Book Equivalent # 8
Words: around 69,023
Date: Oct 9, 2015
Title: Looking for Alaska
Author: John Green
Genre ~ Non-Fiction / Fiction Type: Realistic Fiction/Romance
Opening Sentence: The week before I left my family and Florida and the rest of my minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama, my mother insisted on throwing me a going-away party.
Favourite word / phrase / sentence: “Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”
“Shoot, you coward. You are only going to kill a man.”
“I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it over the flames of hell and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for the want of heaven or the fear of hell, but because He is God.”
Vocabulary and new terms (with part of speech) and definition:
Paradigm (noun) – a typical example or pattern of something; a pattern or model.
Insurmountable (adj) – too great to be overcome.
Placid (adj) – pleasantly calm or peaceful; unruffled; tranquil; serenely quiet or undisturbed.
Entropy (n) – is a measure of the number of specific ways in which a thermodynamic system may be arranged, commonly understood as a measure of disorder.
Soliloquy (n) – a device when a character speaks to himself or herself, relating thoughts and feelings, thereby also sharing them with the audience, giving off the illusion of being a series of unspoken reflections.
Reflection, Connection & Personal Response:
I’ve already read this book before, so it wasn’t too surprising to me. There’s mentions of drugs, sex and smoking in it, which is kind of more mature than I should probably be reading. As always, I’ve really loved Alaska and Takumi. Also, re-reading, I now love Katie (who only get’s like 3 sentences in the book) just because she kneed Pudge in the place where the sun don’t shine because she didn’t like how he cheated on Lara.
I also love the Colonel, so much. He’s so truthful and honest, in the way that hurts. At some point (and, warning for spoilers) when Pudge mourns Alaska’s passing, the Colonel goes something like “you don’t miss her, you miss your now idealised version of her that only focuses on her good, not the whole truth of her” and describes her faults and yes, it’s so cruel to do that, but it’s the truth. Also, the Colonel is like, 5 feet.
Every character has a small quirk to them. Pudge remembers people’s last words, Colonel memorises countries, their capitals, and their populations. Alaska hides wine in the ground in the forest, and Takumi can rap amazingly well. It’s really nice that these characters are special in their own way. The plot of the story is not so good, in my opinion. It’s more reflective and romance, sure, but not in the way I like reading it? It’s kinda more hardcore for me. Still a nice book, though.
(Also, I found a surprise bookmark in my old copy. It was a nice discovery.)