I Was A Drizzle and She Was A Hurricane

Today is National Alaska Young Memorial Day, which means that if you haven't read John Green's novel Looking For Alaska, today is the perfect day to do it.

Do you know what I mean when I say "book memory"? I don't know, I just made it up, but I mean it in the same vein of "sense memory". Whenever I reread a book (or see it or think about it or whatever) I go right back to where I was when I first read it. I imagine where I was sitting or lying, how I felt about it, where I was in my life-- that kind of thing. And when I think about Looking for Alaska I remember lying in the old giant clawfoot tub in our last apartment, on a spring evening, reading the last few pages and crying a little and thinking about how perfectly John Green managed to capture that feeling of dealing with death as a teenager.

"When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."

And the way he describes that living-in-the-future feeling:

"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."

I loved this book so much that I gave away a few copies during a book talk for one of my classes last year (although my love of John Green is obviously no secret on this blog). If you're looking for a quick read and enjoy YA, please do give it a go.

And to my new followers via the mention on The Clothes Horse: Hello everyone! I promise I'll get back to outfit posts soon, it's been terribly cold around here and I'm a bit useless with that sort of thing.