Reading Report: Looking for Alaska, plus other long-winded thoughts

If anything, this week is worse than last, because I went to Texas to visit my mom for the holiday weekend (no class on Monday).  The tickets were purchased months ago when I thought my thesis would be practically finished by now-- my original plan (made at the beginning of the semester) was to send it off to my readers on November 1st.  But I couldn't change the tickets, and it was a good trip, I'm glad I went. 

Now I have a paper due tomorrow, and I absolutely must send my thesis to my readers by Friday-- my advisor tells me I might be able to get away with sending it Monday, but it is generally the accepted practice to give your readers two weeks to read and comment, and I have to have my thesis turned into the graduate school a week before my defense. The defense is December 10, meaning I must have it turned in by December 3, two weeks before December 3rd is November 19th (next Monday), and if I'm going to have any time at all to edit it based on their comments, that means sending it to them this Friday.

SO WHY THE HELL AM I SITTING HERE TYPING A BLOG POST?  And that is an excellent question, but I'm still taking the YALit class, and I just finished Looking for Alaska, and I wanted to write something out while it's fresh in my mind.  Which takes a bit of backing up.

Last fall, when I was doing the independent study on Modernist poetry, I wrote my final paper on the first third of H.D.'s (Hilda Doolittle's) long poem cycle, Trilogy, which is called The Walls Do Not Fall.  She wrote it in England during World War II when it must have seemed that the world was ending.  It's about being a woman poet, a female visionary, in a world that has no use for visions, femininity, or poems.  The Walls Do Not Fall is about figuring out how to survive in that world--not how to change it (she moves on to that, at least partly, in the second and third sections), but how to manage living in that world as it is.

She has some specific strategies, such as choosing carefully to whom you will give your allegiance--in a hierarchical world, it is important to make sure that you are following the leader(s) you want to follow.  Like Joseph Campbell's image of the ladder on the wall-- you don't want to climb and climb and climb a ladder, only to find out that it was propped against the wrong wall and ends up someplace you didn't really want to go (I'm mixing stuff up here, H.D. doesn't know a dang thing about Joseph Campbell)(and I don't know much, either, other than watching a couple of his TV shows about the archetypal hero. I just heard the ladder example years ago from a therapist).

Anyway.  Back to Looking for Alaska (author-John Green).  It struck me that this is what I love about Young Adult literature.  Literary fiction for adults tends to be about analyzing the world, how awful it is, how there is no hope and and everything is futile.  Unless it is rebuilt from the ground up without sexism and racism and classism, there's nothing to be done but despair. But YALit, at least the good stuff, is often about how to manage living in that world--not how to change it, but how to find hope and joy and beauty in the world as it is.   

Looking for Alaska is that type of book.  Miles Halter decides he has had enough of his boring, nerdy life in public school and goes off to a prep school to find the Great Perhaps.  It has definite overtones of A Separate Peace and The Secret History, but it is its own book.  It's occasionally laugh out loud funny, often heart-rending.  It gets a little hokey at the end, even by my standards with my well-known love for hokey-ness, but still. Even though it discusses a very difficult issue, and the teens involved are thoroughly flawed human beings (aren't we all), it still offers a way of dealing with the world, of continuing on even in the face of some very bad stuff.  Rather than just ending in despair, it offers some tools for continuing to live. 

Good book.  Worth reading.