Summer Reading Assignment: Post 2: Looing For Alaska

   In my last post I talked briefly about the main characters. Now I’m going to talk about their wants and desires. So let’s start with Alaska. Alaska kind of wants what everyone wants; to be happy. It goes deeper than that though, she wants to go back and change the past with what happened with her mother. She wants her father to love her. She wants a home. She never wants to leave the Creek because while she may have a house, she does not have a home. Miles is simpler. He has a good family back home with a mom and a dad who love him. He wants something he likes to call a “Great Perhaps” There’s a quote from the book that shows this, “That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.”  He wants a life that is anything but boring, he wants crazy, he wants the beautiful, funny, interesting, messed up, anything-but-innocent Alaska. 

   Now let’s move onto themes. There are always multiple themes in every book you read. There are simple themes in Looking For Alaska like love, trust, grief and friendship, but there are also deeper themes like self-discovery, someone’s life can change the way you see things, there is more to someone than you will ever know, take initiative and make a change in your life. Books are full of messages waiting for people to find. 

   The book is structured in a very unusual way I have never seen before as a reader. The book is split into two parts, a before and an after. In before, the individual passages are like a countdown, starting 136 days before an event we don’t know about. After the event, the book counts up to the end of the story. This gives the book a unique kind of suspense.

Summer Reading Assighnment: Post 1: Looking For Alaska

The book I chose to read for my summer reading project is Looking For Alaska. There are a couple main characters in the book that the story revolves around. The first main character is Miles Halter, also known as “Pudge”. The other main character is Alaska Young. The story revolves around there friendship and how it evolves and changes throughout he book. Chip Martin, mainly known as “Colonel” is another big character in the book being that he introduced Pudge to Alaska and continues to be a big part in the rest of the story through his friendship with both Miles and Alaska. The setting of the book is a boarding school called Culver Creek. Culver Creek is where the main characters live and go to school. The boarding school is what complete changes Miles life from boring to crazy. While there are different types of conflict throughout the book, the main kind would have to be self to self conflict. Both Alaska and Miles show great amounts of self-conflict. They both show self-conflict on how they feel about each other, but there’s so much more than that, especially with Alaska. There is also some man vs. man conflict between the “Weekday Warriors” and the “regular boarders”. The weekday warriors are the stuck up rich kids at the school and the regular boarders are, well the regular people; pretty self-explanatory. Looking For Alaska is written by John Green, the amazing writer that wrote The Fault in Our Stars. Both books connect with a sense of love, but Looking For Alaska is such a unique kind of “love story”. It doesn’t really connect to other things I have read in a deep connection. It’s innovative, it’s original, it’s amazing.