Reasons Why John Green Should Have Been My High School Boyfriend

John Green should have been my high school boyfriend. We would have been so perfect together. Here's why:
1. John Green would have totally understood why I needed to carry a copy of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot wherever I went.
2. We could have gone to prom together and left early to go to a party where there were 212 cans of beer, but nobody drank because we were all just having fun telling stories about each other.
3. During our brief time at the prom, we both would have worn red high-top Converse All-Stars. He would have worn a tux with a tee-shirt, and I would have a cocktail length dress that showed off my awesome clavicle.
4. John Green wouldn't have seen anything wrong with bringing a book to a party and sitting in a corner reading while people did whatever people do at parties.
5. We could have taken road trips to visit obscure artists and douchy writers.
6. John Green should have been my high school boyfriend because he sees into my teenage soul and actually makes me remember what it was really like to be a teenager--a painful sensation I usually block.

After hearing my high school students wax poetic about John Green's novels, this year I finally read:
Looking for Alaska
The Fault in Our Stars
Paper Towns
in that order.

Each one of them is my favorite.

I love the way Green makes adults totally irrelevant in his novels, without writing them out totally.

I'm a high school teacher, so it's a little eerie to read books set in schools where teachers are almost entirely absent from the narrative. But that's how kids experience school. We adults are irritating obstacles they must steer around in their quest to have a life (social life, love life, Darwinian survival of the fittest life).

I love the way Green manages to insert beautiful books into his books:

• In Looking for Alaska it's The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• In The Fault in Our Stars it is a fictional book called An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten
• In Paper Towns it is Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Herman Melville's Moby Dick

I wonder whether Green's books lead younger readers to Whitman and Melville and Marquez--I hope so.

John Green gets that teenagers can be utterly serious and deep, and utterly ridiculous at the same time.

He gives his teen readers credit for having the intelligence to think about death and interconnectedness while also still having incredibly poor judgment at times. And he never judges his characters for that.

Of course, deep down, I understand why John Green couldn't have been my high school boyfriend: it's because

The world is not a wish granting factory.

What author should have been your high school boyfriend?

Looking for Alaska

Looking for Alaska
John Green
Speak, an imprint of the Penguin Group
221 pages

First, let me just say how ardently I love and admire John Green. As soon as I started reading Looking for Alaska, I knew that Green loves books as much as I do. And Green knows and understands both teenagers and adults. That is so rare. I only read this novel because my high school students so universally love it. Among my students, Looking for Alaska and The Fault Is in Our Stars are probably the most-loved and most-often read realistic YA novels.

What I loved about this book is that it is so layered and intricately crafted. Looking for Alaska is a novel that gives its young characters the weight and development of fully formed people, who although they are young, are capable of profound emotion and thought. At t he same time they are capable of profound mischief and profoundly bad behavior. All of which makes Miles Halter, Alaska Young, and the other characters in this novel both believable and heartbreaking.

For readers who haven't yet read Looking for Alaska, here's a quick run-down on the plot. High school student Miles Halter, an unpopular and moderately miserable kid from Florida, transfers to Culver Creek Boarding School. There Miles finds friendship and love, but also pain. Miles has a fascination with the last words of famous people. Taking his cue from poet Francois Rabelais, Miles goes into the "Great Perhaps" in search of something more than the dull and depressing life he has in Florida. He falls for the sexy, intelligent, and unavailable Alaska Young pretty much at first sight. Alaska's obsession is her Life's Library, which is mostly stacked in piles on the floor of her dorm room, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth, and everything that adults like to think is forbidden to teenagers.

Looking for Alaska does not offer a sanitized version of teenage life. Green's characters do the things that teenagers do. Some people might have a problem with that. Green's teenage characters experiment with sex (handled mostly off-stage). There is a hilarious episode with the virginal Miles and his very inexperienced first girlfriend, and a sexual scene that is far from graphic. Green finesses the themes of sexuality and experimentation with alcohol and other substances without glorifying or romanticizing. What Green totally gets about teenagers is how they think; for instance, Green knows what many adults forget--teenagers think about death. Green weaves philosophy, literature, religion (mostly Buddhism) and outlandishly ingenious pranks into a novel that asks all the big questions, but frames them within a teenage world.

There is little else I can say except "read this book." Looking for Alaska has been highly praised, and much of the narrative drive is toward an inevitable event which shakes the world of every character in the book. I can't tell you much else without spoiling the experience of the book.

I will undoubtedly read more of John Green's books. His writing is artful, engaging, and true. What more could a reader ask?