“And you can…”

“Um, I know a lot of people’s last words.” It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations.

“Example?”

“I like Henrik Ibsen’s. He was a playwright.”  I knew a lot about Ibsen, but I’d never read any of his plays. I didn’t like reading plays. I liked reading biographies.

“Yeah, I know who he was,” said Chip.

“Right, well, he’d been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, ‘You seem to be feeling better this morning,’ and Ibsen looked at her and said, ‘On the contrary,’ and then he died.”

Chip laughed. “That’s morbid. But I like it.”

—John Green Looking for Alaska. There’s a new “exclusive collector’s edition” of this 2005 novel, Green’s debut, which won the Michael Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature from the American Library Association. His best known book is The Fault in Our Stars.