Just Finished Reading John Green's Looking for Alaska

The 2005 young adult novel Looking for Alaska, John Green's first book, didn't capture my attention until recently.  But it was a big bestseller as well as highly critically rated...although some folks tried to get it removed from their libraries because of its language and the subject matter.  After all, we are talking about a story describing relationships among teenagers at a boarding school and, well, sooner or later the subjects of sex, alcohol, smoking, and drugs are bound to come up...plus, you know how the profanity can fly between peers at that age.  But that's not what made this book significant: rather, it was a modest introduction, in story form, to philosophy as well as being a study about people's attitudes concerning death and grieving.  It is difficult for me to go much further in describing Looking for Alaska unless I begin to give away the plot (I'm afraid I might have already unwittingly done so).  So instead, let me contrast my memory of adolescence with that of this novel's characters...

One of the first things that protagonist Miles "Pudge" Halter, who tells the story in the first person, experiences as he enters a private Alabama boarding school as a junior in high school is cigarette smoking...and then drinking, thanks to his roommate Chip "The Colonel" Martin and friends Takumi and Alaska.  Throw in lots of talk about sex and some scenes to that effect.  Then add the school's dean, nicknamed "The Eagle", who is continually going around trying to catch his students breaking the rules, and we have a situation where emotionally immature, bratty kids, albeit remarkably intelligent, are totally engrossed in petty dares, feuds, and stupid pranks.  Miles chose to go to boarding school for his own enlightenment...he called it looking for the "Great Perhaps", based on the purported last words of Rabelais (Miles collects famous people's last words).  Chip is fiercely loyal and demands the same from his friends, while...along with Alaska Young, a girl who to me seems to have bipolar personality disorder and with whom Miles becomes infatuated...being incredibly smart.  I could dig the story, and the author spun a good tale, which does provide some life lessons.  But what really bugged me about it was that these kids acted as if they knew more than the grown-ups around them.  When I was that age, the adults around me were very dominant and unyielding: I had none of the kinds of freedom that the young characters in this book enjoyed.  In a way, I'm glad...for example, I never did start smoking, for which I am very grateful.  But my own circumstances were so vastly different from those of Miles and his friends that it interfered with my reading...they somehow just didn't seem to be authentic...

Looking for Alaska is not very long, and it is interesting although pretty disturbing.  Go ahead and read it...you might get something out of it.  I'm not very happy, though, about the way that some high schools are using it as reading assignments.  Author John Green also seems just a little too smug about his success with this work...