“When I was born, my mom wanted to name me Harmony Springs Young, and my dad wanted to name me Mary Frances young.”  As she talked, she bobbed her head back and forth to the MTV music, even though the song was the kind of manufactured pop ballad she professed to hate.

“So instead of naming me Harmony or Mary, they agreed to let me decide.  So when I was little, they called me Mary.  I mean, they called me sweetie or whatever, but like on school forms and stuff, they wrote Mary Young.  And then on my seventh birthday, my present was that I got to pick my name.  Cool, huh?  So I spent the whole day looking at my dad’s globe for a really cool name.  And so my first choice was Chad, like the country in Africa.  But then my dad said that was a boy’s name, so I picked Alaska.”

I wish my parents had let me pick my name.  But they went ahead and picked the only name firstborn male Halters have had for a century.  “But why Alaska?” I asked her.

She smiled with the right side of her mouth.  “Well, later, I found out what it means.  It’s from an Aleut word, Alyeska.  It means ‘that which the sea breaks against’, and I love that.  But at the time, I just saw Alaska up there.  And it was big, just like I wanted to be.  And it was damn far away from Vine Station, Alabama, just like I wanted to be.”

Recommended by: SassyMonkey Reads

Looking for Alaska is about a lonely guy who goes to a boarding school so that he will make friends, which he duly does, and one of them is a mad girl named Alaska (mad in both senses of the word; I am in love with the English language), with whom he duly falls in love, and then she is dysfunctional and many things happen, and actually I think it was quite good, and I believe I shall check out that other book by John Green that everyone says is good.

And that’s about all I have to say about that.

Nope, a subsequent anecdote that made me laugh so much I find it worth editing this post to tell it to you, Internet.  My sister was in a YA fiction class at university, and the teacher was super touchy-feely and encouraged everyone to share, and sometimes there was oversharing.  And when they were talking about Looking for Alaska, this one girl said, “OMG, that scene where they’re having that really awkward scene where she’s trying to give him a blow job?  I mean, girls, we’ve all been there!  Hahaha, I must sound like such a slut.  But seriously we’ve all been there.”  Ah, oversharing.

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