conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled Looking for Alaska about Times, Pudge, Great with the genre: Children's Books, Literature & Fiction
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Winner of the Michael L. Printz Award Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist New York Times bestseller Before. Miles Pudge Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave the Great Perhaps even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then.... After. Nothing is ever the same.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Looking for Alaska
  Afterward Bernie went outside where it was close to thirty below zero and got his injured sled dog. The skin on top of its head required twelve stitches. Bernie, his body a tough string of sinew and muscle, his face lined by surviving in this climate and prematurely aged, cleaned off a table in his workroom, attached to the living portion of the cabin. A Coleman lantern provided some light, and Eric put on a Petzl headlamp. He administered some local anesthesia, as Bernie held the calm dog. A large grizzly pelt hung from the wall, stiff, not tanned. It was the winter bear that had attacked his dog team. A winter bear is usually an old bear who is unable to get fat anymore, its teeth worn down to nothing. The dog was fine; we drank some tea and said our good-byes, then drove back to Coldfoot to Trooper Bedingfield's place.
  Their house was owned by the state and built right next to the plane hangar next to the airstrip. The Endicott Mountains rose up to the west; Coldfoot was nestled in a narrow valley. A tall chain-link fence surrounded the house; so many lights were on inside that the snow-covered yard was brightly lit. Because of the reflection off the snow, the light was amazingly bright. The tall fence was left over from the state trooper family before them, who'd had small children and been concerned about bears snatching them from their play or the kids wandering off into the forever wilderness around them in every direction. Inside this little house lived five people, almost one-half the population of Coldfoot.
  Eric knocked on the door, a rare occurrence surely. Immediately we could hear the quick yap of small dogs. A beautiful woman opened the door, a surprise out here in the rugged bush; she seemed quite friendly. Eric introduced us to Lynnette, Curt Bedingfield's wife and postmistress at the Coldfoot "post office," possibly the recipient of the least mail of any post office in the United States. Although Lynnette had been born in California, she had moved to Alaska when she was eight months old. The house was impeccably neat. Grow lights were shining on her year-round lettuce plants, and since it was March and time to think about spring, row after row of baby cabbage and carrots and flowers were also emerging from potting soil. Their home was attractively decorated and gave a whole new meaning to the idea of light therapy. Their living room and kitchen, which opened to each other, would make a perfect place for the surgery Eric would soon perform on their dogs.
  Trooper Bedingfield came out from the back bedroom still in uniform. His head was basically shaved; he was trim, quick-stepping, and seemed genuinely pleased to see Eric and Vicky, and even Rita, Julianne, and me. In the winter around here, visitors must be a luscious gift, unless you're human-hating hermits, which they obviously were not. I thought that it was a positive sign that the trooper and his wife seemed to really like Eric and Vicky. Watching them interact made me feel more secure. At least the trooper would know we were here and what we were doing—I made sure to tell them. Their eighteen-year-old son, Jeremy, was sitting on the sofa. Their younger sons, Isaac, seventeen, and Simeon, fourteen, were on a school trip. Their school, which served Cold-foot and Wiseman, had about fifteen people in it from K to 12.
  What Curt had done, and it turns out Curt goes way above and way beyond the call of duty for the people in his gigantic territory, was possibly save their lives. Trooper Bedingfield's territory is 73,000 square miles, roughly 350 miles wide by 210 miles deep. His territory is bigger than New York State, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire combined. Curt's responsible for an area almost twenty thousand square miles larger than Michigan, except Michigan has over 9 million people; his area of responsibility has about forty-five hundred. The majority are Natives living in some of the most isolated places on the continent: Arctic Village, Venetie, Bettles, Deadhorse, Anatubik, Kuletucvik. He patrols most of it in one of two planes, a PA218 Super Cub or a Cessna 185. Eric told me that Curt is an amazing pilot, and he must be.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: They told me later when they knew me better that sometimes they would do anything to get out of the village, fighting feelings that were a combination of cabin fever and village fever. Two good-looking young guys, twenty-seven and twenty-nine, naturally they got the urge. Sometimes they got so feverish they'd head out in a blizzard across the frozen ocean to Kotzebue, the largest town in any direction. There, certain weekends there were dances at the Lions Club. Basically it was them, a few married guys with their wives, and a large number of Eskimo women who wanted to dance until night became day. They never had to ask anyone to dance, it was all they could do to dance with one woman at a time, especially a few hours into the dance, after some alcohol had been consumed. Sometimes six women would be lined up, all wanting to dance at once. A few times, after the dance had ended and they'd turned down all kinds of offers, they had to run their fast snow machines full throttle through the snow-covered streets of "Kotz" to escape a carful of good-looking women wanting the dancing to move to another level.
  Eric and Dean said they'd never imagined such a thing, but teachers hold a special place of respect in Alaska. In Alaska, as I've said, you don't do something outside your village without your entire hometown knowing about it. Plus their bosses live in Kotzebue. Dean and Eric both said the people of Deering knew before they got home whom they'd danced with that night.
  On Valentine's Day, both our older daughters called us. Brooke, who's in her early twenties, called us with news. We had noticed that she seemed happier in the last several months than in a long time, and we didn't think it was because we were gone. Brooke wanted both Rita and me on the phone to tell us she was in love, and that someone had given her a very special present this day, a big rock. A guy we'd not yet met, Trey Buttrey from Thompson Station, the little town north of us, had asked her to marry him. She had said yes. It was wonderful news, and we told her how happy we were for her.
  Later on Rebekah also called. She'd spent some time with us in Alaska, but now was back in the States at school. She asked how we were doing. She told me that she had decided she'd like to come up for spring break, sometime in March. I said great, told her I would love to go off somewhere with her. There was a pause, and then she said that she would rather go somewhere by herself, perhaps to some village way out.
  This moment when your child no longer needs you should be cause for celebration, even in the last frontier. I should have been thrilled that she wanted to go somewhere constructive and have an adventure, rather than do some MTV spring break thing. But I felt a prick of sadness, a slight blue mist coming over me when she said it.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last four paragraphs. Start with the sentence 'The mercury lights glared from above and reminded me of the brilliance of a glacier's reflected light'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The mercury lights glared from above and reminded me of the brilliance of a glacier's reflected light. Alaska was never far away from me. Since I'd been back, I'd noticed that there was a calmer center in me; I could be in tight, milling crowds like this one or under intense pressure and not feel like I needed to escape.
  Tiger Williams, head of the upper school, gave out several awards, the same kinds of prizes that were going to students in every high school in the country. Frankly, our family has not been known as award winners. Most of us are too ornery or dance to the beat of some drummer that others don't hear. But Jed was awarded Outstanding Senior Boy. At the beginning, Tiger had asked the audience not to scream and whistle for their family members, but several families totally disregarded her. One person even used a foghorn—a bit rowdy for so many well-behaved people.
  Then Courtney Beavers, valedictorian, got up to make her speech. Her curly brown hair seemed more windblown and wild than usual. She and Jed were both going to the University of Southern California. I remember her, year after year, skinny and shy, winning all kinds of academic awards. She began quietly, talking about how being done with high school meant she and the class of 2001 could begin living their dreams in the daylight. She then informed her parents, that she, her older brother, and three classmates, including Jed, had jumped out of a plane yesterday at fourteen thousand feet. I couldn't see Courtney's parents' faces when she informed them of her leap into the clouds. Our family already knew about it—it was Jed's idea, his graduation present.
  As far as Jed and our family are concerned, as I suppose it is obvious now, the adventures, no matter what they are and where they take us, will continue to be just one step, just one jump, just one encouraging word, just one heartbeat away.