12 posts tagged “stephenie meyer”
More Twilight stuff, because I have honestly never anticipated a movie more, and that includes any of the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings installments.
Note: If you haven't read Eclipse (and are planning on it), there are spoilers contained in the following.
I was exploring Stephenie Meyer's website last week and in addition to finding those awesome playlists I mentioned, I found a Q&A on the Eclipse page. I scanned it initially, and then I stopped and started reading more thoroughly. She addressed some of the hate-filled rants criticisms of Bella, and I must say, I almost had to stop and check to see if I'd written some of those answers.
I mean, I figured I understood Bella and her motivations pretty well, but to have my thoughts and opinions match up perfectly with the author's is a bit gratifying and makes me think just maybe I'm not as clueless as I think I am.
Anyway, everything Stephenie explained makes perfect sense and is what I have believed and imagined since I first read the series. And Bella is firmly ensconced on my list of favorite literary heroines, flaws and all.
(And I still do not get why anyone -- and I'm talking readers, here -- would pick Jacob over Edward. Or, you know, even like Jacob. I loathe the boy.)
Q&A with Stephenie Meyer
Q. Did Jacob imprint on Bella?
A. No. And this is how you can be sure: in New Moon, after the first time Jacob becomes his wolf phase, he is mean to Bella. He won't tell her what is wrong. He says he can't see her anymore. If he'd imprinted on Bella in that moment (and it happens the first time you see the person after you've phased), he would have answered all her questions. Pretty much, he would have given her anything in the world she wanted. (When he's staring at her on the bottom of page 173 in Eclipse, he's trying to make himself imprint on her. But that's not something you can force.)
Q. What is the most pivotal plot development that happens in Eclipse?
A. In both Twilight and New Moon, Bella commits to becoming a vampire without once really examining what price she'll pay. In Eclipse, Bella fully comprehends that price. And then she chooses to pay it. Every aspect of the novel revolves around this point, every back story, every relationship, every moment of action.
Q. What are the characters' biggest mistakes in Eclipse, their tragic flaws?
A. Bella's is a lack of self-knowledge; she never would have pursued her friendship with Jacob if she had realized how much more than friendship it really was. You don't give up your friends when you fall in love; however, you do give up your other romantic interests. If Bella had understood herself better, she could have saved everyone a lot of heartbreak. Sometimes that happens when you try to do the right thing.
Edward's big mistake is overreaction. It's in his nature to be too extreme (see: New Moon). He's a very all-or-nothing kind of person, and it makes him unreasonable. In the beginning of Eclipse, he's too overprotective. When he sees the error of his ways, he goes too far in the other direction. He could have chosen a middle ground—maybe admitted to his jealousy and asked Bella to choose him, rather than watching her get in deeper with Jacob. Of course, he has other issues that make forcing this issue problematic. What if Jacob is better for her? What if Bella could have a more complete life with him? Should Edward really insist that Bella give everything up for vampire life? Or would it be better to let her make a fully informed choice? Can you see his dilemma? Part of Edward wants Bella to choose Jacob (and life).
Jacob doesn't have a tragic flaw. He has one goal and one hope. His goal is to save Bella's life. His hope is that he'll win her heart in the process. He fails at both. But that doesn't mean he regrets trying. If he could do it over again, he'd do the same thing. Jacob couldn't live with himself if he didn't give saving Bella his best effort—he knows it's going to hurt when he loses, but he knows it would hurt worse if he didn't try. Does he do everything right? Heck, no! But he's sixteen and he's making it up as he goes along. Those who are upset by some of his tactics should consider his youth and the fact that he is, after all, right. Bella is in love with him. (In the end, it's truly healthier for her to be aware of this as she goes forward with unalterable decisions.)
Q. What's the deal with Bella just falling in love with Jacob in the eleventh hour of Eclipse? Don't you believe in true love anymore? What happened to blacken your soul, woman??
A. First of all, let me say that I do believe in true love. But I also deeply believe in the complexity, variety, and downright insanity of love. A lucky person loves hundreds of people in their lives, all in different ways, family love, friendship love, romantic love, all in so many shades and depths. I don't think you lose your ability—or right—to have true love by loving more than one person. In part, this is true because you never love two people the same way. Another part is that, if you're lucky, you learn to love better with practice. The bottom line is that you have to choose who you are going to commit to—that's the foundation of true love, not a lack of other options.
Next, Bella does not fall in love with Jacob in Eclipse. Bella falls in love with Jacob in New Moon. I think it's easy to understand why this fact doesn't occur to her. Bella has only fallen in love one time, and it was a very sudden, dramatic, sweep-you-off-your-feet, change-your-world, magical, passionate, all-consuming thing (see: Twilight). Can you blame her for not recognizing a much more subtle kind of falling-in-love?
Does this love devaluate her love for Edward? Not for me. For me, it makes that perfect true love stronger. Bella has another option. She has a really good one. An option that's easier in many ways, that takes nothing—like her family, present or future—away from her. She would have love, and friendship, and family—an enviable human future. But she chooses Edward over all of this. This makes it real for me.
...till Breaking Dawn is released.
I kind of cheated. I didn't read the entire first chapter in the just-released special edition of Eclipse, but Entertainment Weekly ran about a third of the first chapter and I read it.
The highlight of my day in an otherwise awful cesspool now that I have succumbed to the rotavirus my nieces and nephew (and my mom and sister) had last week.
I still don't feel like blogging, blogging, and honestly, I don't know if I'll ever feel like blogging, blogging again. I think I'll just do a summary-type thing.
On the agenda:
Game 1, Championship Series, Women's College World Series: This is the first championship series since 1986 that hasn't featured either Arizona or UCLA. I like both Arizona State and Texas A&M, but Longhorn or not, I'm going to go ahead and root for the Aggies anyway. Because yeah, there's a fierce rivalry between A&M and UT, but when it comes down to it, I'm going to cheer for the state and the conference. And also, the Megan Gibson-Amanda Scarborough story is very compelling.
Organizing my iPod: Loading a bunch of new stuff, including the Eclipse playlist and new stuff from Linkin Park, Armor for Sleep, Muse, Marjorie Fair, blink-182, Sugarcult and Coldplay; going through my almost 3,500 songs making sure there are no duplicates and that the artist, song title and CD are correct.
A Company of Swans (Eva Ibbotson): I'm anxious to read this because its protagonist has made Stephenie Meyer's favorite literary heroine list, and since her list is almost identical to mine, I suspect this will be a fantastic read.
So much for using The Host to bridge the interminable gap between now and the time Breaking Dawn, the fourth -- and final, sob! -- in the Twilight saga, is released in August.
As is so often the case, I couldn't pace myself.
I can't say that I liked The Host better than any of the Twilight books, especially Twilight, which is my clear favorite, but it is at least as good.
It's hard to aptly describe the plot without giving too much away or being too confusing, but I think my BSG correlation is pretty accurate. Battlestar Galactica with a smidge of a not-cheesy, more-hopeful Red Dawn thrown in for good measure. (If that's not a unique description, I don't know what is.)
At several points throughout the story, I found myself thinking about BSG, though, and how I immediately started sympathizing with Sharon, and especially Helo, the human in love with a "toaster," moreso than anyone else, even though the series is told from the human perspective and therefore we are supposed to hate the Cylons. Sharon remains my favorite character. (Which reminds me -- I really need to catch up on last season.)
Stephenie Meyer does a superb job with the first-person narrative. I liked Wanderer better than Melanie, and really, better than all of the humans, just as I liked Bella better than any of the characters in the Twilight series and get really, really annoyed at all the Bella bashing that seems to take place in the rabid fandom. (I know I posted last year sometime as to why I loathe, despise and abominate fandoms.)
Jared is no Edward Cullen, that's for sure, and really, he doesn't play nearly the all-consuming role Edward does. Stephenie mused that if a movie is made, she sees Jared as being very Matt Damon-esque, and that fits. Although if the movie is made -- and I can't see why it won't be, especially given the projected success that the Twilight franchise is supposed to achieve -- I don't think even Damon can play 26.
But yeah. Give The Host a chance. It's fantastically entertaining and has equal parts action, adventure, suspense, romance, reflection and angst. Stephenie does an excellent job at weaving in pertinent themes like individuals vs. community, prejudice vs. acceptance, love, sacrifice, honor, and probably half a dozen others.
I went to bed last night having read a mere 48 pages of The Host.
I woke up this morning at 9 a.m. and started reading again. (I'm sick with horrid allergies, a fever, and a lovely hacking cough.)
It is now 3:41 p.m. and I'm at page 437. Just 182 pages left.
I cannot for the life of me put this book down, even though my brain is begging me to take a nap. Or at least take some more medicine for this beyond irritating cough.
Anyone who likes Battlestar Galactica should definitely read The Host. The story is so similar, except that it's like it's being told from, for example, Sharon's point of view as a Cylon.
So awesome.
Stephenie Meyer is so my favorite author.
I knew it would begin with the end, and the end would look like death to these eyes. I had been warned.
Not these eyes. My eyes. Mine. This was me now.
Stephenie Meyer's new book, The Host, dropped Tuesday. I put myself on the waiting list at the library a few weeks ago, and I was perfectly okay with being 11th. I mean, I admit, I wasn't all that enthused to read it. After all, this was wholly separate from the Twilight series. No Edward. No Bella. No impossibly, epically, gut-twistingly angsty romance. No life-and-death situations whereupon death would be more welcome than spending eternity without the one your heart yearns for...
Wait...where was I again?
Oh, yeah. The Host. So anyway, even though I'd heard really good things about it, I still was leery. I mean, it's being described as sci-fi-ish. I'm always leery of the sci-fi genre, even though I have discovered jewels like Battlestar Galactica and Firefly amidst the weird puppet-y Farscape stuff.
And then I got to work, sat down to count drawers and compile the morning deposit, switching on Glenn Beck as I always do. Five minutes after I did this, he starts raving about Stephenie Meyer. His daughters love Twilight, and so he's become quite familiar with the series as well, and then he proceeds to read the first few paragraphs of Chapter One of The Host, including the above excerpt, and I stopped everything I was doing to listen.
And then instead of going to the bank, the other store, and back to the main store to continue about my day, I made a quick detour to Barnes and Noble to pick up my own copy.
I am hooked. So yeah. There will be no vacation recap, no pictures -- I probably won't even unpack (!!) until I'm done.
I'm only on Chapter 2 and although I already know it won't top Twilight -- I'm not sure anything ever will -- it's going to come dang close.
I am so absolutely sick to death about the degradation of morals that has been intensifying for quite some time, yes, but recently has been even more rampant and blatant than usual. I'm not Catholic, but I followed a lot of Pope Benedict's recent visit, and I was so incredibly impressed by his proactive stance on what's been going on, not only in the Catholic church, but in society in general. I love that he referenced Paul when he said that while all things may be lawful, they are not necessarily beneficial. He called -- rightly so -- a lot of the hedonism present "false freedom."
Reading the Time article I've posted below couldn't have come at a better time. It was informative, well-written and encouraging -- that not all popular trends are smutty and there is still honor in being virtuous.
Is it any wonder why I love this series of books?
Stephenie Meyer: The next JK Rowling?
By Lev Grossman, Time Magazine
Five years ago, on the night of June 1, 2003, a Phoenix housewife named Stephenie Meyer had a dream: a young woman was talking to a beautiful, sparkling man in a sunlit meadow. The man was a vampire. They were in love, and he was telling the girl how hard it was for him to keep from killing her.
Meyer had not written anything much before then. Her main creative outlets were scrapbooking and making elaborate Halloween costumes. But the dream was so vivid that she absolutely had to write it down. Then she kept on writing. She wrote the entire story of the young woman and the vampire from start to finish. That story became a young-adult novel called Twilight, and she followed it up with two sequels, New Moon and Eclipse. Together the three Twilight books have sold more than 5.3 million copies in the U.S., 4 million in the past 12 months alone. They've spent a combined 143 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list; when Eclipse was released last August, it bumped the final Harry Potter book out of the top spot on some lists even though it came out only 2 1/2 weeks later. Her first non-vampire novel, The Host, will be published next month. A movie of Twilight will be in theaters this December.
Meyer, 34, is a huge success at selling books, but she's becoming something more. People dress up like her characters. They write their own stories about them and post their tales on the Internet. When she appears at a bookstore, 3,000 people go to meet her. There are Twilight-themed rock bands. Meyer has, like one of her vampires, turned into something rare and more than merely human: a literary phenomenon. How?
There's nothing particularly fantastical about Meyer's life. She grew up in Phoenix, the daughter of a CFO at a contracting firm, and went to Brigham Young University, where she met her husband, an accountant named Christian who goes by "Pancho." They got married at 21 and have three sons. They still live just outside Phoenix in a town called Cave Creek, in a large modern house guarded by towering saguaro cacti. Smart, funny and cheery, Meyer does not seem noticeably undead in person. An observant Mormon, she doesn't drink alcohol and has never seen an R-rated movie. She's not perfect--although Mormons avoid caffeine on principle, she drinks the occasional cherry Diet Pepsi. "It's about keeping yourself free of addictions," she explains, sitting on a huge couch in her living room. "We have free will, which is a huge gift from God. If you tie that up with something like, I don't know, cocaine, then you don't really have a lot of freedom anymore."
The characters in Meyer's books aren't Mormons, but her beliefs are key to understanding her singular talent. The heroine of Twilight is a girl named Bella who moves from Phoenix to a small town in Washington State (a part of the country Meyer had never visited when she wrote Twilight). Bella feels like an outsider at her new high school, but she is immediately drawn to a strange, otherworldly, ridiculously good-looking group of siblings called the Cullens, particularly to 17-year-old Edward.
The Cullens are actually a local coven of vampires. Edward has been 17 since 1918. He is super-strong and super-fast, he can hear people's thoughts, and he does not breathe or sleep or age. His skin is cold, and when exposed to the sun, he doesn't burn--he glitters. Edward and the Cullens aren't ordinary vampires: they have renounced human blood on moral grounds, feeding instead on wild animals, which they hunt by night. He and Bella are instantly, overwhelmingly attracted to each other, but he is also wildly hungry for her blood.
Resisting that temptation is a constant struggle. Edward's choice--and the willingness to choose a different way in general--is a major theme in Meyer's books. "I really think that's the underlying metaphor of my vampires," she says. "It doesn't matter where you're stuck in life or what you think you have to do; you can always choose something else. There's always a different path."
True. But that does not exhaust the meaning of the Twilight books. Certainly some of their appeal lies in their fine moral hygiene: they're an alternative to the hookup scene, Gossip Girl for good girls. There's no drinking or smoking in Twilight, and Bella and Edward do little more than kiss. "I get some pressure to put a big sex scene in," Meyer says. "But you can go anywhere for graphic sex. It's harder to find a romance where they dwell on the hand-holding. I was a late bloomer. When I was 16, holding hands was just--wow."
But it is the rare vampire novel that isn't about sex on some level, and the Twilight books are no exception. What makes Meyer's books so distinctive is that they're about the erotics of abstinence. Their tension comes from prolonged, superhuman acts of self-restraint. There's a scene midway through Twilight in which, for the first time, Edward leans in close and sniffs the aroma of Bella's exposed neck. "Just because I'm resisting the wine doesn't mean I can't appreciate the bouquet," he says. "You have a very floral smell, like lavender ... or freesia." He barely touches her, but there's more sex in that one paragraph than in all the snogging in Harry Potter.
It's never quite clear whether Edward wants to sleep with Bella or rip her throat out or both, but he wants something, and he wants it bad, and you feel it all the more because he never gets it. That's the power of the Twilight books: they're squeaky, geeky clean on the surface, but right below it, they are absolutely, deliciously filthy.
Becoming Stephenie Meyer
Meyer wrote Twilight in three months flat. "I know to the day when I became a writer," she says. "One day. Which is cool." Once she'd had the dream, she wrote like a woman struck by lightning, barely sleeping, typing one-handed with a baby in her lap. (At the time, she was taking care of three children under the age of 5.) Even now she does her writing in an open office area in the middle of the house. She's not interested in a room of her own. "I can't close doors and write. Even if the kids are asleep, I know that I could hear them if I needed. I feel better if I'm kind of in the center of things and I know what's going on."
Her story reminds one a little of J.K. Rowling's--Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as an unemployed single mom while her baby daughter slept--and Meyer is quick to point out that her success is a direct result of the way Rowling changed the book industry: children are now willing to read 500-page novels, and adults are now willing to read books written for children. But as artists, they couldn't be more different. Rowling pieces her books together meticulously, detail by detail. Meyer floods the page like a severed artery. She never uses a sentence when she can use a whole paragraph. Her books are big (500-plus pages) but not dense--they have a pillowy quality distinctly reminiscent of Internet fan fiction. (Which she'll readily grant: "I don't think I'm a writer; I think I'm a storyteller," Meyer says. "The words aren't always perfect.")
Whereas Rowling's works maintain a certain English reserve, Meyer's books are full of gusting emotions. Bella never stops gasping and swooning and passing out and waking up screaming from nightmares. Her heart is always either pounding or stopping. (Bella's histrionics don't feel at all unrealistic. When you're writing about adolescents, melodrama and realism are the same thing.) Rowling labors over her intricate plots, but Meyer's stories never bend or twist or branch. They have one gear, and she guns it straight ahead till the last page. The way she manages the reader's curiosity, maintaining tension and controlling the flow of information, is simply virtuosic. She creates a compulsion in the reader that is not unvampiric.
Meyer and Rowling do share two important traits. Both writers embed their fantasy in the modern world--Meyer's vampires are as deracinated and contemporary as Rowling's wizards. And people do not want to just read Meyer's books; they want to climb inside them and live there. James Patterson may sell more books, but not a lot of people dress up like Alex Cross. There's no literary term for the quality Twilight and Harry Potter (and The Lord of the Rings) share, but you know it when you see it: their worlds have a freestanding internal integrity that makes you feel as if you should be able to buy real estate there.
Meyer first realized something was afoot when she gave a reading in Seattle and somebody drove 4 hours and took a boat to get there. At twilightmoms.com a website for fans over 25, there are more than 200,000 posts. Last year there was an Eclipse prom in Tempe, Ariz. "It's not like Harry Potter, where you can wear a wizard's robe," Meyer says. "But they do what they can. One girl even had colored contacts!"
Beyond Twilight
You wouldn't want to live in Meyer's next book. Her fourth Twilight novel, Breaking Dawn, will be out in August--it's already No. 8 on Amazon.com--but on May 6 she will publish The Host (Little, Brown; 619 pages), a science-fiction novel being marketed to adults. It's set in the near future on an Earth that has been conquered by parasitic aliens who take over the bodies of humans, annihilating their hosts' personalities. One human host resists; she lives on as a voice in the head she shares with the alien. When host and parasite (who goes by Wanda) meet up with the host's old lover--now a resistance fighter in hiding--the alien falls for him too and joins the humans. It's a love triangle with two sides, a ménage à deux. Like Twilight, The Host is a kinky setup--two girls in one body!--played absolutely clean.
And like Meyer's other books, The Host is about love and choice and demi-human creatures. ("I rarely write about just humans," Meyer says. "You can get humans anywhere.") The Host is also set on the same slow burn as Meyer's other work: while there's hot kissing, it's a strict PG. But The Host is a grittier read--much of the book is set in a hardscrabble resistance hideout. Nobody has nice clothes. There's romance, but much of The Host is about Wanda's attempts to fit in with her new human bedfellows, about feeling alone and different and unlovable--literally alienated.
If there's a formula to Meyer's work, it holds true here: she rewrites stock horror plots as love stories, and in doing so, she makes them new again. She writes vampire novels without the biting and science fiction without the lasers. Instead, she slows down the action, tapping it for the pent-up emotional drama that's always been present in it but had been all but invisible until she came along. "That's what I like about science fiction," Meyer says. "It's the same thing I like about Shakespeare. You take people, put them in a situation that can't possibly happen, and they act the way you would act. It's about being human." And sometimes there's nobody quite as human as somebody who isn't.
So I've been tagged by Slow Learner to do the following book meme. (It circulated through a while ago, too, but I never did do it.)
- Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the next three sentences.
- Tag five people.
Well, it should come as no surprise to any of you (and especially since I confessed to my weakness on the blog) that I'm reading Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer. (Again.) Because of that, I can't post only three sentences.
Context: a conversation between protagonist Bella Swan (one of my favorite fake people ever) and new friend Jacob Black about the heretofore mysterious Cullen family.
"That's Sam -- he's nineteen," he informed me.
"What was that he was saying about the doctor's family?" I asked innocently.
"The Cullens? Oh, they're not supposed to come onto the reservation." He looked away, out toward James Island, as he confirmed what I'd thought I'd heard in Sam's voice.
"Why not?"
He glanced back at me, biting his lip. "Oops. I'm not supposed to say anything about that."
"Oh, I won't tell anyone, I'm just curious." I tried to make my smile alluring, wondering if I was laying it on too thick.
He smiled back, though, looking allured. Then he lifted one eyebrow and his voice was even huskier than before.
"Do you like scary stories?" he asked ominously.
As for tagging, hmm, I can't remember which of you already did this! I'll go with Erin, Steph, Eli's Dad, Steve Betz, and Kelly S.
9) Atonement, Ian McEwan: Fabulous. Yes, it took me a really, really long time to read, considering it's only a 300 page novel. This is one of those rare instances where I like both the book and movie equally. The guy who adapted the book into the screenplay did a really fantastic job.
Anyway, I think what I find most ludicrous surprising is that a large amount of people seem to think Briony Tallis is a horrible human being, and that she irrevocably interfered with Robbie and Cecilia and ultimately ruined their lives on purpose, whether from childish, petty jealousy, or, even worse, sheer boredom. Really? I mean, seriously? Briony was the "surprise" child, considerably younger than her brother and sister, and whose parents were conspicuously absent. Her father was away most of the time due to "business" endeavors, and her mother was stricken with frequent migraines and spent most of her days locked inside her darkened bedroom. Briony was largely left alone, to escape inside her imagination. One day she witnesses a scene from afar that she doesn't understand -- from her vantage point, it looks as though Robbie, the gardener, is ordering the older sister she idolizes to take her clothes off in broad daylight and dive into the fountain. She has no idea about the actual circumstances, and that scene will emerge again in her mind to color the series of tragic events waiting to unfurl. She delivers a note from Robbie to Cecilia, a note that was mistakenly given to her -- Robbie had picked up the wrong one -- and being 13 and insatiably curious, as most 13-year-old girls are, she read it. She didn't understand the language, although she recognized it as sexual and, in her mind, predatory. She confides in her older (manipulative) cousin, who convinces Briony that Robbie is a monster and a sex addict who would only end up hurting Cecilia.
Later, she encounters Robbie and Cecilia in the library. She knows nothing about sex. Again, from her vantage point, it looks as though Robbie is hurting her sister, and she's traumatized. She has to protect Cecilia, and she has no idea how to go about doing so -- until she happens upon her cousin with her brother's friend in the darkened woods. At the time, she doesn't know it's her brother's friend, but the events she'd witnessed earlier that day, as well as her cousin's manipulative prompting, leads her to conclude that it was Robbie, the predatory monster, and she leaps at her chance to take action. To protect her family.
And so she lies to the police. That scene in the movie, with the tiny, innocent-looking Briony, with her white dress and big blue eyes, solemnly assuring the chief of police in a clipped, assured voice that yes, she'd seen him, she'd seen him with her own eyes, was chilling, but it was also so incredibly tragic. I felt so much sorrier for Briony than for Cecilia and Robbie. Yes, it's tragic to have your life ruined by an outside source -- to wrestle with external conflict -- but for Briony, it must've been infinitely more excrutiating as she grew older and realized her grave errors in judgment. She faced an internal conflict that gnawed at her day in and day out. She thought she'd been saving her sister, and she ended up damning her -- and Robbie -- to a life they didn't choose and would never escape.
One of the comments at which I was most incredulous was from a certain reviewer at Amazon.com who stated that Briony's desire to control everything and everyone around her was evident in the fact that she changed the events and ending when she later, at the dusk of her life, published her book. I laughed at that, because he must've fallen asleep during the waning moments of the movie. She clearly stated that changing those events -- by making it so that Robbie and Cecilia had a happy ending -- was the only way she knew of making amends. Selfish? Controlling? I think not.
10) Twilight, Stephenie Meyer: By now I have certainly written enough about this and its sequels, so I won't babble on any more except to say that this has quickly become one of my very favorite books.
11) New Moon, Stephenie Meyer: See Twilight.
12) Eclipse, Stephenie Meyer: See Twilight.
13) Remember Me?, Sophie Kinsella: I love Sophie Kinsella's stuff, and I was looking forward to getting the email from the library telling me I could come by and pick it up. I read it in one day. It was pretty standard Kinsella fare -- funny, engaging, witty protagonist who finds herself in a perplexing, overwhelming predicatment. The plot was very 13 Going on 30 meets Samantha, Who? Since I loved the movie and find the TV show funny and charming, I liked the book. I didn't like it quite as much as Can You Keep a Secret? and The Undomestic Goddess, but I liked it as much as the Shopaholic books. I'd give it a solid three stars. Er, Cherry Chapsticks.
You may remember that I'd stated in prior posts that I'd started Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. I've since stopped, and I took it back to the library yesterday. I find Sebold's writing style a bit disconcerting, and I just couldn't get into the story. I'm sure I'll pick it up again, but for now, I am perfectly content to wait for the movie.
I'm breaking up my fiction to read one of David Limbaugh's books that I picked up from the library yesterday: Persecution: How Liberals are Waging War Against Christianity. I've been wanting to read this for a while because it's so plainly evident. After that, I'll probably read Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, another of Limbaugh's books on the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party, then House of Sand and Fog, and then, knowing me, I'll start Twilight again.
Logan: I thought our story was epic, you and me...spanning years and continents. Lives ruined and blood shed. Epic...
Veronica: Come on. Ruined lives? Bloodshed? You really think a relationship should be that hard?
Logan: No one writes songs about the ones that come easy.
It was one of my favorite quotes -- and one of my favorite scenes -- in all three seasons of Veronica Mars, and it kept running along the bottom of my mind, like a news ticker, throughout my consumption of Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse.
Before I continue, let me issue this disclaimer, in case it wasn't clear in past posts: I love Harry Potter. I have loved that series since I first discovered it on a plane to Chicago in September of 1999. I waited with eager anticipation for each volume thereafter, and inhaled each one in one day. I have seen each of the movies the day it premiered -- in fact, it's become quite a fun little tradition for myself, Kevin, and Mia. I have taken them to see every one, even when they didn't weigh enough to hold down their seats in the theater for ...and the Sorceror's Stone. I continue to anticipate the releases of ...and the Half-Blood Prince and ...and the Deathly Hallows. I never thought another series would be able to come along and have the same impact.
Until Twilight.
I've been trying to determine exactly why Bella, Edward and Alice have trumped Harry, Ron and Hermione in just three books' time. While I feel Stephenie Meyer is overall a better writer than JK Rowling, especially when it comes to evoking emotion and creating very complete, very layered, very realistic characters (seriously, when Bella was curled up on the forest floor, numb and practically catatonic, I was there right along with her -- I've been there), I think it ultimately comes down to what I've mentioned in earlier posts: Meyer's world is more realistic than Rowling's. And also? The epic, rip-your-heart-out romance between Edward and Bella.
Now, when I say the word "realistic," I am not implying in any way that I believe vampires and werewolves are any more realistic than witches, wizards, and trolls. However, when I suspend disbelief enough to make those worlds realistic, it is far easier for me to insert myself into Forks, Washington, than Hogwarts. It is easier for me to identify with Bella (and Alice, and Edward, etc.) than Harry.
Like Joss Whedon did when creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Meyer writes about characters who just happen to be vampires. Yes, their vampire status defines their world and creates a number of conflicts and complications, but -- again, like Whedon -- Meyer's creations are very human. They strive to retain their humanity. They want to fit in with society.
Harry Potter exists in a separate, secret reality, where nobody can know about them, and there's this underlying, catastrophic battle always lingering on the horizon. On its own, the series is quite exciting and interesting. But at the end of the day, I can't see myself in that world the way I can in the Twilight books. That is how I determine what books (and movies, and TV, etc.) with which I fall in love -- if I can imagine myself inserted into those particular settings and scenarios.
I finished Eclipse last night (about five minutes before I passed out -- the meds my doc prescribed to help me sleep worked far more quickly than I anticipated) and it was all I could do to pick up The Lovely Bones on my way to work rather than grabbing Twilight to begin the, well, epic experience all over again. (Yes, I have since purchased all three books. I can't not have them in my collection.)
Edward Cullen has ruined me for, you know, non-fictional men. Steph (who I am happy to say is addicted right along with Erin and me, yay!) said she was trying to remember if there had ever been another relationship quite like Bella and Edward's, and I have to say, I don't think so. Sigh. Romance and love like that does not exist outside of fiction.
And it sucks.
Pun not really intended.
