Looking For Alaska: Before: 84-0 Days

by John Green
Tired of his life at home, Miles Halter leaves for boarding school where he meets (and falls in love with) the impulsive and unpredictable Alaska Young. But when tragedy strikes, Miles begins to question his relationship with Alaska.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Before: 136-87 Days, Before: 84-0 Days, After

Here are links to our lists for other books by John Green: An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. ingenious
    showing inventiveness and skill
    And that’s pretty ingenious, to divert water from the gutter to her room.
  2. unpredictability
    the quality of being guided by sudden impulses
    I didn’t know whether to trust Alaska, and I’d certainly had enough of her unpredictability--
  3. endeavor
    earnest and conscientious activity intended to do something
    Although she certainly does not excel at endeavors such as teaching the French language, Madame O’Malley makes a mean stuffing, and she invites all the students who stay on campus to Thanksgiving dinner.
  4. monotonous
    tediously repetitious or lacking in variety
    I sat in the back of the hatchback on the drive home—and that is how I thought of it: home—and fell asleep to the highway’s monotonous lullaby.
  5. tsunami
    a cataclysm resulting from a destructive sea wave
    “I don’t. . .” she started, and then a sob came like a tsunami, her cry so loud and childlike that it scared me, and I got up, sat down next her, and put my arm around her.
  6. minion
    a servile or fawning dependent
    "What we need is a pre-prank that coincides with an attack on Kevin and his minions,” she said.
  7. angst
    an acute but unspecific feeling of anxiety
    This never happened to me in Florida, this oh-so-high-school angst about who likes whom more, and I hated myself for letting it happen now.
  8. transitory
    lasting a very short time
    Instead, they have a bundle of energy, and that bundle of energy is transitory, migrating from one body to another, reincarnating endlessly until it eventually reaches enlightenment.
  9. dilapidated
    in a state of decay, ruin, or deterioration
    We walked on the dirt road over the bridge and back to the school’s barn, a dilapidated leak-prone structure that looked more like a long-abandoned log cabin than a barn.
  10. complacency
    the feeling you have when you are satisfied with yourself
    He was trying to lull us into complacency, but it would not work.
  11. traipse
    walk or tramp about
    You’ll say that while you were traipsing through the woods lighting firecrackers you were simultaneously hacking into the faculty network and printing out false progress reports on school stationery?
  12. undeniable
    not possible to contradict
    It was an undeniable fact: The Colonel would have no chance at a scholarship to a good school if he got expelled from the Creek.
  13. expulsion
    the act of forcing out someone or something
    For me, it was just fun, particularly since we were risking expulsion.
  14. illicit
    contrary to or forbidden by law
    The nice thing about the constant threat of expulsion at Culver Creek is that it lends excitement to every moment of illicit pleasure.
  15. intentional
    done or made with purpose and will
    I didn’t think it was lame so much as more of Alaska’s intentional vagueness, another example of her furthering her own mysteriousness.
Created on Thu Oct 17 17:23:32 EDT 2013 (updated Thu Aug 07 16:21:46 EDT 2025)

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