I'm very pleased to note that Paper Towns made the "Best of the Year" lists at Booklist, Kirkus, and School Library Journal. So pleased in fact that I have been inspired to write my own best of the year list:

Best Book I Read That You Didn't Read:
This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar ben Jelloun

Best Failure to Apprehend the Other Complexly:
John McCain for cynically thinking that women will vote for women because they are women.

Best Brotherhood 2.0 spinoff:
This is a tight race, but I'm going to give the edge to the five awesome girls.

Best Videoblogger of 2008:
Frezned.

Best Show at the Indianapolis Museum of Art:
Surprisingly, I think my favorite may be the exhibition of the Vogel Collection currently on the third floor of the IMA. Much of the work is difficult--particularly for a guy like me who is not entirely convinced by minimalism--but its presentation and the manner in which it was collected helped me to understand why minimalism matters.

Best New Discovery about Indianapolis:
Lunch with my friends Chris and Marina.

Best Performance of the 2008 Tour de Nerdfighting:
It definitely wasn't anything Hank or I did. It was either Molly playing My Hope in Seattle or Julia Nunes playing Short and Sweet in Boston.

Things in 2008 I Am Most Likely to Bore My Future Children About:
The tour with Hank and registering 14 new voters in Indiana.

And you? Did you love something I didn't read? (Probably.) Did you discover something awesome about Indianapolis? (Probably not.) Let me know your bests in comments or on your blogs.

Happy 2009. Here's to the most awesome recession ever.

(Spoiler Alert)

I found the long question quoted below among the comments on my last post. I can't be sure it was written by a teenager (unless, Dido, you identify yourself). But I suspect it was.

(A side note addressed to adults: I would argue that when we think about teens as readers, we need to stop thinking about the teens we know. Like, around us, teens can be awkward and intellectually unimpressive. But they often aren't showing us their best selves, precisely because they feel the intellectual distance between us and them. I'd argue that the ONLY way to bridge that distance is to deny its existence. I'm not arguing that all teenagers are like Dido. I'm just arguing that most can be like him/her. I'd also argue, slightly off-topic, that of course you don't need to be able to connect Paper Towns--or any book--to Moby Dick or Orpheus or Gatsby or whatever in order for a book to be intellectually rewarding. That these connections exist does not make a novel inaccessible, except in the case of outlandishly referential work like, say, Finnegan's Wake. But okay, let's listen to Dido and be reminded that people like him/her exist:)

"Somewhere down along the very long list of things I love about the book is the fact that Q reads Ovid. I take Latin, and though I feel guilty about not knowing a modern language yet I love the language and literature and the whole idea of knowledge for its own sake (because everyone thinks that reading ancient poetry is impractical). Did you take Latin? Anyway, this seems very irrelevant but it's partly why I'm asking this question.

"I was so blown away by Paper Towns I reread it right away. And the second time, I was really struck by the scene where Margo gets bit by the snake. It reminded me of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which I especially love Rilke's version of. I realized that the whole book could be loosely seen as within that framework. She is taken from him - not through fate but through her own will - just when they begin to redevelop some sort of a relationship. And she is, from his point of view, lost in the underworld; he actually thinks she is dead. She has gone to the world of the paper towns, and he is willing to follow her despite all the dangers and obstacles. The idea of comparing Q to Orpheus is laughable in light of his terrible tone-deafness, but he does seem to see Margo at first as the helpless, beautiful, one-dimensional Eurydice - a classic damsel-in-distress. But she is an actual person who makes her own decisions, and despite the fact that Q follows her into her new world he is unable to bring her back. Because, like Orpheus, he looks at her - because instead of focusing simply on his own world, the outside world he lives in, he looks at her. And he sees her. And Margo never needed saving, not even from the snake. But the ending had the same bittersweetness as the end of Orpheus; she might have come with him, or he might have stayed, but they must go in separate directions. Just as Orpheus gives up a woman he though he owned, Q gives up all the images he attached to Margo. And she is free. In a way the snake incident, which seems so random at the time, foreshadows all of this, shows that their relationship can't last. At least this way my thinking.

"So my question, more simply is: was the snake a deliberate allusion to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice?"

Yes. I mean, of course the moment with the snake is also trying to play with the oldest serpent, that one in Genesis. But yeah. Yeah. Nice reading, kid.

1. Over at nerdfighters.com, we've been reading Paper Towns for the Nerdfighter Blurbing Book Club. I'm going to make a video next week in which I answer questions about the book; if you have any, please leave them in comments.

2. 2009 will see some changes in the kind of content featured here (I'm going to continue posting a lot of text, but will probably also post more videos about books). Is there anything you'd like to see more? (Or less?) Let me know.

3. Since no one disagreed with my post on Octavian, I will assume everyone who reads sparksflyup agrees with me. Dissenters this is your last chance to explain yourselves!

3. That is all. I've gotta go buy a present for my dad save the American economy.

When we argue about whether Book X is better than Book Y, it feels like a how-many-angels-can-fit-on-the-head-of-a-pin discussion. In Zen they call it "a question wrongly put." But of course, we must rank books, because book awards do encourage and reward ambition among authors and publishers, and they do bring good books to readers, and etc. Also I suspect the Venn Diagram of People Who Like Lists and People Who Like Books would look a lot like a circle.

Such discussions are always games of incomplete information, because none of us has read every book published for teenagers (or for children, or for adults, or whatever), which is why I generally try to steer clear of such debates, at least in public.

But, I mean, come on. Octavian Nothing 2 is the best book of the year. I loved a lot of books this year--I loved (LOVED) The Disreputable History; I loved The Adoration of Jenna Fox; I loved The Hunger Games; I loved The Graveyard Book and Little Brother and many others. I liked Paper Towns okay, too. And I'm sure there are lots of books I haven't read that are brilliant. But come on.

Octavian Nothing, taken as a whole, is the greatest literary achievement in the history of teen literature. I mean, who can argue otherwise? And what is their argument? (Yes, that is a call for arguments.)

Generally their argument is: "Octavian isn't really a book for teens. Teens aren't smart enough to get it. The teens I know don't like it." To which I would respond, OMFG SHUT THE HELL UP, only I wouldn't say hell. Teens ARE able to read critically and thoughtfully; they DO answer the challenge when faced with difficult but engaging work. I read Faulkner as a teen, and as any of my high school teachers will tell you, I was barely literate.

I mean, here is a sample question asked by a real live f'ing teenager at a recent nerdfighter gathering: "Can you talk about why Quentin’s vessel survives the land whale when Ahab’s vessel doesn’t survive the sea whale?" That's the kind of question you pray will get asked, and there have been dozens of others like it on tour, and all of them have been asked by teenagers.

That's why I try to write ambitious work (I may fail, but I try): not to win awards or to convince adults that my work has value, but because teenagers can always read better than I can write. They can even read better than M. T. Anderson can write, and that's saying something.

In which John shares the last words of 50 people in under 4 minutes.

Do not click the link below if you haven't read Looking for Alaska.

But if you have read LfA, I never thought when I was sitting in my basement in Chicago all those years that one day a fictional event would be acknowledged in such a weirdly touching nonfictional way.

(240 people are attending!)

UPDATE: If you don't have a facebook, you can't see the amazing thing. But why don't you have a facebook? You should. It's easy and free and etc.

I stood on top of the table because Scott and Justine are very mean and also very generous. The money will benefit Ashanet, firstbook, and Doctors without Borders.

I never want to do anything like that again as long as I live.

So, okay. I suffer from somewhat severe acrophobia--which is not the fear of acros, but the fear of heights. It started in about 2000, and it has become steadily worse, to the point that it is now kind of hilarious.

For instance: I am not able to stand on top of a table. This will become relevant to our story in a moment.

But first I want to say that while phobias are irrational, fears are not. There is nothing wrong with being afraid of heights: When you stand (as I once did, pre-acrophobia) at the lip of the Grand Canyon and look down, you should be afraid. Because if you fall, you will die. All fears are based in this, I think--you become aware that you are at Moment X, and that occasionally Moment X is changed by Factor Y, and that Moment XY is widely know for being miserable and/or fatal.

(So, like: In his book Everything and More, David Foster Wallace argued that fear of flying in an airplane is not an irrational fear, because planes do sometimes crash. On the other hand, if we spend our lives obsessed with all the improbable-but-possible factor Y's with which our Moment X's might intersect, we'd be unable to function.)

(But on the danger of Moment XY: Once, someone pointed out that if you fall from a height of three feet, you are very unlikely to die or even to hurt yourself. That would be true, of course, if I were zero feet tall. Unfortunately, I am six feet tall, so when I am putting myself another three unnecessary feet into the heavens, parts of me--some of the most important parts--are in fact NINE FEET from the ground.)

Right so but anyway: My dear friends Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld like to tease me about being phobic. A couple weeks ago, we were at a party together, and I was staying far away from the windows because the party was on like the 12th floor, and Justine said, "How much would we have to pay you to stand on top of that table?" And then she pointed at a table, approximately dining-room-table height. It looked quite wobbly.

And I laughed, because, you know, other people were watching and I didn't want them to think I was crazy.

And then Justine said, "No, really. How much would we have to pay you?"

So I had to think of a very specific number: The number had to be low enough that the small crowd that had by now assembled wouldn't think me absolutely insane, and yet high enough that I wouldn't have to stand on top of the table.

After a few seconds of analysis, I said, "5,000 dollars." This turned out to be the wrong sum of money. Justine just nodde and said, "Okay." And I said, "Okay, what?" and she said, "Okay, stand on the table and I'll give you 5,000 dollars to the charity of your choosing."

Five thousand dollars is a lot of money. You can do a lot of good with five thousand dollars. I've seen five thousand dollars change the world.

And so, dear reader, I'm sure you can guess what happened next.

I could not bring myself to stand on top of the table. I thought of the hundreds of people I would help; I thought of the joy that I always feel at lightening the wallets of my friends Scott and Justine; and then I thought of life up there on top of that table, nine feet in the air, and I slunk off to the bar to order something strong.

And there, I thought, the story ended, until I received an email from Justine saying that the offer stood. So, okay. This weekend, no matter how hard it may be, I am going to climb to new heights for charity (with Sarah videotaping it). This, by the way, will also fulfill my outsanding debt to Lauren Myracle. Wish me luck, fearless readers. I'm gonna need it.