Brotherhood 2.0 - Hank and John Green have been brothers for more than twenty-six years. Hank is an ecogeek, writer, and web designer who lives in Montana. John is a writer (he wrote the novels Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines) who lives in Indiana, having recently moved from New York.After noticing that their relationship had for years consisted primarily of emails and instant messages, John and Hank swore off all textual communication with each other for 2007. Instead, we are making public video blogs back and forth every weekday for the entire year, on our blog, Brotherhood 2.0.
John Green is the Michael L. Printz Award-winning author of Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines. When he was little, he wanted to be an earthworm scientist. (There is a word for such a person: oligochaetologist.) But he killed off his entire earthworm farm due to his general inability to care for pets. Later, he made a list of things he was good at. The list included "telling lies" and "sitting." So he became a writer.
THE LONG BIO FOR BOOK REPORTS, THE INSANELY CURIOUS, AND/OR STALKERS
John Green is a writer living in Indianapolis, Indiana (by way of New York and Chicago) with his outrageously wonderful wife, Sarah. John's first novel, Looking for Alaska, was published in 2005. It won the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in Young Adult literature, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, and received many other accolades, which are discussed at some length here. The movie rights to Looking for Alaska were acquired by Paramount, and Josh Schwartz (creator of The O. C. and a very nice guy) is currently working on the screenplay. It has also been translated into 13 languages.
John's second novel, An Abundance of Katherines, came out in September 2006. Katherines was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book and was also a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. More about Katherines here.
John grew up in Florida before moving to Alabama to attend boarding school--and yes, that school bears some physical resemblance to Alaska's Culver Creek. After graduating from college in 2000, John worked for six months as a student chaplain at a children's hospital. It was there that he started thinking about last words and the book that became Looking for Alaska.
John lived for several years after that in Chicago, where he worked for Booklist Magazine, a fantastic book review journal. While there, he reviewed hundreds of books of all varieties--from picture books about Confucius to romance novels about Confucius (really!). His reviewing specialties included the literary fiction, books about Islam, and books about conjoined twins. John has read 11 books about conjoined twins (there are, it is worth pointing out, more books about conjoined twins currently in print than there are actual conjoined twins currently alive. In this sense, conjoined twins are like serial killers). John's book criticism has also appeared in The New York Times Books Review.
John has also written for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," and for Chicago's public radio station, WBEZ. If you want to be inundated with jokes about John's ex-girlfriends, peruse the "On the Radio" archives. Katherines readers will be unsurprised to learn that John often writes about trivial intellectual pursuits for mental floss magazine.
What else? John and his brother Hank created the year-long video blog Brotherhood 2.0. He is a total Dumpee. He likes sushi and country music and Nintendo. (Note: Those words, in that order, have never appeared on the Internet.)
QUESTIONS I'M OFTEN ASKED BY PEOPLE WRITING PAPERS
This part of my web site used to be full of jokes and lies, but now that people are trying to use the site as an actual resource for actual research papers and book reports, I feel compelled to try to answer more serious questions. Although there will still be plenty of lies! And I will never tell you what's a lie and what isn't!
Q. Where do you get your ideas?
A. I have no idea. I really don't. All I know is that my books all start with a person. (Alaska started with Alaska; Katherines started with Hassan.)
Q. How long does it take you to write a book?
A. Alaska took about four years. Katherines about two and a half. I am not a mathematician, but it seems to me that if I keep this up, my next book will be written in one year, and the book after that will be written in negative six months. I'm very excited about being able to write a book in negative time.
Q. How old are you?
A. I'm 29. But knowing how rarely I update this page, I should probably just say I was born in 1977.
Q. Were you a child prodigy like Colin Singleton?
A. No. I was a piss-poor student, actually. I wasn't even the best C-student on my school's Academic Decathlon team. (But I was on the Academic Decathlon team. NERD FIGHTERS!!!)
A. I really believe that your reading of a book I wrote can be just as legitimate as my reading of a book I wrote. (It's possible you can even read the book better than I can.) So I don't know anything more about what happened to Alaska than you do. (I knew from when I started the book that we'd never be inside Blue Citrus with her.)
Q. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
A. Try to experience a lot of heartbreak and woe. Ideally, there should also be some weeping and gnashing of the teeth. That stuff will come in handy later. But the most important thing is to read. That's true whether you're an aspiring writer or a working one. Reading is the only apprenticeship that writers have.
John Green
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