First, I am going to be reading and signing Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines the day after Thanksgiving (Friday, Nov. 24th) at 1pm at Little Professor Books in Homewood, Alabama (2717 18th Street).

Second: A few schools around the country have started teaching Looking for Alaska in English classes (I know--it's weird), and as a result, I've noticed an uptick in people coming to sparksflyup via search strings like "'Looking for Alaska' essay" or "'Looking for Alaska' paper," or "summary of Looking for Alaska," or "themes of Looking for Alaska," or "I am a filthy cheater looking to steal a paper about 'Looking for Alaska' off the Internet," or somesuch.

It's possible that all these people are just searching for this fascinating comparative essay written by a high-school student who read both my Looking for Alaska and Peter Jenkins'. But probably, they are cheaters. And you shouldn't cheat. So let's make a deal. You won't cheat, and I'll give you a guide on how to write a paper about Alaska in a footnote. Okay? Okay.*




*First, you have to read it. I mean, seriously, the book is like 220 pages long. It has reasonably sized type. It has short chapters. I read it about 500 times when proofreading it, and I'm not that smart, so surely you can read it once. And I will promise you this: It is not the most painful reading experience you'll ever have, because one day you'll have to read Ethan Frome, and you will be pleading to the sweet holy Lord God Almighty to let you read Alaska again.

Okay, so having read the book, you no longer need "'Looking for Alaska' summary," because the summary is in your head. Now you need "'Looking for Alaska' essay," and perhaps a touch of "'Looking for Alaska' themes." And I realize that's no neat trick. Essays about books do not just pour forth from one's fingers after having merely read the book. So you'll need to come up with a thesis, an argument about the book. What, if anything, does this book do? Is it mere entertainment written in the hope of making the author rich? Is it about the meaning of suffering? The universality of forgiveness? The author's sublimated misogyny? Did the author write the entire book because he hates swans and wants them to be hunted to extinction? All of these are valid arguments. It doesn't really matter if your argument is true; it mostly matters if it's interesting. So come up with an interesting argument, and find some things in the book to support it, and then quote liberally from the book. Quoting liberally is the A#1 way to pad your word count. Also, it's good to write long and kind of repetitive closing paragraphs. Furthermore, your concluding paragraph should be very lengthy and redundant.

Now, if you're anything like me, you've finished your paper and it features a fascinating thesis, excellent examples from the book to defend that thesis, and a long and repetitive concluding paragraph. There is only one problem: The essay is not long enough. First, you will need to add a couple sentences that don't mean anything, such as, "Green's use of language is often very compelling, and reveals a great deal about his attitudes toward (whatever your topic is)." And then finally, to give yourself the last few lines you need to reach the minimum paper length, you need to switch your font to Courier New, which is the font God made for people who like their papers to look long without actually being long. And then you hit print. And you get an A, or a B at the worst, and you don't have to feel like a cheater.