{"id":87,"date":"2007-04-17T10:17:07","date_gmt":"2007-04-17T15:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danversreads.wordpress.com\/2007\/04\/17\/looking-for-alaska-john-green\/"},"modified":"2007-04-17T10:17:07","modified_gmt":"2007-04-17T15:17:07","slug":"looking-for-alaska-john-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/?p=87","title":{"rendered":"Looking for Alaska ~ John Green"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/04\/alaska.jpg\" title=\"alaska.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" align=\"left\" src=\"http:\/\/danversreads.files.wordpress.com\/2007\/04\/alaska.thumbnail.jpg\" alt=\"alaska.jpg\" \/><\/a>&#8220;I am concussed.&#8221;*<\/p>\n<p>I was so pleasantly surprised by John Green&#8217;s <em>Looking for Alaska<\/em> that I became concussed. Okay, so that&#8217;s not entirely true &#8211; I <em>was<\/em> surprised by just how much I enjoyed this novel, but I wasn&#8217;t the one concussed; no, that was Miles &#8220;Pudge&#8221; Halter, the remarkably reasonable and intelligent narrator of Green&#8217;s novel. True, it&#8217;s another young adult book, but this one is both <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ala.org\/ala\/yalsa\/booklistsawards\/printzaward\/previouswinners\/06Printz.htm\">award-winning<\/a> and filled with layers and marked by a clear, smooth writing style. Here&#8217;s a synopsis:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Before. Miles \u201cPudge\u201d Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave \u201cthe Great Perhaps\u201d even more (Fran\u00e7ois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then. . . . After. Nothing is ever the same.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>John Green is also the author of <em><strong>An Abundance of Katherines<\/strong><\/em> (an award nominee) and he maintains a <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sparksflyup.com\/weblog.php\">video blog<\/a> with his brother.<\/p>\n<p>*And the moment when Pudge finds himself in a concussed state is one that shines in the story simply because the humor of it catches you completely off guard. One minute you&#8217;re sitting there, reading a story filled with intellectual depth, and the next you&#8217;re chuckling. Which leads to full blown laughter. And pretty soon you&#8217;re sitting there, pointing at the book, looking between it and whomever is sitting closest to you, still laughing. At least that&#8217;s what happened to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;I am concussed.&#8221;* I was so pleasantly surprised by John Green&#8217;s Looking for Alaska that I became concussed. Okay, so that&#8217;s not entirely true &#8211; I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed this novel, but I wasn&#8217;t the one concussed; no, that was Miles &#8220;Pudge&#8221; Halter, the remarkably reasonable and intelligent narrator of&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ya"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6V6sR-1p","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}