Looking for Alaska by John Green

So, the story on why I am reading all these John Green novels is that over the summer my library at home had An Abundance of Katherines, which I picked up because of the nice looking cover art and because my name is Katharine.  You understand.  Anyway, it was pretty good, and the style was fun and funny, and so I thought, "Huh, John Green, his picture on the flap looks kind of like Bryce Lowder, that is weird,  he's a pretty funny guy though."  And then lo and behold months later I'm browsing around the return shelves and I find all kinds of his other books, and so I snagged them.  I'm sad that it's been such a while since I read Katherines, because it would be interesting to compare with these two that I've just read.  These two were really similar, but I don't remember Katherines having an alluring but mysterious and unattainable girl who then disappeared and led to the main character's long soul-and-world-view-searching-and-revising internal journey.  But perhaps my memory is just faulty.  

Anyway, the quirk of Alaska is that the main character (still a smart, skinny, lovable nerd) is just starting off at a boarding school in Alabama, so we get to watch as he makes friends with really cool funny people in an enviably short amount of time.  But I'm not bitter.  Ahem.  Anyway, one of his cool funny friends is an alluring but mysterious and unattainable girl named Alaska, who disappears half way through and leads to the main character's long soul-and-world-view-searching-and-revising internal journey.  I realize that I'm sounding really snippy and snarky and all other adverbs beginning with "sn-", but I don't really mean to be--I'm the one who read these books overnight and will continue to read anything Green ever writes. Honestly, I think that these books are a testament to the magical power of fun, quirky writing to make even the same basic plot lines seem fun and refreshing and new, no matter how many times they're told.