Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
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."
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."
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"Hey, so I went back and reread The Fault in Our Stars last week; I had read it many years ago."
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"But by the time I wrote The Fault in Our Stars, I was conscious of the fact that I was going to be read into that novel because I'd been friends with a young person who died of cancer, because I'd worked closely as a chaplain with young people who were dying."
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"I thought that would be sort of a funny joke; I mean, I imagined that The Fault in Our Stars was going to be my least successful novel commercially, and so I imagined that as kind of a joke for the people who were really familiar with me who would get a lot of the sort of subtle references between Van Houten 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, you know, 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"And so there was this strange meta experience as a result of writing The Fault in Our Stars."
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"And 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 Fault in Our Stars
Buy on Amazon"So, after I wrote The Fault in Our Stars, I spent over a year working on a desert island novel, a novel where six young people were stranded on a desert island."