Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
Here’s a list of all the books mentioned in this episode, complete with an Amazon buy link and quotes from the episode.
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"He's the author of The Fault in Our Stars, which began as a novel for young adults and ended up a cultural phenomenon."
The Anthropocene Reviewed
Buy on Amazon"I've secretly been a fan of John Green for a while, but when I stumbled onto his latest book, The Anthropocene Reviewed, I was shocked to discover that it was non-fiction, actually meant for adults."
Looking for Alaska
Buy on Amazon"Can you take me back to your first book? It's called Looking for Alaska."
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"So you said it wasn't your dream to write bestsellers, but then you made the mistake of writing The Fault in Our Stars, which turned out to be one of the biggest books of all time: Time Magazine's fiction book of 2012."
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"Hey, I went back and re-read The Fault in Our Stars last week. I had read it many years ago; my oldest girls were young teens when it came out, and I used to read lots of young adult novels to have something to talk about."
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"You've been cranking out books every year, every other year, and then after The Fault in Our Stars, there was a five-year gap before your next book, Turtles All the Way Down."
Turtles All the Way Down
Buy on Amazon"You've been cranking out books every year, every other year, and then after The Fault in Our Stars, there was a five-year gap before your next book, Turtles All the Way Down."
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"So one of the storylines in The Fault in Our Stars is this [____] author who hates his readers. Did you feel a lot of pressure not to be that [____] author?"
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"I mean, I imagined that The Fault in Our Stars was going to be my least successful novel commercially, and so I imagined that kind of as a joke for the people who were really familiar with me and would get a lot of the subtle references between Manhattan and myself."
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"I didn't, of course, imagine that I was going to be inundated with this level of fan mail and this amount of people asking me what happens after the end of the book, which is what the main character in The Fault in Our Stars wants to know from the author."
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"There was this strange, meta experience as a result of writing The Fault in Our Stars."
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"There is this real, meta experience where sometimes a sick kid will ask me what happens after the end of The Fault in Our Stars, and I'll have to say, like Peter Van Houten, 'I also don't know.'"
The Anthropocene Reviewed
Buy on Amazon"So I moved to Germany recently and was in a German bookstore that had a tiny section of books in English: one shelf, maybe 30 total, and one of them was The Anthropocene Reviewed, your latest book released in 2021."
The Anthropocene Reviewed
Buy on Amazon"I must have been living under a rock for the last year because I had been completely unaware of the book's existence despite the fact that it was a New York Times bestseller."
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"After I wrote 'The Fault in Our Stars,' I spent over a year working on a desert island novel, where these six young people were stranded on a desert island."
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"I remember highlighting those six words and control-xing and putting them in a new Word document, and that became 'The Fault in Our Stars.'"
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"I mean, there have been so many after 'The Fault in Our Stars.'"