Summer Reading Post #2: Looking for Alaska

The first thing I want to talk about is the “before/ after” sense of the book. I have come to discover what that means, but haven’t gotten that far in the book. It makes the story have a depth that I haven’t experienced in any other book, that I can relate to. A theme flows out of this that I can’t find the right words for but I can describe from personal experience. Death of someone who is a big part of your life (in my case, a parent) turns your life into a before/ after. I literally feel this day to day experiencing my ‘after’ and thinking about my ‘before’ and how lucky I was without knowing it. I hope that shows the theme I feel. Miles is a very complex person in that he goes “in search of a great perhaps” at the boarding school and he has a curiosity for people’s last words. He wants satisfaction of knowing and physically having answers. I want to talk about Alaska in greater depth in a future post when I feel like I know enough to judge her into words, but she simply wants to feel either complete, or numb, and I can’t decide which at this point in the book. I'll leave you a quote since I can't do much at this point of the book to accurately show you her complexity. In this quote, Alaska and the gang are all talking about the worst day of their life, and Alaska describes the day her mother died. "So I just sat there on the floor with her until my dad got home an hour later, and hes screaming 'Why didn't you call 911?' and trying to give her CPR, but by then she was plenty dead. Aneurysm. Worst day. I win. You drink," (Green 119). I think this exemplifies her thought process in a way I can't squeeze into a phrase to give you to get a good judgment. The Colonel simply wants the most out of what he gets. If he goes to a party, he’s going to party hard. If he has a test, he’s going to study hard. But I don’t know much about him yet. And a newer major character who has come in is The Eagle. As the Dean at the boarding school, he wants nothing more than order. Things must be his way or he is angry. I’m getting increasingly excited to venture further into the book. I'll leave a quote from the book I really like.

"If people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane."