Follow Up on Looking for Alaska and John Green

I've really enjoyed the discussion about John Green's Looking for Alaska and coincidentally it just debuted on the NY Times bestsellers list. I almost didn't finish it because of my interpretation of page 48. Here it is and a little set up: the narrator is new at this boarding school and at his first basketball game with his roommate the Colonel.

I wanted to abandon the book but these posts on Facebook helped me decide to keep reading.

And when I posted the blog there was more discussion both in the blog comments and on Facebook.

So then I set out to connect with Looking for Alaska author John Green. I found his twitter and since it was an active account with tweets by him, I wrote these:

I didn't hear back from him so I followed up with these:

And a while later, he responded! 

So I replied

but I didn't hear anything back. Hm. So what now? If he didn't think the characters were black, is it still racist? Another Facebook discussion ensued which brought me some closure on the whole thing. 

Whew. That was so fun! If you participated, thank you! If you waded through all of that, thank you too! If you care to weigh in on the topic, comment away...