Summer Reads #3: Looking for Alaska

So, technically if you count Divergent, Insurgent and Allegiant this would be Summer Read #6, but I called those books a sidebar, so I'm going to leave this as #3. 

Looking for Alaska was a great book. Truly, it was worth reading. However, I felt like the ending was a dead giveaway. If you pay attention to the clues, you as a reader will make a far better detective than Colonel and Pudge. I had the ending pinned almost as soon as they mentioned the white tulips (not a spoiler). 

Even better than the story itself were the author's responses to some questions he has been asked about the book that are in the back of the book. My favorite was the kid who was asking him for two important symbols and the "enemy" of the novel. John Green's response was beautiful. He gives a little speech about how there don't always have to be symbols or enemies in books to make them worth reading, but that in this book there are a few. Then he points out how the book belongs to the reader, so what the kid could come up with would be just as important as the author's imagined symbols. 

"In short, I'm not gonna do your homework dude." 

HA. 

I laughed. It made me really happy to see him not answer it with a list of the symbols or enemies. I've always loved books that I'm not given the answers for. 

In my Methods of Literary Studies course we read Moby Dick; our teacher set out by telling us to ignore the whale. To not imagine the whale as a symbol for anything. Ignore all the signs and come up with a different symbol to discuss. 

On the final she then asked us to define the whale in terms of what it represented. Perhaps one of the biggest symbols in the book and she never once made it important in discussion. While there were like five people who were pissed because they hadn't read the book and ignored all the SparkNotes information about the whale because she explicitly told us not to think about it, I was excited. I got to hash out all the hushed feelings about the whale with a completely clear mind. 

That being said, I hate when people ruin it for me and give away all the big symbols. 

The last discussion talks about the tragedy in the novel and asks whether or not it was a... [spoiler alert...] suicide or not. His answer was great. He doesn't know. Still. I love it. I love that even he couldn't get inside the head of this character enough to know whether or not it was intentional or not. He would remain in the dark just like Colonel, Pudge, Takumi, and even better, the readers. 

I realize I talked more about the Q&A section of the book, but I feel like I could talk about more without giving away the whole thing. 

A Not Big Fat Liar English Major