John Green
John Green did not invent contemporary young adult fiction, but he is a large part of why the shelf looked the way it did for a decade. His books have more than 50 million copies in print, and The Fault in Our Stars is among the best-selling novels ever published. The voice is the thing that spread: articulate teenagers who talk in aphorisms, a permanent interest in the gap between the person you imagine and the person who actually exists, and a narrator who is smarter than is strictly realistic and knows it.
His real move is that the books argue with themselves. Looking for Alaska sets up a mystery and then refuses to solve it the way the genre wants. Paper Towns is an explicit correction of the idealised-girl figure his earlier work was accused of inventing, and it says so out loud on the page. An Abundance of Katherines is the most self-conscious and the least successful. Turtles All the Way Down is the best written and the least comfortable, a novel about intrusive thought that declines to use the illness as a metaphor for anything.
The online career is not a footnote. The vlogbrothers videos he makes with his brother Hank built an audience that was buying his books before the publishing industry had noticed him, and the habit of essayistic monologue produced The Anthropocene Reviewed, a nonfiction collection that rates pieces of the human world on a five-star scale.
Three of the novels have been filmed and he appears briefly in all three: an uncredited bit in The Fault in Our Stars, an uncredited voice in Paper Towns, and a named part, Mr. Adler, in Turtles All the Way Down. He collaborates too. Will Grayson, Will Grayson is written with another novelist in alternating chapters, and Let it snow and 21 Proms are shared anthologies.
Movies (3)
Books (12)
- The Fault in Our Stars (2012)
- Looking for Alaska (2005)
- Paper Towns (2008)
- Turtles All the Way Down (2017)
- An Abundance of Katherines (2006)
- Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2010)
- The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021)
- Looking for Alaska / An Abundance of Katherines / Paper Towns / The Fault in Our Stars (2018)
- Let it snow (2008)
- Mental Floss (2006)
- Everything Is Tuberculosis (2025)
- 21 Proms (2007)
Where to start with John Green
Open Looking for Alaska first, because that is where the voice arrives fully formed and because it is the quickest way to decide whether you can stand it. Green is a writer people either take personally or find unbearable, and there is not much room in between.
The Fault in Our Stars is the famous one and it is better than its reputation among people who have not read it: funnier, and far more suspicious of sentiment than the marketing suggested. Turtles All the Way Down is the mature version of the same writer and the one I would hand an adult.
The Anthropocene Reviewed is nonfiction and the easiest recommendation here, because it works perfectly well for a reader with no interest in teenagers at all. Paper Towns is his argument with his own earlier work, and An Abundance of Katherines is for completists.
John Green on CrossBinge
- where to start: Who Is John Green's First Adult Novel For?
- For fans of: For fans of John Green: what to watch, read and play next