My interest in rereading this again came off the back of watching the Hulu adaptation of the book which not only brings the text successfully to the screen, but enhances it. LFA is a pretty well-handled meditation of finding meaning in life, how to live well, especially in the face of suffering. While its thematic elements remain strong, its characterisation is actually pretty lacking going back to it. There's something about the show that does the book so well that it modernises and overshadows it somewhat. Not to say it ruins the book; no it's good. But the show outpaces it in a number of key ways: Giving characters like Takumi and Lara more story (not having Takumi rap is possibly the greatest omission the show did); deepening the adult characters like the Eagle and Dr. Hyde; the chance to spend time from the perspectives of Alaska and the Colonel, the former benefiting from not being so mysterious and inscrutable and the latter having some great texture to his story by having a black actor play the Colonel (he is dating one of the Weekday Warriors, an upper-class young woman. There are some brilliant scenes between them in light of this).

The show coloured in the ghostly contours of the book.

But I'm not reviewing the show. The book is a great treatise on finding meaning and one of the formative novels in my attempt to write YA in this vein: these crucial years feel so large, so strange. How can you best use them? How can you best live your life? What do you want to live for? Some of the most powerful parts are not thinking about future pacing and speculation, reminding us that all of life is in the present, something easily forgotten; as Alaska herself says, dreaming of the future is a type of nostalgia, one that removes us from the present.

All my concern about where I am as a person, what I want to do, I've forgotten to actually do things. To be present in my thoughts, body, and life. This book was a reminder. Sort of topping this off was revisiting a time when I devoured vlogbrothers videos, or watched Casey Neistat's energetic presentist vlogs ... It was a look back so that I could look around.

So, flaws and all, this remains as one of the most important books to me.