‘One hundred and thirty six days before what?’, I asked myself. This made me extremely eager to continue reading. For me, as I was coming to the chapters that are a few days ‘before’, I was in total suspense, and could not put the book down. I think that this was a wonderful way to lead up to the climax of the book, the event that we are ‘before’, as it keeps the reader engaged and just waiting for what will happen. In part two of the book, the first chapter is labelled ‘the day after’, and it makes sense as to why the chapters were labelled that way. I really do admire the way John Green titled the chapters in this way, because I feel like it kept me in much more suspense than other books I have read. Also, I sometimes tend to jump ahead in books, just to catch a little bit of what happens near the end to reassure myself, or to see if a