Looking for Alaska

"We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did." 

Forgive and forget?

"The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive." That is Miles's answer to Alaska's religion question "How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?" (based on the words of Simon Bolivar). In this book there are a few people who need to forgive and be forgiven. The first of course being Alaska for possibly (SPOILER ALERT) having killed herself. They need to forgive her for not swerving, for storming out that night, for always being so crazy. They also need to forgive themselves for letting her go that night, none of them had any idea what was going to happen. 

Alaska had never forgiven herself for letting her mother die. She was never able to forgive herself for not calling 911 when her mother collapsed. Because she never forgave herself she was always stuck in her own labyrinth of suffering and when the time came when she was trashed, upset, and out of control she found her way out of the labyrinth by killing herself (or so it would seem). 

In Miles's paper there's also a part about forgetting he writes, "I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her." One of the things he's referencing here is the zen principle that everything that comes together will eventually fall apart. Later in his paper he talks more about that, but here he's saying that since he knew her, one day he will forget her. When Alaska was out driving that night she was only thinking about letting her mother down again, she never thought of her friends who cared about her, or really anyone else. They have to forgive her for not thinking of them just as she will have to forgive them for forgetting her. (Not sure if this makes any sense......) 

Looking for Alaska

“I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God." This quote tells the story of Rabe’a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism. She was seen running threw her village with a flaming torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other.  I think in a way this is what our teachers and Rabbis have wanted to say to us. Don’t love G-d because there’s a reward if you follow the mitzvot, and don’t follow them just for the fear of punishment, but love G-d because He is G-d and He should be loved. Loving G-d for the reward is like loving your mother because she’ll give you presents, or loving your mother because you’re scared she’ll scream at you if you don’t, but you should on principle love your mother because she’s your mother. Love for G-d like love for your mother should be unconditional. 

The Third Book

So for my final book to write about I'm torn I just read two amazing book, they're both different in many ways and similar in some. One is The Promise by Chaim Potok and the other is Looking for Alaska by John Green. If I want to keep up on my always uplifting Holocaust books I should write about The Promise. Whatever, I think I'll just go for Looking for Alaska... 

The Book Thief (thank you Polly for this idea)

So Polly asked me why is this book called The Book Thief which isn't a bad question. This book is so complex and about so many different things and yet it focuses it's title on a seemingly small and rather removable part of the story. But for Liesel it isn't something small, it's not something she can take out of her life. For her stealing books, at least in the beginning was a show of defiance. She was trying to prove something to everyone, she could read, and not only that she could steal books away from Hitler in order to do it. Even though it's something small in her eyes it was the only thing she could do to try to fight off Hitler. Hitler who took away her mother, in a sense killed her brother, made Max run away and forced him to go to a concentration camp, had her papa beaten in the street, then had him sent to war, Hitler who hated words and had them burned. Liesel hated Hitler for so many reasons, so for her anything she could do to fight him was worth it. So that's why I think it's called The Book Thief because the book is about her journey, from the tiny quiet girl on the train, to the strong girl fighting off Hitler with words. And it all started with a book she found buried in the snow.

The Book Thief Note that there are spoilers... I guess there are in all of them...

A long times ago I read Of Mice and Men, and I didn't really like it because not too much happened during the whole book, and then at the very end all of the sudden there was a flash of action. This book almost felt like that, but it was better. Not too much happens throughout this book, it's kind of just showing you the day to day life of this girl, and her life just happens to be taking place on a backdrop of major world events. But things do happen, and it also creates a sort of emotional connection between the reader and the characters, and then of course at the end a bomb falls on the city and everyone is killed. You do get a warning in the middle of the book that Rudy dies, but it still leaves you heartbroken at the end, with the all of the intense detail about the complete and utter destruction. It leaves you feeling so terrible for Liesel, she's lost everyone important to her in her life. It's like once she's finally able to build up her life make friends, become a family with her foster parents, all of that is gone in one second, and it leaves her with one one left to turn to. 

The Book Thief- Question Prompt 1

This was an overall enjoyable book, there was only one part that was really weird. There's this boy named Rudy and he and Liesel are best friends and all he wants from her is a kiss, he's always doing things for her in hopes she'll kiss him. But she never does. Then at the very end of the book her town gets bombed and everyone dies but her (because she was sitting in the basement). So she's running around looking for her dead friends and family and she finds Rudy and she kisses him for a really long time, and then weirdest of all she goes and tells his father (who survived because he was away at war). But other then that weird little bit it was really good, it's written with tons and tons of description. Death sees moments in colors, "The last time I saw her was red. The sky was like soup, boiling and stirring. In some places, it was burned. There were black crumbs, and pepper, streaked across the redness." Overall I definitely recommend it, it's very interesting (and slightly confusing) and it's written in a beautiful and very interesting style.