Paper Towns door John Green

John Green – Paper Towns

Information about John Green

John Micheal Green was born in 1977 in the Anapolis Indiana, USA. When he was 15 he went to a boarding school in Alabama, after which he studied English and religion. He wanted to become a priest in the Anglican Church. For some months he worked as a priest in a children hospital in Ohoi, where he saw many children die. Then he decided he wanted to write book about his experiences at boarding school and about people who have to deal with the death of somebody the loved. This book became his first, looking for Alaska, 2005. In 2006 Green wrote an Abundance of Katherines. Both books won him the Micheal L. Prints Award ‘for excellence Young Adult Literature’. In 2008 his third novel was published, Paper Towns.

In 2008, Green wrote with Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle Let it snow. Together with David Levithan he wrote Will Grayson.

Nowadays Green reviews books for booklist and The New York Times Book Review and for National Public Radio. He and his brother Hank have videoblogs that are very popular and are called brotherhood 2.0 and nerdfighters.com (got to Youtube).

Green lives in Indianapolis (Indiana) with his wife Sarah, their son Henry Atticus and dog Willy.

Paper Towns – Prologue

1. What are ‘Paper Towns’?

• Copyright trap a map to protect a mapmaker for stealing his maps
• Fake towns

1. Does ‘Omictionary’ really exist? (p. 15)

• Yes it’s exist, but it is really nothing.

1. Quote two sentences from the Prologue that show the differences in character of Quentin and Margo.

• I always got very nervous whenever I heard that Margo was about to show up. (p.4)
• As I took those two steps back, Margo took two equally small and quiet steps forward. (p.5)

1. ‘Why?’ ‘Maybe all the strings inside him broke, ‘she said. (p.8) What does Margo mean?

• Depression
• When everything went wrong in your life.

1. When Margo and Quentin are nine they make a horrible discovery… ‘’As I took those two steps back, Margo took two equally small and quiet steps forward. ‘’ (p.5)

1. Is this a good representation of their personalities?

Yes, because Margo is more adventurous than Quentin.

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1. How does this event weave through the rest of the story?

Quentin and Margo are going to have an adventure ad midnight, and it is still that Margo is more adventurous than Quentin because Q didn’t liked it at the beginning.

1. Who are you more like --- Quentin or Margo? Explain your answer and give examples.

I am more like Quentin because if I see a dead man I am not going to set steps forward but backwards. And when Q and Margo went to an adventure, Q didn’t liked it to have an adventure in midnight but Margo liked it.

Paper Towns – Selection 2

1. Have Q and Margo changed a lot since nine years ago or are they still the same in character and personality? Explain your answer and quote a sentence from fragment 2 to support you answer.

They are still the same, Margo is still more adventurous and Q is more afraid:

• You’re a very anxious person, Q.’’ (p.32) ß Q’s character
• Having or not having. It’s all so boring.’’ (p.33) ß Margo’s Character.

1. ‘’ I love driving fast under streetlights.’’ ‘’Light, ’I said, ‘’the visible reminder of Invisible Light.’’ ‘’That’s beautiful.’’ She said. ‘’T.S. Eliot,’ I said. ‘’ You read it, too. In English last year. ‘’ I hadn’t actually ever read the whole poem that line was from, but a couple of the parts I did read got stuck in my head. What do these lines mean for you? Explain your answer.

It’s like a reminder of reading my Paper Towns book because they have it about a book.

Paper Towns – Selection 2

Choose 5 questions from the following 17 and work them out neatly, completely and seriously. This will be part of your grade.

Questions about the entire book:

1. Explain how the difference in character between Margo and Quentin causes them not to have a relationship.

One of the important thing about them not to have a relationship is that Quentin is more afraid and Margo is more adventurous, so when Margo want to do something with actions I think Quentin want to do it one time but for the second time I don’t think so. Here you have some sentences from the book:

• I always got very nervous whenever I heard that Margo was about to show up. (p.4)
• As I took those two steps back, Margo took two equally small and quiet steps forward. (p.5)
• ‘’You’re a very anxious person, Q.’’ (p.32) ß Q’s character
• Having or not having. It’s all so boring.’’ (p.33) ß Margo’s  character.

1. Margo left some clues but did she really want to be found by Q?

I do think she wants to be found by ‘Q’ otherwise she didn’t wanted to go with ‘Q’ on midnight on an adventure. And I saw these sentences in the book that say something about this question:

• She wanted me to play out the string, to find the place where she had stopped and was waiting for me, to follow the bread crumb trail until it dead ended into her. (p. 117)
• It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she’d left for me. And ‘me’ is in this book Quentin himself.

1. ‘Why?’ ‘Maybe all the strings inside him broke, ‘she said. Those strings come back throughout the book, see pp. 58, 70, 71, 104, 105. Later Q reminds Margo that she used the same expression for herself (p.58). What do these strings mean? Explain with examples. Do you recognise this in your own life? When do your strings break?