The Post Where DFTBA.

My very favorite author in the whole entire world is John Green. I adore his books, they are beautifully written and heart wrenching. Looking For Alaska is my very favorite novel of his and coincidentally where I got the title for my blog.

Miles Cavalry aka Pudge is a adolescent boy who goes looking for his Great Perhaps. Which he thinks he will find at a boarding school in the great state of Alabama; Birmingham to be exact. The first page begins a hundred and thirty-six days before and ends one hundred and twenty-two days after. It's an incredible story of a boy who loves last words and highlights books and meets a girl named Alaska that changes his life and makes him question everything. He discovers what friendship is with a guy named the Colonel in a shitty dorm with a trunk for a table. I love this story. Some of my very favorite quotes are from this book and I will share them with you.

"Just like that from a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane." (88)

This is intoxicating. I absorb it every time I read it. There is no one on earth that doesn't want this said about them. We all want to be forces that bring people to their knees and comes into your life and just drowns you with their presence. And John Green captures the spirit and force of Alaska so well in Pudge's eyes. He also captures the vulnerability of that age of being young and a little awkward or strange and honestly not knowing how to handle people who are in your eyes incredible beings.

"'Don't you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don't love the crazy, sullen bitch.' And there was something to that, truth be told" (96)

This I can simply relate to. The way you are viewed by a person isn't necessarily how you are. The idea they have of you somehow becomes more important than who you are. I know many people who have views of their crushes or loved ones and when they do something that doesn't fit that mold they have created they get disappointed. We very much put people on pedestals and when you do that with a person who makes mistakes and is very much human they will come crashing to the ground. Infatuation with an idea of a person is captured so well here and all throughout this book. Not just with a romantic interest like the one between Pudge and Alaska but some of the friendships in this story as well.

"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."

One of Pudge's fascinations is with last words. I think this is the most striking of all the last word's Green shares with you in this novel and I think Pudge's input is beautifully put. I know we all struggle with the unknown not that of just the after life but of the mysterious over there of the future as well.

Being my favorite novel and all I am highly recommending this to any writer. As well as any other Green novel you can get your hands on. But be warned some of them have a tendency to rip your heart out and run it over full speed. He also has a youtube channel that is very popular and worth checking out if you haven't heard of him already. As John Green would say himself "Don't Forget To Be Awesome".