“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
―
Oscar Wilde
This is Bibliophile.
Welcome to my weekly segment where I take a Canadian university, and search its library catalogue for interesting new books to comment on. As always, a bold H following an entry denotes that the book is held in my local university library.
I've had a bit of an odd hurdle today; I'm having trouble finding an appropriate university library to plumb. Normally, I just take whatever comes next from Wikipedia's list of Canadian Universities. But with under 500 students, University Canada West doesn't so much have a library as it has a few shelves that happen to contain books on them. And the next up, University of Fraser Valley, might have a very fine collection, but its library website has currently disappeared, so it's off the list too. So that brings us to door number 3, the University of Northern British Columbia. It doesn't have a new book page, and you can search by year, but only if you specify a subject,title, author, or keyword. Ah, so it's going to be one of THOSE. The first twelve books that have been published in 2013, fit the keywords I randomly choose, and strike my eye as interesting, after the break.
Showing posts with label twilight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label twilight. Show all posts
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Friday Quotations: Jealous of the Sparkle
"As Claire Kahane has shown, the underlying hint of father-daughter romantic love predicated on an absent mother is a central subtext of the Gothick women's romance, and (for the first three books anyway) Bella the emotional orphan clearly craves this kind of masterful paternal attention." --Victoria Nelson, Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural
1) Sorry it's a day late.
2) Sorry for the quotation. Insulting Twilight is admittedly grasping the low hanging fruit. In this case, it should probably be noted that Nelson did add that proviso that the relationship between them changes dramatically in book 4, and that it is essential that Bella chooses to become a vampire, insisting that their relationship be one of equals. ...The books themselves still annoy me, though. I have nothing against the fans, but the books...I'll stick to my Patricia Briggs and Jim Butcher for my urban fantasy, thanks.
Later Days.
1) Sorry it's a day late.
2) Sorry for the quotation. Insulting Twilight is admittedly grasping the low hanging fruit. In this case, it should probably be noted that Nelson did add that proviso that the relationship between them changes dramatically in book 4, and that it is essential that Bella chooses to become a vampire, insisting that their relationship be one of equals. ...The books themselves still annoy me, though. I have nothing against the fans, but the books...I'll stick to my Patricia Briggs and Jim Butcher for my urban fantasy, thanks.
Later Days.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Vampire Marathon, Part III
This is going to be a bit fragmented; I've got a lot of work to do on campus today, but the Sunday bus doesn't leave for another 45 minutes, so I've got time to do a bit of reading, but not enough to finish the book.
1:06 pm. p 355. "I mmm'd and ahh'd at the right places, but it wasn't easy to concentrate. Jessica, Mike, the dance, the school--they all seemed strangely irrelevant at that moment." Bella Swan: terrible friend. Although I have to admit, you would have to work pretty damn hard to make me care about a school dance either. (I had to look up Bella's last name on Wikipedia. The first line of text under her entry is "Bella Swan (later Bella Cullen)." Thanks for the spoiler alert, Wikipedia.)
1:11 pm. P359. "Charlie couldn't doubt Edward's sincerity, it rang in every word." I think it says a lot about my current state of development that no element in a work of fiction can make me wince more than a particularly egregious comma splice.
1:14 pm. P360. "I was glad that the rain was too heavy to see Charlie clearly on the porch. That mean that he couldn't see how Edward's hands lingered at my neck, brushed along my collarbones. I gave up trying to help him and focused on not hyperventilating." The collarbones have long been known as the sexiest of the shoulder bones. See Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, "My Mistress's collarbones are nothing like an ivory piano."
1:23 pm. P 369. "Alice held the ball in both hands at her waist, and then, like the strike of a cobra, her right hand flicked out and the ball smacked into Jasper's hand.
'Was that a strike?' I whispered to Emse.
'If they don't hit it, it's a strike,' she told me."
All right, I know that, as someone who finds everything associated with football utterly baffling, I probably shouldn't say this, but... really, Bella? Do you understand what a baseball game is? If this is her average sport knowledge, it's no longer a mystery why she has so much trouble in gym class.
1:26 pm. P371. "Alice slapped them dainty high fives." I would like very much to see that. I would like to see what makes a high five dainty.
1:31 pm. P384. A more hunter-oriented vampire has fixated on Bella, and her solution is to leave her father and go on the run. Ladies, don't go on the run with strange older men. Stay in school.
1:37 pm. P398. The only certain way to kill a vampire is to "tear him to shreds and then burn the pieces." First, note that Edward's default gender of a vampire is male. A product of an early 20th century upbringing? (And frankly, you'd think that would be more of an issue; someone who went through their formative years during World War 1 would have a rather different outlook than someone who went through the same formative years in the era of Lady Gaga and the Internet.) Second, I didn't mention this when it first came up, since it's one of the better known scenes of the movie, but Meyer's vampires twinkle in sunlight. That drastically changes the usual vampire dynamic--even if you evade one till morning, all you've done is make them appear more telegenic. And it makes them pretty indestructible. I guess that's okay when you're telling a type of story that focuses on the relationship over the violence, but it does make it a little harder to swallow that the vampires aren't running the joint. Even the True Blood group of vampires has more worldly power than these guys, and they're limited by not only no sunlight, but having to sleep during the day.
1:47 pm. P 410. "It's been almost a century that Edward's been alone. Now he's found you. You can't see the changes that we see, we who have been with him for so long. Do you think any of us want to look into his eyes for the next hundred years if he loses you?"
That would be a problem with vampires: sheer longevity of holding a grudge. And not just something big, like losing one's One True Love. Can you imagine the enmity that would arise over a century of Not Putting Down the Toilet Seat?
I will continue this work later. For now, fair readers, adieu.
4:31 pm. ....aaaand we're back. Let's end this.
4:33 pm. P 413. "like a carnivorous flower, we are physically attractive to our prey." There has got to be a better comparison than that. Although it does leave the door wide open for jokes about Edward's pistil.
4:37 pm. P423. "I could feel it was too early again when I woke, and I knew I was getting the schedule of my days and nights slowly reversed." Another peril of dating the nocturnally oriented.
4:43 pm. P437. "The minutes passed and Edward's arrival grew closer. It was amazing how every cell in my body seemed to know he was coming, to long for his coming. That made it hard." That's what she said. All right, that's literally what she said, but... you know, the joke is to take the phrase and... sigh... I'm getting tired...
4:45 pm. P438. Bella evades the vampires at the airport. I mention this, because her plan here is probably the cleverest thing she has done to date.
4:48 pm. P445. The villain does his grand "reveal of major plot." I have honestly never heard a more unnecessary villainous grand speech. The evil vampire is hardly Machiavelli, and his big revelation re: another member of Eddie's coven is somewhat underwhelming. It may perhaps work better if James has been introduced a little earlier in the narrative, or if the other vampires as characters had been explored a little earlier; it's hard to feel any impact of a revelation involving people you've been familiar with for only a chapter or two.
P4:59 pm. P 468. "My mother's voice was unsure; as far as I could remember, this was the first time since I was eight that she'd come close to trying to sound like a parental authority. I recognized the reasonable-but-firm tone of voice from talks I'd had with her about men." Does that imply that these talks about men happened when Bella was eight? Or that her mother made no attempt to sound like a parental authority when she was previously discussing men? Because really, neither is really an ideal situation.
5:03 pm. P473. " 'I'll be the first to admit that I have no experience with relationships,' I said. 'But it just seems logical... a man and woman have to be somewhat equal... as in, one of them can't always be swooping in and saving the other. They have to save each other equally. ... I can't always be Lois Lane. I want to be Superman, too.'"
The first half of this, at least, is the most sensible thing Bella has said in a while. Unfortunately, it's her argument to support the thesis "You should really turn me into a vampire."
5:07 pm. P 481. "Would I ever get used to his perfection?" Just in case you thought Bella had changed...
5:10 pm P 485. "Emmett enjoyed having me around--he thought my bizarre human reactions were hilarious... or maybe it was just the fact that I fell down a lot that he found so funny." I knew there was a reason I liked Emmett. Also: there is something so... inescapably "teenage girl" -ish about a book that ends with a prom.
5:16 pm P498. " 'Look,' I said, 'I love you more than everything else in the world combined. Isn't that enough?'"
Thank you and goodnight, ladies and gentlemen.
All right, a quick overview. To damn with faint praise, that wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I was expecting something excruciatingly badly written, and this, in comparison, was perfectly serviceable, if not outright exciting. I know I keep comparing it to Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels, but I think it's pretty apt. In both cases, I found the mythology behind the world better than execution or the personality of the leads (though Harris pulls ahead in both--Sookie is infuriating, but Bella is virtually a blank slate--all the easier to project one's teenage self onto, I suppose). And in both cases, the vampire is used as a sort of escapist wish-fulfillment--a sense of danger without any real danger. And as someone who devoured fantasy series in his teenage days (and a fair bit now, for that matter), I can respect a piece of escapism when I see it. The story doesn't even need vampires, at the moment; you could have told much the same with Edward as the son of a gangster, or a misplaced prince. I found a lot of Bella's excess in pursuing Edward and being okay with his stalker behavior to be personally distasteful and creepy, but if I believe that teenage boys can play video games without becoming gun addicts, I think I need to give the audience of this book the benefit of the doubt as well.
So then: not a great book, by any means. And not the best possible use of a week off. But its cultural influence was/is undeniable, and with that respect in mind, I graciously leave Bella to pursue her fangs-filled future in peace.
Later Days.
1:06 pm. p 355. "I mmm'd and ahh'd at the right places, but it wasn't easy to concentrate. Jessica, Mike, the dance, the school--they all seemed strangely irrelevant at that moment." Bella Swan: terrible friend. Although I have to admit, you would have to work pretty damn hard to make me care about a school dance either. (I had to look up Bella's last name on Wikipedia. The first line of text under her entry is "Bella Swan (later Bella Cullen)." Thanks for the spoiler alert, Wikipedia.)
1:11 pm. P359. "Charlie couldn't doubt Edward's sincerity, it rang in every word." I think it says a lot about my current state of development that no element in a work of fiction can make me wince more than a particularly egregious comma splice.
1:14 pm. P360. "I was glad that the rain was too heavy to see Charlie clearly on the porch. That mean that he couldn't see how Edward's hands lingered at my neck, brushed along my collarbones. I gave up trying to help him and focused on not hyperventilating." The collarbones have long been known as the sexiest of the shoulder bones. See Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, "My Mistress's collarbones are nothing like an ivory piano."
1:23 pm. P 369. "Alice held the ball in both hands at her waist, and then, like the strike of a cobra, her right hand flicked out and the ball smacked into Jasper's hand.
'Was that a strike?' I whispered to Emse.
'If they don't hit it, it's a strike,' she told me."
All right, I know that, as someone who finds everything associated with football utterly baffling, I probably shouldn't say this, but... really, Bella? Do you understand what a baseball game is? If this is her average sport knowledge, it's no longer a mystery why she has so much trouble in gym class.
1:26 pm. P371. "Alice slapped them dainty high fives." I would like very much to see that. I would like to see what makes a high five dainty.
1:31 pm. P384. A more hunter-oriented vampire has fixated on Bella, and her solution is to leave her father and go on the run. Ladies, don't go on the run with strange older men. Stay in school.
1:37 pm. P398. The only certain way to kill a vampire is to "tear him to shreds and then burn the pieces." First, note that Edward's default gender of a vampire is male. A product of an early 20th century upbringing? (And frankly, you'd think that would be more of an issue; someone who went through their formative years during World War 1 would have a rather different outlook than someone who went through the same formative years in the era of Lady Gaga and the Internet.) Second, I didn't mention this when it first came up, since it's one of the better known scenes of the movie, but Meyer's vampires twinkle in sunlight. That drastically changes the usual vampire dynamic--even if you evade one till morning, all you've done is make them appear more telegenic. And it makes them pretty indestructible. I guess that's okay when you're telling a type of story that focuses on the relationship over the violence, but it does make it a little harder to swallow that the vampires aren't running the joint. Even the True Blood group of vampires has more worldly power than these guys, and they're limited by not only no sunlight, but having to sleep during the day.
1:47 pm. P 410. "It's been almost a century that Edward's been alone. Now he's found you. You can't see the changes that we see, we who have been with him for so long. Do you think any of us want to look into his eyes for the next hundred years if he loses you?"
That would be a problem with vampires: sheer longevity of holding a grudge. And not just something big, like losing one's One True Love. Can you imagine the enmity that would arise over a century of Not Putting Down the Toilet Seat?
I will continue this work later. For now, fair readers, adieu.
4:31 pm. ....aaaand we're back. Let's end this.
4:33 pm. P 413. "like a carnivorous flower, we are physically attractive to our prey." There has got to be a better comparison than that. Although it does leave the door wide open for jokes about Edward's pistil.
4:37 pm. P423. "I could feel it was too early again when I woke, and I knew I was getting the schedule of my days and nights slowly reversed." Another peril of dating the nocturnally oriented.
4:43 pm. P437. "The minutes passed and Edward's arrival grew closer. It was amazing how every cell in my body seemed to know he was coming, to long for his coming. That made it hard." That's what she said. All right, that's literally what she said, but... you know, the joke is to take the phrase and... sigh... I'm getting tired...
4:45 pm. P438. Bella evades the vampires at the airport. I mention this, because her plan here is probably the cleverest thing she has done to date.
4:48 pm. P445. The villain does his grand "reveal of major plot." I have honestly never heard a more unnecessary villainous grand speech. The evil vampire is hardly Machiavelli, and his big revelation re: another member of Eddie's coven is somewhat underwhelming. It may perhaps work better if James has been introduced a little earlier in the narrative, or if the other vampires as characters had been explored a little earlier; it's hard to feel any impact of a revelation involving people you've been familiar with for only a chapter or two.
P4:59 pm. P 468. "My mother's voice was unsure; as far as I could remember, this was the first time since I was eight that she'd come close to trying to sound like a parental authority. I recognized the reasonable-but-firm tone of voice from talks I'd had with her about men." Does that imply that these talks about men happened when Bella was eight? Or that her mother made no attempt to sound like a parental authority when she was previously discussing men? Because really, neither is really an ideal situation.
5:03 pm. P473. " 'I'll be the first to admit that I have no experience with relationships,' I said. 'But it just seems logical... a man and woman have to be somewhat equal... as in, one of them can't always be swooping in and saving the other. They have to save each other equally. ... I can't always be Lois Lane. I want to be Superman, too.'"
The first half of this, at least, is the most sensible thing Bella has said in a while. Unfortunately, it's her argument to support the thesis "You should really turn me into a vampire."
5:07 pm. P 481. "Would I ever get used to his perfection?" Just in case you thought Bella had changed...
5:10 pm P 485. "Emmett enjoyed having me around--he thought my bizarre human reactions were hilarious... or maybe it was just the fact that I fell down a lot that he found so funny." I knew there was a reason I liked Emmett. Also: there is something so... inescapably "teenage girl" -ish about a book that ends with a prom.
5:16 pm P498. " 'Look,' I said, 'I love you more than everything else in the world combined. Isn't that enough?'"
Thank you and goodnight, ladies and gentlemen.
All right, a quick overview. To damn with faint praise, that wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I was expecting something excruciatingly badly written, and this, in comparison, was perfectly serviceable, if not outright exciting. I know I keep comparing it to Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels, but I think it's pretty apt. In both cases, I found the mythology behind the world better than execution or the personality of the leads (though Harris pulls ahead in both--Sookie is infuriating, but Bella is virtually a blank slate--all the easier to project one's teenage self onto, I suppose). And in both cases, the vampire is used as a sort of escapist wish-fulfillment--a sense of danger without any real danger. And as someone who devoured fantasy series in his teenage days (and a fair bit now, for that matter), I can respect a piece of escapism when I see it. The story doesn't even need vampires, at the moment; you could have told much the same with Edward as the son of a gangster, or a misplaced prince. I found a lot of Bella's excess in pursuing Edward and being okay with his stalker behavior to be personally distasteful and creepy, but if I believe that teenage boys can play video games without becoming gun addicts, I think I need to give the audience of this book the benefit of the doubt as well.
So then: not a great book, by any means. And not the best possible use of a week off. But its cultural influence was/is undeniable, and with that respect in mind, I graciously leave Bella to pursue her fangs-filled future in peace.
Later Days.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Vampire Marathon, Part II
And here we go again.
3:00 pm. p 152. I think I like Angela better than any other character in this book. That perhaps does not bode well for her future vitality.
3:03 pm. P161. "I braced myself, feet apart, trying to remember through my panic what little self-defense I knew. Heel of the hand thrust upward, hopefully breaking the nose or shoving it into the brain. Finger through the eye socket--try to hook around and pop the eye out. And the standard knee to the groin, of course." Wow. I guess not every lesson Bella's mother tried to impart was about looking at the sunny side of life.
3:05 pm. p 162. "It was amazing how instantly the choking fear vanished, amazing how suddenly the feeling of security washed over me--even before I was off the street--as soon as I heard his voice." "Put your faith in older, mysterious men" may not be the best message to convey to impressionable yound ladies.
3:10 pm. P173. "Only you could get into trouble in a town this small. You would have devastated their crime rate statistics for a decade, you know." It's funny, because she was nearly raped and murdered. TOO SOON, Edward.
3:15 pm. P190. "Don't you see, Bella? It's one thing for me to make myself miserable, but a wholly other thing for you to be so involved. It's wrong. It's not safe. I'm dangerous, Bella--please, grasp that."
I haven't known Bella long, but it strikes me that telling her this is like telling a crack addict they shouldn't smoke this particular bit of crack because it might be too awesome for them.
3:21 pm. P195. And the money quotation: "About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him--and I didn't know how potent that part might be--that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him." "Unconditionally and irrevocably." Wait to make love sound like a venereal disease, Bella.
3:24 pm. P200. It's interesting that both Bella and Sookie Stackhouse have the built in protections from their opposite attraction's powers--the vampire can't read Bella's mind, and Sookie can't read vampires, though she is in turn protected from their glamour abilities. I guess there's a limit to exactly how much a power deficient is "sexy."
3:35 pm. P227. "It must be a hard thing, to be a father; living in fear that your daughter would meet a boy she liked, but also having to worry if she didn't. How ghastly it would be, I thought, shuddering, if Charlie had even the slightest inkling of exactly what I did like." I think Charlie is my next favorite character. Essentially, I seem to like the ones that don't say anything.
3:39 pm. P231. "I hurried to change afterward, ill at ease, knowing the faster I moved, the sooner I would be with Edward. The pressure made me more clumsy than usual, but eventually I made it out the door, feeling the same release when I saw him standing there, a wide smile automatically spreading across my face." Honestly, she's usually much scarier than he is.
3:42 pm. P242. "He grinned his crooked smile at me, stopping my breath and my heart. I couldn't imagine how an angel could be any more glorious. There was nothing about him that could be improved upon." She is so, so much scarier.
3:44 pm. P245. "Having the advantages I do, I have a better than average grasp of human nature. People are predictable. But you... you never do what I expect. You always take me by surprise." Edward said earlier that he preferred day to night because the night was so predictable. That's a downside to immortality that doesn't get covered in your classic Greek version--run-of-the-mill boredom. I guess that's why Zeus was always turning into swans.
3:48 pm. P248. "Our relationship couldn't continue to balance, as it did, on the point of a knife. We would fall off one edge or the other, depending entirely upon decision, or his instincts. My decision was made, made before I'd ever consciously chosen, and I was committed to seeing it through. Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating, than the thought of turning away from him. It was an impossibility."
No. All joking aside for a moment, just... no. One of the most insidious lies you can tell to yourself is that you don't have a choice, especially when the one taking away your power is you. ...Sorry to get afterschool special, but the romantic tragic teenager has never been a trope I have a lot of patience for. (I chose a great book for that, huh?)
3:55 pm. P252. "I woke early, having slept soundly and dreamlessly thanks to my gratuitous drug use." Thus solving the intense dream problem forever. FOREVER.
4:02 pm. P273. "Bella, I couldn't live with myself if I ever hurt you. You don't know how it's tortured me." How to tell your relationship with a vampire will be difficult pointer #456: when his dialogue becomes indistinguishable from that of an abusive spouse.
4:06 pm p 279. " 'I'm a bit heavier than your average backpack,' I warned. 'Hah!' he snorted. I could almost hear his eyes rolling. I'd never seen him in such high spirits before." pointer #457: when your vocabulary while literally riding him takes a turn towards the equestrian.
4:08 pm p 284. "You're intoxicated by my very presence." Pointer #458: you both continually refer to his effect on you as a drug.
Later Days.
4:13 pm p293. Edward reveals that he comes by nearly every night while Bella is asleep and spies on her. Look at these pointers. They do not form a foundation for a healthy relationship.
4:23 pm P310. Edward responds to Bella's question re: a possible sexual tryst: "It's just that you are so soft, so fragile. I have to mind my actions every moment that we're together so that I don't hurt you. I could kill you quite easily, Bella, simply by accident." I haven't heard that line since I stopped reading those Klingon Harlequin romances.
4:30 pm p 328 "Finally, a rational response!" he murmured. "I was beginning to think you had no sense of self-preservation at all!" He's joking, but I remember a certain passage a few hundred pages back where Bella speculated that her father was now okay with leaving guns in the house loaded because he thought her "old enough to not hurt herself accidentally, and happy enough not to do it deliberately." Whose mind works like that? Who sees a gun and thinks, "gee, I guess my dad doesn't think I'm suicidal after all?" To answer my own question: generally speaking? The suicidal are the ones who think like that. Bella had issues long before Eddie showed up.
4:37 pm p342. Bella chalks Eddie's "murdering people and drinking their blood" phase to youthful rebellion. This is the same girl who hates speeding, and goes to great lengths to avoid lying. Those things are bad, but a little murder is okay.
...And on that note, I'll call it a day. Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion.
3:00 pm. p 152. I think I like Angela better than any other character in this book. That perhaps does not bode well for her future vitality.
3:03 pm. P161. "I braced myself, feet apart, trying to remember through my panic what little self-defense I knew. Heel of the hand thrust upward, hopefully breaking the nose or shoving it into the brain. Finger through the eye socket--try to hook around and pop the eye out. And the standard knee to the groin, of course." Wow. I guess not every lesson Bella's mother tried to impart was about looking at the sunny side of life.
3:05 pm. p 162. "It was amazing how instantly the choking fear vanished, amazing how suddenly the feeling of security washed over me--even before I was off the street--as soon as I heard his voice." "Put your faith in older, mysterious men" may not be the best message to convey to impressionable yound ladies.
3:10 pm. P173. "Only you could get into trouble in a town this small. You would have devastated their crime rate statistics for a decade, you know." It's funny, because she was nearly raped and murdered. TOO SOON, Edward.
3:15 pm. P190. "Don't you see, Bella? It's one thing for me to make myself miserable, but a wholly other thing for you to be so involved. It's wrong. It's not safe. I'm dangerous, Bella--please, grasp that."
I haven't known Bella long, but it strikes me that telling her this is like telling a crack addict they shouldn't smoke this particular bit of crack because it might be too awesome for them.
3:21 pm. P195. And the money quotation: "About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him--and I didn't know how potent that part might be--that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him." "Unconditionally and irrevocably." Wait to make love sound like a venereal disease, Bella.
3:24 pm. P200. It's interesting that both Bella and Sookie Stackhouse have the built in protections from their opposite attraction's powers--the vampire can't read Bella's mind, and Sookie can't read vampires, though she is in turn protected from their glamour abilities. I guess there's a limit to exactly how much a power deficient is "sexy."
3:35 pm. P227. "It must be a hard thing, to be a father; living in fear that your daughter would meet a boy she liked, but also having to worry if she didn't. How ghastly it would be, I thought, shuddering, if Charlie had even the slightest inkling of exactly what I did like." I think Charlie is my next favorite character. Essentially, I seem to like the ones that don't say anything.
3:39 pm. P231. "I hurried to change afterward, ill at ease, knowing the faster I moved, the sooner I would be with Edward. The pressure made me more clumsy than usual, but eventually I made it out the door, feeling the same release when I saw him standing there, a wide smile automatically spreading across my face." Honestly, she's usually much scarier than he is.
3:42 pm. P242. "He grinned his crooked smile at me, stopping my breath and my heart. I couldn't imagine how an angel could be any more glorious. There was nothing about him that could be improved upon." She is so, so much scarier.
3:44 pm. P245. "Having the advantages I do, I have a better than average grasp of human nature. People are predictable. But you... you never do what I expect. You always take me by surprise." Edward said earlier that he preferred day to night because the night was so predictable. That's a downside to immortality that doesn't get covered in your classic Greek version--run-of-the-mill boredom. I guess that's why Zeus was always turning into swans.
3:48 pm. P248. "Our relationship couldn't continue to balance, as it did, on the point of a knife. We would fall off one edge or the other, depending entirely upon decision, or his instincts. My decision was made, made before I'd ever consciously chosen, and I was committed to seeing it through. Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating, than the thought of turning away from him. It was an impossibility."
No. All joking aside for a moment, just... no. One of the most insidious lies you can tell to yourself is that you don't have a choice, especially when the one taking away your power is you. ...Sorry to get afterschool special, but the romantic tragic teenager has never been a trope I have a lot of patience for. (I chose a great book for that, huh?)
3:55 pm. P252. "I woke early, having slept soundly and dreamlessly thanks to my gratuitous drug use." Thus solving the intense dream problem forever. FOREVER.
4:02 pm. P273. "Bella, I couldn't live with myself if I ever hurt you. You don't know how it's tortured me." How to tell your relationship with a vampire will be difficult pointer #456: when his dialogue becomes indistinguishable from that of an abusive spouse.
4:06 pm p 279. " 'I'm a bit heavier than your average backpack,' I warned. 'Hah!' he snorted. I could almost hear his eyes rolling. I'd never seen him in such high spirits before." pointer #457: when your vocabulary while literally riding him takes a turn towards the equestrian.
4:08 pm p 284. "You're intoxicated by my very presence." Pointer #458: you both continually refer to his effect on you as a drug.
Later Days.
4:13 pm p293. Edward reveals that he comes by nearly every night while Bella is asleep and spies on her. Look at these pointers. They do not form a foundation for a healthy relationship.
4:23 pm P310. Edward responds to Bella's question re: a possible sexual tryst: "It's just that you are so soft, so fragile. I have to mind my actions every moment that we're together so that I don't hurt you. I could kill you quite easily, Bella, simply by accident." I haven't heard that line since I stopped reading those Klingon Harlequin romances.
4:30 pm p 328 "Finally, a rational response!" he murmured. "I was beginning to think you had no sense of self-preservation at all!" He's joking, but I remember a certain passage a few hundred pages back where Bella speculated that her father was now okay with leaving guns in the house loaded because he thought her "old enough to not hurt herself accidentally, and happy enough not to do it deliberately." Whose mind works like that? Who sees a gun and thinks, "gee, I guess my dad doesn't think I'm suicidal after all?" To answer my own question: generally speaking? The suicidal are the ones who think like that. Bella had issues long before Eddie showed up.
4:37 pm p342. Bella chalks Eddie's "murdering people and drinking their blood" phase to youthful rebellion. This is the same girl who hates speeding, and goes to great lengths to avoid lying. Those things are bad, but a little murder is okay.
...And on that note, I'll call it a day. Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Vampire Marathon, Part I
Let's get this started.
6:53 pm: "When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end" (1). Is that how things work? The better something is, the better you feel when it's over?
6:58 pm: "When I landed in Port Angeles, it was raining. I didn't see it as an omen--just unavoidable. I'd already said my goodbyes to the sun" (5). Bella's not a glass half-full type, is she?
7:00 pm: "It was beautiful, of course; I couldn't deny that. Everything was green: the trees, their trunks covered with moss, their branches hanging with a canopy of it, the ground covered with ferns. Even the air filtered down greenly through the leaves.
It was too green--an alien planet." Seriously not half-full. 'This view is too scenic!' 'There's too many colors in that sunset!'
7:03 pm: "It was nice to be alone, not to have a smile and look pleased; a relief to stare dejectedly out the window at the sheeting rain and let just a few tears escape. I wasn't in the mood to go on a real crying jag. I would save that for bedtime, when I would have to think about the coming morning." Yeah, you don't want to spend all your crying jags up right away. I'll admit, having grown up in a school with just over 100 students, I really don't have a lot of sympathy for her dread of a place with "a frightening total of only three hundred and fifty-seven" students.
7:09 pm. "I can do this, I lied to myself, feebly. No one was going to bite me." (14) Foreshadowing!
7:11 pm. "My Trigonometry teacher, Mr. Varner, who I would have hated anyway just because of the subject he taught, was the only one who made me stand in front of the class and introduce myself." (17) Whom, Bella. Whom. If you want to broody and emo, I'm not going to stop you, but at least do it using the right pronouns. It's about standards.
7:14 pm. "I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel." (19) All right, I did like the pairing of those two metaphors, and the disparity between them. Way to po-mo it, Bella.
7:19 pm. A tumultuous beginning to the Edward/Bella relationship: "I sat frozen in my seat, staring blankly after him. He was so mean. It wasn't fair. I began gathering up my things slowly, trying to block the anger that filled me, for fear my eyes would tear up." Note that Edward has, at this point, no interaction with Bella whatsoever beyond shooting her a dirty look.
7:22 pm. "At home, only two years of P.E. were required. Here, P.E. was mandatory all four years. Forks was literally my personal hell on earth." I don't think that word means what you think it means.
7:25 pm. "I had decided to read Wuthering Heights--the novel we were currently studying in English--yet again for the fun of it." Recall that this is the book where one character thinks fondly of partitions of his coffin breaking so that his rotting corpse can be fully intermingled with the body of his beloved. This choice probably tells us a lot about Bella.
7:31 pm. "His hair was dripping, wet, disheveled--even so, he looked like he'd just finished shooting a commercial for hair gel. His dazzling face was friendly, open, a slight smile on his flawless lips. But his eyes were careful." All right, I was joking before, but it's interesting how Bella's go-to metaphors for Edward's beauty all involves placing him in the context of some form of medium: a commercial, an ad, a movie, a sculpture.
7:41 pm. "That was the first night I dreamed of Edward Cullen." Dream sequence!
7:43 pm. "I watched him sometimes, unable to stop myself--from a distance, though, in the cafeteria or parking lot. I watched as his golden eyes grew perceptibly darker day by day. But in class I gave no more notice that he existed than he showed toward me. I was miserable. And the dreams continued." Ah, teenage love. So deep, and yet so hard to distinguish from stalking.
7:48 pm. "I wasn't interesting. And he was. Interesting... and brilliant... and mysterious... and perfect... and beautiful... and possibly able to lift full-sized vans with one hand." (79) Man, in high school, I always lost the girl to the guy who was possibly able to lift full-sized vans with one hand. Not because I couldn't lift vans with one hand; I could. But once I had, the possibility that I might or might not was gone. Girls like a bit of mystery.
7:53 pm. "I was planning to go to Seattle in the next few weeks, and, to be honest, I'm not sure if your truck can make it. ...can your truck make it there on one tank of gas? ...The wasting of finite resources is everyone's business." (83) Edward Cullen, ladies and gentlemen. Vampire, van-lifter, and eco-critic. (Although he does get some points for at least attempting to inject some humor.)
8:07 pm. "The bouquets of brilliant anemones undulated ceaselessly in the invisible current, twisted shells scurried about the edges, obscuring the crabs within them, starfish struck motionless to the rocks and each other, while one small black eel with white racing stripes wove through the bright green weeds, waiting for the sea to return." That's a rather convoluted sentence, but it's nice to Bella neither unhappy nor brooding over Edward.
"...I was completely absorbed, except for one small part of my mind that wondered what Edward was doing now, and trying to imagine what he would be saying if he were here with me." Oh. Never mind.
8:15 pm. P 130. Hmmm. A third of the way through the book, and we're already in our second dream sequence.
8:19 pm. P135. Bella finds a vampire-oriented website: Vampires A-Z. Which some enterprising fan has turned into a real website. Which is a little obsessive, but, well, one of my favorite blogs is of a guy who reviews 1990-era comic books, so I won't be too quick to criticize someone on that score. But I looked at the posts, and found this:
OMG! thats awesome, this means that Stephenie Meyer didn't just make up the concept of vampires, she just borrowed the facts! that means that vampires really could exist, and so could edward cullen! Yay, thats awesomeeee I am reading the book now andit is exactly the same, well almost
iloveyouedward xx love, twilights biggest fan
Put aside the fact that the site was created in 2006, and the book published in 2005. The important thing here is that someone believed Stephanie Meyer made up vampires. Brahm Stoker wrote Dracula 113 years ago. Vampire myths date back centuries and exist across cultures. The last movie in the Blade trilogy came out in 2004. But this person believes Meyer invented vampires. The mind, it boggles.
8:34 pm. Bella tries reading some Jane Austen: "My favorites were Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. I'd read the first most recently, so I started into Sense and Sensibility, only to remember after I began chapter three that the hero of the story happened to be named Edward. Angrily, I turned to Mansfield Park, but the hero of that piece was named Edmund, and that was just too close. Weren't there any other names available in the late eighteenth century?" I was going to make a snobby comment about Bella mixing up her centuries, but a bit of research suggests that some of Austen's books were at least started in the 18th century, though they were all published later. You win this round, Bella.
...All right, I'm going to call it quits for a night. I'm at page 150, which is actually a much quicker pace than I'd anticipated, but I want to drag this thing out to at least two days, so a break is in order. I have to admit, it's not as bad I thought it would be. It's eye-rollingly moody, and certainly not on the level of the literary works it keeps dropping, but it's not the litany of howlingly bad lines that I'd expected. If anything, it's disappointing in how utterly mundane it is. Why, at this point in a Sooky Stackhouse novel, she would have given at least a half dozen speeches about Bill's effect on her libido. Libido, of course, having just come up on her word-a-day calendar.
...Hmmm... maybe that's a potential candidate for the next marathon...
Later Days.
6:53 pm: "When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end" (1). Is that how things work? The better something is, the better you feel when it's over?
6:58 pm: "When I landed in Port Angeles, it was raining. I didn't see it as an omen--just unavoidable. I'd already said my goodbyes to the sun" (5). Bella's not a glass half-full type, is she?
7:00 pm: "It was beautiful, of course; I couldn't deny that. Everything was green: the trees, their trunks covered with moss, their branches hanging with a canopy of it, the ground covered with ferns. Even the air filtered down greenly through the leaves.
It was too green--an alien planet." Seriously not half-full. 'This view is too scenic!' 'There's too many colors in that sunset!'
7:03 pm: "It was nice to be alone, not to have a smile and look pleased; a relief to stare dejectedly out the window at the sheeting rain and let just a few tears escape. I wasn't in the mood to go on a real crying jag. I would save that for bedtime, when I would have to think about the coming morning." Yeah, you don't want to spend all your crying jags up right away. I'll admit, having grown up in a school with just over 100 students, I really don't have a lot of sympathy for her dread of a place with "a frightening total of only three hundred and fifty-seven" students.
7:09 pm. "I can do this, I lied to myself, feebly. No one was going to bite me." (14) Foreshadowing!
7:11 pm. "My Trigonometry teacher, Mr. Varner, who I would have hated anyway just because of the subject he taught, was the only one who made me stand in front of the class and introduce myself." (17) Whom, Bella. Whom. If you want to broody and emo, I'm not going to stop you, but at least do it using the right pronouns. It's about standards.
7:14 pm. "I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel." (19) All right, I did like the pairing of those two metaphors, and the disparity between them. Way to po-mo it, Bella.
7:19 pm. A tumultuous beginning to the Edward/Bella relationship: "I sat frozen in my seat, staring blankly after him. He was so mean. It wasn't fair. I began gathering up my things slowly, trying to block the anger that filled me, for fear my eyes would tear up." Note that Edward has, at this point, no interaction with Bella whatsoever beyond shooting her a dirty look.
7:22 pm. "At home, only two years of P.E. were required. Here, P.E. was mandatory all four years. Forks was literally my personal hell on earth." I don't think that word means what you think it means.
7:25 pm. "I had decided to read Wuthering Heights--the novel we were currently studying in English--yet again for the fun of it." Recall that this is the book where one character thinks fondly of partitions of his coffin breaking so that his rotting corpse can be fully intermingled with the body of his beloved. This choice probably tells us a lot about Bella.
7:31 pm. "His hair was dripping, wet, disheveled--even so, he looked like he'd just finished shooting a commercial for hair gel. His dazzling face was friendly, open, a slight smile on his flawless lips. But his eyes were careful." All right, I was joking before, but it's interesting how Bella's go-to metaphors for Edward's beauty all involves placing him in the context of some form of medium: a commercial, an ad, a movie, a sculpture.
7:41 pm. "That was the first night I dreamed of Edward Cullen." Dream sequence!
7:43 pm. "I watched him sometimes, unable to stop myself--from a distance, though, in the cafeteria or parking lot. I watched as his golden eyes grew perceptibly darker day by day. But in class I gave no more notice that he existed than he showed toward me. I was miserable. And the dreams continued." Ah, teenage love. So deep, and yet so hard to distinguish from stalking.
7:48 pm. "I wasn't interesting. And he was. Interesting... and brilliant... and mysterious... and perfect... and beautiful... and possibly able to lift full-sized vans with one hand." (79) Man, in high school, I always lost the girl to the guy who was possibly able to lift full-sized vans with one hand. Not because I couldn't lift vans with one hand; I could. But once I had, the possibility that I might or might not was gone. Girls like a bit of mystery.
7:53 pm. "I was planning to go to Seattle in the next few weeks, and, to be honest, I'm not sure if your truck can make it. ...can your truck make it there on one tank of gas? ...The wasting of finite resources is everyone's business." (83) Edward Cullen, ladies and gentlemen. Vampire, van-lifter, and eco-critic. (Although he does get some points for at least attempting to inject some humor.)
8:07 pm. "The bouquets of brilliant anemones undulated ceaselessly in the invisible current, twisted shells scurried about the edges, obscuring the crabs within them, starfish struck motionless to the rocks and each other, while one small black eel with white racing stripes wove through the bright green weeds, waiting for the sea to return." That's a rather convoluted sentence, but it's nice to Bella neither unhappy nor brooding over Edward.
"...I was completely absorbed, except for one small part of my mind that wondered what Edward was doing now, and trying to imagine what he would be saying if he were here with me." Oh. Never mind.
8:15 pm. P 130. Hmmm. A third of the way through the book, and we're already in our second dream sequence.
8:19 pm. P135. Bella finds a vampire-oriented website: Vampires A-Z. Which some enterprising fan has turned into a real website. Which is a little obsessive, but, well, one of my favorite blogs is of a guy who reviews 1990-era comic books, so I won't be too quick to criticize someone on that score. But I looked at the posts, and found this:
OMG! thats awesome, this means that Stephenie Meyer didn't just make up the concept of vampires, she just borrowed the facts! that means that vampires really could exist, and so could edward cullen! Yay, thats awesomeeee I am reading the book now andit is exactly the same, well almost
iloveyouedward xx love, twilights biggest fan
Put aside the fact that the site was created in 2006, and the book published in 2005. The important thing here is that someone believed Stephanie Meyer made up vampires. Brahm Stoker wrote Dracula 113 years ago. Vampire myths date back centuries and exist across cultures. The last movie in the Blade trilogy came out in 2004. But this person believes Meyer invented vampires. The mind, it boggles.
8:34 pm. Bella tries reading some Jane Austen: "My favorites were Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. I'd read the first most recently, so I started into Sense and Sensibility, only to remember after I began chapter three that the hero of the story happened to be named Edward. Angrily, I turned to Mansfield Park, but the hero of that piece was named Edmund, and that was just too close. Weren't there any other names available in the late eighteenth century?" I was going to make a snobby comment about Bella mixing up her centuries, but a bit of research suggests that some of Austen's books were at least started in the 18th century, though they were all published later. You win this round, Bella.
...All right, I'm going to call it quits for a night. I'm at page 150, which is actually a much quicker pace than I'd anticipated, but I want to drag this thing out to at least two days, so a break is in order. I have to admit, it's not as bad I thought it would be. It's eye-rollingly moody, and certainly not on the level of the literary works it keeps dropping, but it's not the litany of howlingly bad lines that I'd expected. If anything, it's disappointing in how utterly mundane it is. Why, at this point in a Sooky Stackhouse novel, she would have given at least a half dozen speeches about Bill's effect on her libido. Libido, of course, having just come up on her word-a-day calendar.
...Hmmm... maybe that's a potential candidate for the next marathon...
Later Days.
A Statement of Intent: Vampire Edition
First, an apology to anyone who is reading this and was there till the end of the English party last night. If you were there, you know why you're getting an apology.
To the matter at hand, we are quickly approaching another government-mandated holiday. And as you may remember, on a previous such occasion, I celebrated by doing a reading marathon. I have decided to do another such event this weekend, and rather than do the "pile of books" as last time, I have chosen a single tome: the first volume of Stephanie Myers' Twilight.
Oh yes.
So, starting at 7:00 pm tonight, tune in regularly for updates on what will, no doubt, be a new level of epic epicness. (Sadly, there will be no drinking this time around. Reason: see apology.)
To the matter at hand, we are quickly approaching another government-mandated holiday. And as you may remember, on a previous such occasion, I celebrated by doing a reading marathon. I have decided to do another such event this weekend, and rather than do the "pile of books" as last time, I have chosen a single tome: the first volume of Stephanie Myers' Twilight.
Oh yes.
So, starting at 7:00 pm tonight, tune in regularly for updates on what will, no doubt, be a new level of epic epicness. (Sadly, there will be no drinking this time around. Reason: see apology.)
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