Academics are more than just a barrier to fun or a logistical challenge they are, often, the very point.

Looking For Alaska is a boarding school novel in which the academic experience actually takes up some room: we often tag along with Miles as he listens to his teachers and engages with their material.

That quest is complicated by an unexpected event midway through the book – which I won’t spoil, even 18 years after its publication, but let’s just say that Looking For Alaska is most remembered among fans as a book that was not exactly afraid of breaking readers’ hearts. Miles spends much of Looking For Alaska on a quest for meaning, both in an academic setting and with his group of smart, misbehaving friends (including the titular Alaska, a female classmate on whom Miles has a crush). And, invariably, I think about John Green’s books, which set me on a crucial path both as a reader and as a writer. When I wonder how I got there (which is often), I think back to that formative year in my life. My debut novel in English, a psychological thriller called The Quiet Tenant, will be released in June, in the US and in the UK. Or maybe I was power-drunk on the exhilaration of living on my own for the first time. I think it had something to do with how for the first time in my life, every time I stepped into a bookstore or a library, all the books were in English. That was the year I decided I might want to try writing a novel in English one day. I was born and raised in France, but at that time, I was studying abroad in London. (And, lest my memory was failing me, I re-read it before writing this piece.) I came to Looking For Alaska when I was 19, or perhaps a young 20. The Looking For Alaska described in the context of those challenges is not the Looking For Alaska I remember. “What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person?”

“I must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning,” he says. Classes will be lecture-style, meaning he will do most of the talking, and his students will sit and listen. The teacher, known among students as the Old Man for self-explanatory reasons (he is indeed very old), breathes “with great labor”, and walks so slowly Miles feels he “might die before he ever reached the podium.”ĭr Hyde – the Old Man’s actual last name – promptly lays out the rules of his class: he expects students to do the assigned reading, consistently and on time. Early in John Green’s 2005 debut novel Looking For Alaska, its teenage protagonist Miles Halter, newly settled at a boarding school in Alabama, sits down for a World Religions class.

Alaska book john green