Vlogbrothers rewatch, Day 16: January 22

There is nothing more satisfying than watching genuinely good people find out they have won an award for their extraordinary work. I don't know John Green personally and have never met him in real life (though we have technically been in the same room once), but even all these years later, I'm happy to see him so happy.

(It should be noted that in the video, John notes that An Abundance of Katherines won an honor award but didn't actually win the Printz Award in 2007, but that they would not tell him who did win. That turned out to be Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese, which was adapted into a TV series of the same name in 2023).

Why am I talking about things that happened in 2007? That's because this is a full Vlogbrothers rewatch, where I'm revisiting every Vlogbrothers video ever made in order from the very beginning, one per day, using this playlist.

At this point John only had two novels out, Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines. He actually did win the Printz award in 2006 for Alaska, but being a runner-up the following year still had to be an amazing feeling. As a writer, even when you're rewarded for your work in some way, you never know if any of your follow-up work is going to be met with similar success (or any success at all for that matter). I'm not a novelist and I've not won anything for my writing except for NaNoWriMo. but there are a lot of ways to define success, and I'm so glad John got to celebrate this not insignificant piece of his.

He had no idea just how many people his work would come to inspire in the years to come.