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bookshelves: currently-reading
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bookshelves: currently-reading
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so, i wasn’t going to read breaking dawn. i was pretty smug about it. i thought to myself, “yeah, i couldn’t care any less than i do about that annoying bella person.” and then i snagged myself. i picked up a copy in an airport bookstore and read the first chapter.
that night i had a dream. (yes, ms. meyer, this is right up your alley.) i dreamed that in order to finish my master’s requirements (don’t worry, this is a terrifying graduate school dream that doesn’t involve any nudity) i had to take a class on fiction writing from stephenie meyer. i found myself at a mixer for the start of the year explaining to another classmate why i was absolutely mortified by this requirement. “she can’t write,” i explained. “her characters lack depth. all her books hinge on the power of lust. each character in the book is a cliche of a cliche.” and on and on dream jes went explaining herself. at some point fellow classmate says to me, “yeah. i’m stephenie meyer’s husband, but i have to agree with you. she’s not that great of a writer.”
i’m not sure exactly the cosmic weight of such a dream, but you go ahead and ponder.
and now, on to slaughter breaking dawn. at first i was delighted with meyer’s plot twists. a baby ripping its way out of a mother’s uterus with her teeth = cool. jacob imprinting on the baby with the impossible name (renesmee) = totally unexpected. [and please, all you crazy baby namers out there, don’t pick renesmee up! please!] bella actually turning into a vampire = thank goodness. (i could not have lived through another minute of her incessant whining.)
but then meyer let me down. the ending felt so contrived. too simple. everything added up too easily. (and meyer never had me believing for a second that alice had abandoned the “family.”) the last hundred pages or so were nothing but tedious. i was actually rooting for the volturi to incinerate the guts out of everybody by the end.
but let’s think about this a little more. meyer is writing in a genre that is inherently good natured. ya fiction usually ends happily with all the loose ends tied up. kids need that sort of black and white to the world where the good end happily and the bad unhappily.
and if you’re mad at meyer for her lack of morality and for the sexuality of the novels–take a step back. i wonder if we wouldn’t be so quick to flog her if she wasn’t mormon and we didn’t expect some sort of higher than usual moral ethic.
to her credit, she does enter a little paragraph about bella being unable to imagine giving herself to someone without the commitment of marriage attached. (i don’t recall that being a popular sentiment in the world at large lately.)
in the end, meyer has written out every tween girl’s fantasy: to find herself loved by someone impossibly beautiful and perfect, to discover that she has latent powers that will save her family and friends unexpectedly, to stumble upon a physical beauty she never dreamed of, to have someone admit to her that she didn’t belong in the normal world and was destined for something greater.
ultimately, i can’t be angry with meyer. let’s face it: her book is published and mine isn’t. she’s got gazillions of dollars and adoring fans and i don’t.
we’re all just jealous of her, aren’t we? ]]>
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at last. the bubble that's been hovering around me like a second skin the past few months keeping me from penetrating life: my life, an imaginary life -- finally burst. i picked up alice sebold's the lovely bones, a book i've been avoiding. i don't do hype. i don't do murder. but i read that first chapter and i felt absolutely smacked. hurled across the room and smacked. i hunkered down and read that entire book in a day and a half. if a book that tackles something so grotesque and repulsive can be beautiful, it is. sebold is poetry itself. somehow getting inside those characters helped me open something inside myself. i looked up from the last page and saw my husband and my son and i thought, this is good. what i have, here, right now, is good. at last. ]]>
Jes
took the never-ending book quiz.
| questions answered: | 32 |
| correct: | 24 (75.0%) |
| skipped: | 5 |
| best streak: | 6 |
| questions added: | 0 |
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i rarely seem to jump on book-bandwagons these days. maybe it’s the same reason i don’t watch the news or don’t seem to care whether obama or hillary wins the democratic nomination. but for some inexplicable reason (i liked the cover…?), i read atonement by ian mcewan. i’m going to agree with all those people that make the new york times bestseller list: this is a well-written book that will drive you into the ground. i haven’t read a novel this graphic in a long time. (if you stick to those russians you hear a heck of a lot more about the endless steppe than you do about sex.) and, i’m proud (?) to tell you all that this is supposed to be a book full of “twists” and i knew (not even guessed, but knew) every single twist from about page 100. i think it’s because i’m such an astute reader. (and not because i could never guess who done it in an agatha christie.) ]]>