George Writes

Looking for Alaska by John Green, a book review

I would just like to say that John Green is absolutely my most favorite story-teller and I will never, ever be able to write like him. And some days I do just stay in bed and cry because I’ll never be as magnificent as him. 

Looking for Alaska starts out with Miles “Pudge” going to a Boarding School, he’s looking for the Great Perhaps, you see, and he’s convinced that he’s going to find it somewhere in the Boarding School. Whether he does or does not is, I think, up to the reader and what they think, but I have a firm belief that Pudge fins it in a girl named Alaska Young. 

Alaska Young is not only the girl of Pudge’s dreams but she’s also an avid strawberry-hill drinker, a cigarette smoker, a prankster extraordinaire, a wonderful reader and a really fantastic human being in general.

Looking for Alaska is a nice parallel of Spud by John van de Ruit, but Spud is loud, and rude and crude; while Looking for Alaska is something oh-so-soft compared to Spud. Looking for Alaska is painfully, painfully stunning and if you do not read this book, then I beg you, please please read this book and now. 

Looking for Alaska is a book that once you put it on your shelf, you’ll look over at it and sigh. You’ll be up at three in the morning with a crap case of insomnia and skipping to your favorite parts, highlighting your favorite quotes, and just crying gross tears over it. 

There are almost no words to describe John Green’s first book, but you’re always going to have the wonderful people that you met in Looking for Alaska in your heart, I absolutely promise. Please read this book. 

Spud by John van de Ruit, a book review

Spud is one of those books that come into your world and then they never leave you. Well, at least that’s how it was for me. Spud was one of the two books that got me to want to be a writer. 

It’s mostly geared towards teen males (you can tell by all the cracks about puberty, anatomy and the like) but still as a born-female I could learn how to enjoy it. 

It’s rude and crude, definitely, and at some points can be a “bit much” and, even, borderline sexist but that’s what it’s like in a South African Boarding School in 1990. Yeah, it’s about a guy named John “Spud” Milton that goes off to boarding school (much like the beginning of Looking for Alaska by John Green). Also, it’s in South Africa in 1990, by then you were either very racist or a Freedom Fighter. Spud identifies himself as a Freedom Fighter, but his father is a raging racist and goes as far as boarding up the doors and windows at times. 

It’s not all just cracks about penises and funny, stupid, racist and sometimes misogynistic jokes; it’s also about the horrors of being a teenager, of being a human being. It’s about what it’s like to make friends and then instantly lose them again. It’s about girls and “losing it”, and it’s about what the cabin of The Crazy Eight think of you, and whether you’re good enough. 

I can’t give this book a rating as much as I can just ask you, “Can you handle this book?” It has drugs, sex, violence, and a musical. It has someone getting caught in a window and claiming the next day that he was in there because he heard the voice of God himself. There’s a maniacal kid that lives in the gutters of the school with a cat named Rodger. There’s also the accident-prone Vern that goes to the school hospital twice in only the first week. 

Can you handle Spud? Read and find out. 

Reincarnation by Suzanne Weyn, a book review

The only thing that ever ruined this book was the cover, I would walk around with it at school, and upon seeing the cover, people would look at me like some pervert, and I’d just flail that, “I swear to God it’s more thought-provoking than it looks!”

Reincarnation starts in sometime around prehistory when two people fight over a green gem, both in different circumstances. Then the story tumbles out in this fantastic way that when you finally close the book (which will be soon, it’s hard to put down) you feel like you’re never quite going to read a book like that one again. 

Reincarnation leaves you with this feeling that leaves some Potterheads with, the nostalgia of, “Why does this have to be made up? Why can’t this be real?” It definitely leaves you wondering if maybe you have some sort of subconscious past that you feel the need to invoke. Someone you want to meet again, and again - because you apparently love them that much. 

And Reincarnation isn’t a weepy love story where they were ALWAYS in love and they were like, “Oh, baby, we’re going to be together forever.” No the first time they meet each other, they end up literally killing each other over a fucking emerald stone. 

It does have a bit of a Romeo and Juliet taste to it about the star-crossed lovers. She always seems to have the upper-hand (being one of the high-class citizens, someone popular, a famous singer) while he usually tends to be the servant or the slave. 

It’s not teary in the least, but it does leave you with some wonderment that you’re glad that you picked it up and started reading it. All I can say is, well done, Suzanne Weyn, well done. 

Gaia’s House

            The fog outside smelled entirely of soap and chemicals being released from the trees. Her house was the one that I went to on the days when my house seemed just too empty, or too barren, or too cold, or too eerily quiet. I went to her house where it had the same features of being cold and empty and quiet – but it seemed different like I was somehow not alone.

            I call it her house, as I will always call it her house because it’s the house of Gaia to me, really. It’s the one house that has seemingly been left untouched, there is furniture and power and water, but no one lives there. The house is seemingly invisible to everyone, everyone else except me.

            I ride my bike to her house almost every day, just to say hello to it. I feel as if the house has actual emotions instead of just being that – a house. I park my bike out in the front on the dirt road and step through the lush and healthy garden of greens and pink and purples and yellows. Everything I have ever known to exist has died, except for this garden; the garden at Gaia’s house.

            There are three steps to get onto the front porch, and on the front porch is a rocking chair that squeaks when you sit back in it; and the coffee table in front of the rocking chair has an ash tray that’s never been used and a cup of coffee, that no matter how many times I’ve washed, every time I come back – it looks like someone’s drank a cup of coffee from the mug.

            Inside the house, there is no kitchen, and there is no bathroom; there is just a sitting room with a piano lodged into a corner and a big, lumpy, extremely comfortable bed in an adjacent corner. There’s a fireplace between these two; and there is also a table with a set of four chairs on another side of the house – it does not have any rooms, instead it is one very large room.

            The floorboards creek and not in an eerily way but in a way that it seems the sounds coming from the rough wood of it is more of a dazed song than it is a noise, really. Almost as if you’re invited by that sound to come in just a bit closer. It’s inviting and I’ve sat in this house on more than one occasion and just made myself a cup of tea (there’s a sink and a stove and an oven in a corner) and pushed down on the keys of the piano.

            I don’t know how to play the piano, or any other musical instrument, really. It’s nice to sit down and just push on some keys and hum to myself as if I actually know how, just for the company of it. I stayed here over night once, and it rained that night. The sound of the rain hitting the tin roof was a lullaby that I had never heard before, nor would hear quite the same again; almost as beautiful as that of the floorboards creaking.

            Gaia’s house. I think I might’ve been born there.

            If only I knew someone so I could tell them.

            I …. I am alone. 

Two drag queens walk into a bar. 

Oh, no wait. 

That’s not a joke. 

That’s the beginning of a love story.