Looking for Alaska (2005) by John Green

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Looking for Alaska (2005)

by John Green

Culver Creek (Birmingham), Alabama

Alabama: 10/18

   I checked out the Hulu Version of this paperback- with a picture of who I presume was the actress who played the eponymous Alaska of the title.  Before I shit all over this book let me just say that I understand that John Green has multiple YA hits (The Fault in our Stars), that he is a popular YouTuber and I think Podcaster, and that he has lots of fans some of whom might actually read this post.  In other words, Looking for Alaska is a hit, and the author has other hits, but the books are terrible. 

  Set in a progressive co-ed high school and narrated by a fish-out-of-water type, Green brings together a familiar band of misfits which includes a Japanese guy buy no African American.  In fact, there are no African American characters in this book which is enough to make me hate John Green.  There's nothing specific to Alabama in this book beyond, I think, the geographical location of the school and the fact that the author went to a similar school in Birmingham.  You can tell it's a new generation of YA author because of the presence of the most harmless blowjob depicted in this history of literature in these pages.

Luminous (2025) by Silvia Park

 Book Review

Luminous (2025)

by Silvia Park

     2025 was a down year for literary fiction neither the race for the Booker nor the National Book Award interested me- I didn't even recognize the semi-finalsts for the National Book Award.  Luminous, by first time novelist Silvia Park, stood out to me this year as an excellent combination of genre (science fiction) and literary fiction themes.  Luminous moves in a couple different directions and handle all its issues in a way that isn't overly didactic or stereotyped.    Luminous is one of the first really vivid visualizations of what a post-human society might look like- here we have characters who are part robot, part human, humans who have familial relationships with robots and robots that definitely, definitely want to be human.  At times, the literary fiction element made me feel like I was reading a contemporary I, Robot as written by Virginia Woolf, but my take is always that a difficult to read novel is interesting in a way that an easy-to-read novel simply is not.

  I'd highly, highly recommend picking up a copy of Luminous if you can find it in a book shop.