'Looking for Alaska' is John Green's first and best novel

When John Green’s sixth novel Turtles All The Way Downreleases on Oct. 10, it will be the most anticipated young adult book release of the year. Things look starkly different today for Green than they did in 2012, when he published The Fault in Our Starsand it went on to become not only a bestseller but a blockbuster film.

Green’s first novel, Looking for Alaska, was published just over a decade ago, in 2005. It didn’t break the New York Times bestseller list until 2012, and it remains eclipsed by TFiOSin the Green repertoire. But this book – about 17-year old Miles Halter and the friends he makes at an elite boarding school in Alabama -- remains my favorite John Green novel to this day.

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SEE ALSO:Watch John Green read the first chapter of his new book

There’s an incompleteness to Alaska, and even to Paper Towns, that makes me value those books more. Even the characters speak less deliberately than in TFiOSor early samples of Turtles, which points to Green improving as a writer but his teen protagonists growing dubiously more eloquent. In Alaska, Miles and his friends are blisteringly smart, quoting Gabriel García Marquez between long drags of cigarettes. Perhaps that's what gives the book its longevity; they're more precocious than pretentious -- I couldn't relate to them on the same level emotionally as a teen, but I grew into it.

I plucked it off the shelf, flipped to the page I wanted, and read him what was then my favorite passage...He bought the book.

My journey with Alaska started back in 2008, but over the years I've been amazed by how well it holds up and resonates with things I'm going through. I first read it when I, like the protagonists, was 17, and I too was desperate for adventure. I got hooked on something Miles is fixated on from the outset of the novel; he’s inspired by the last words of the French poet François Rabelais (allegedly): “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”

Miles moves across states and switches schools to find his Great Perhaps, his life-altering adventure, and he does; he finds the Culver Creek Preparatory High School, he finds Colonel and Alaska and Takumi and they drink cheap wine and pull pranks and live like they’re part of something grand and important.

I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.

Alaska earned a reread during college, when I made the classic mistake of falling in love with someone who didn’t love me back. I was shocked at how differently I read the book; what I held dear as a story of teen shenanigans revealed layers about heartbreak and the futility of longing, and here I was needing comfort about exactly those things! Where I first read the book relating to Pudge’s thirst for adventure, this time I pored over the passages where he can’t stop thinking about the layers between him and Alaska as they lay next to each other; about how she acts differently when she’s drunk; about the tiny infinitesimal moments that he clings to, and the many more where it is hopeless.

"I just wanted to kiss you and make it better.""Too bad you didn't," I deadpanned, and they laughed."You're adorable," she said, and I felt the intensity of her eyes on me and looked away nervously. "Too bad I love my boyfriend." I stared at the knotted roots of the trees on the creek bank, trying hard not to look like I'd just been called adorable.

This book's spine has seen better times.Credit: mashable/proma khosla

By this time I had reread and lent out the book enough that the binding started to strain. Instead of lending it out yet again, I recommended it to my friend on a visit to Borders bookstore. He hemmed and hawed and rolled his eyes at YA, and I made a case for the book, mainly by not backing down and reminding him that we almost always liked the same things.

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I plucked it off the shelf, flipped to the page I wanted, and read him what was then my favorite passage:

“So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”

He bought the book.

A few months later, during the summer vacation, I received an email from him with “Looking For Alaska” as the subject line. He had lost a family member recently, and the book – which deals heavily with death – had been a comfort.

John Green had given me the tools to deal with something painful and complicated years before I needed it, and also gave me so much in between.

“The author nailed the grief and disbelief that arises after such a tragedy, and how people find the strength to carry on,” he wrote. "But everything happens for a reason, right? There's an explanation for why you found that book at Borders and forced me to read it. It's not just another emo novel about a kid who dies and how the friends deal with it...The constant discussions of life after death, how people continue to live on, helped me deal with the death in my family."

Different page markers for every reread.Credit: mashable/proma khosla

I turned to the book most recently in the spring of 2016, after the aforementioned friend passed away without warning. On the same day that I decided I was ready to reread Alaska, I found the above email. Everything happens for a reason, he said, and it didn't sound trite in his voice coming from an email so many years ago. The same book that comforted him after a loss was now helping me cope with his death -- and here was his own explanation of how it did that.

So much of his death felt unresolved; our friendship grew complicated as we got older and it didn't have a neat end. I pored over the same questions and guilt day and night, like Miles and Chip. To say it was a difficult time was an understatement; I found myself thinking from day one about passage I memorized: “It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.”

Returning to Alaskahelped me immensely, not because it provided any closure or peace, but because it explored the uncertainties of a grief that is not simple, as most aren't.

In contrast, for all the tears TFiOS induces, it's fairly straightforward about how the character and readers should feel. With Alaska, Green had given me the tools to deal with something painful and complicated years before I needed it, and also gave me so much in between.

Alaskais still the most beat-up book on my shelf, my number one recommendation to someone seeking the great perhaps in YA form or dealing with a difficult time emotionally. It's a book that told us, more than 12 years ago, that Green was a force to be reckoned with – and that holds up more than anything.

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