The Hunger Games:Let Them Have Stakes!

(It’s been a while since I blogged, so cut me a break on the rambling if it’s even more pronounced than usual. )

Spoilers ahead.
I haven't been reading as much as I'd like. The Tofu Muchacha is the most voracious reader I have ever met, so my general lack of a "book in hand" is even more pronounced sometimes.

The thing is… I love to read. When I really get into a book, I plow through it, tackling every word, plot point, characterization. It really makes me completely useless for anything else until I’m done with it. Maybe that’s why I don’t read that often…

I become obsessive. I read spoilers and commentaries and reviews and speculations. The month after I read Harry Potter 6, I spent more time on Mugglenet than I did doing work. I read every single little essay and breakdown. Who was ‘RAB’? Was Dumbledore really dead? All that stuff.

What I’m trying to say is that when I sink myself into a really good book, it’s rarely just the book.

The Hunger Games trilogy has done this to me.

How did nobody tell me how awesome these books are?

The books are told from the perspective of a teen girl. Much like in Twilight or The Forest of Hands and Teeth (both discussed on this blog in the past, even in relation to each other). The main characters in these books are similar, but not the same. Bella Swan (Twilight) is this sort of gawky, completely self-unaware moron who goes through life being oblivious to everyone around her for no particular reason. Katniss Everdeen of the Hunger Games books is also unaware of other people’s perception of her, for the most part, but as opposed to dumb-old Bella, she’s also capable, self-possessed, and independent. In fact, while Bella needs rescuing from… well…  just about everything ever, Katniss is a total, certifiable badass. She provides for her family, bravely volunteers to essentially sacrifice herself on behalf of her sister, and she more than holds her own in not one, but two Hunger Games (not to mention the actual war zones of the third book.). Despite her self-assessment that she’s selfish, she repeatedly displays loyalty, morality, courage, and empathy. On the other hand, Bella’s full and complete motivation is some sickening, weirdo crush on Edward the Toothless, Shiny Vampire.

Like the other books, The Hunger Games also features a “love triangle”. Yes… it’s true.  Apparently this is some sort of requirement for entry into the Young Adult genre, so just like every “Young Adult” novel featuring a teen girl main character, there’s not just one guy vying for Katniss’ attention, but two. And just like every “Young Adult” novel, she’s at least somewhat oblivious to their attentions until they’re literally licking her face and actively trying to die for her. And just like every “Young Adult” novel, a fair amount of internal monologue from the main character is devoted to her hashing out her feelings for her various suitors.  The difference here is that while in Twilight Bella’s love triangle poses no mystery whatsoever (shit… on the back of the first book, she talks about being “Irrevocably in love” with Edward), and Mary from The Forest of Hands and Teeth sort of realizes that her love life is pretty inconsequential when the world is ending,  I had a difficult time figuring out what would happen with Katniss. And more importantly, there were many times over the course of the action where I was convinced she’d end up with neither of them and be happy with that, or that one of them would die, making her decision that much easier. Nobody thinks Edward or Jacob will ever die. In fact, Jacob can’t die, because he’s not a real character. He’s simply this sort of symbol of the life Bella is leaving behind when she forces Edward to kill her in one of the grossest scenes of devotion in any book ever.  

Katniss has moments where she could go either way (or neither way), and even better is that the moments are earned in the text. There really aren’t any convenient misunderstandings. There aren’t dumb roadblocks. She simply has two perfectly good, though flawed, men whom she loves, and she has a truly hard time deciding between them for legitimate reasons. Peeta is the love for the future. Gale is the love for the now. Her world largely defines her choices. |

It makes sense that she’d pick Gale… He saved her family. He’s more like her. He’s got shared life experiences. He’s a survivor in the most traditional sense, which makes him the perfect choice for a world where there’s no order. Where survival is necessary.

Then there’s Peeta. He saved her life numerous times. He sacrificed his leg, his sanity, everything to keep her safe. And ultimately, she ends up with him, not because of any of these things, but because he’s a beacon of light and positivity that balances out her nightmares. He’s the perfect choice for a world recovering from Chaos. It’s a decision that makes sense.

Suzanne Collins refused to create a choice without consequence. She created stakes to her choice, and by keeping both men alive, and largely whole she refused to give Katniss an easy choice either way. It’s easily the most tolerable teen love triangle I can recall. (Not that I liked the constant internal tug-o-war between the two. I could see and understand the dilemma from the start, and the perpetual back and forth was sort of beating a dead horse really.

But really, it’s the consequence that makes the story good. You get the feeling that if Katniss had chosen Gale, that Peeta would not have been okay. That he would have faded somehow, like Haymitch. Gale is a little stronger, but he makes it clear to Katniss that he can’t be there and watch her with Peeta. She knows she’ll lose one by chosing the other.

The Stakes Get Higher, or… you know… exist.

My biggest complaint about Twilight is that nothing happens, and when it does, it’ isn’t drastic or even.. like… “on screen” (so to speak). Nobody of import is ever really harmed, and because it’s established early on that any danger is by choice, there are no real stakes to anything they do. There aren’t really even any true antagonists. The wolves, sort of, but since Jacob is one, and they’d never really kill off any of them, they’re ultimately harmless. (Not to mention that the author sets up their whole mythology to be “protectors”). The Vulturi are certainly not nice, but that’s sort of like saying that the cops and judges in a judicial system are the judges. They may be dicks, but they’re just enforcing the established rules. It’s so fucking boring. There are hundreds of pages of speculation and conversations about what MIGHT happen, and then the climax is a 3 page sequence that ends in the bad guys just sort of going away after being convinced Renesme isn’t the droid they’re looking for or some shit.

It’s what makes The Forest of Hands and Teeth so good. Everyone can die. Most folks do die. The Zombies are a real danger. The people are forced into danger. It’s scary as hell. It’s a great series of books.

The stakes in The Hunger Games?

Everyone could fucking die. And for the most part, they do. Off the top of my head, here’s a short list of the important, and beloved characters who bite it in The Hunger Games:

Prim
Finnick
Peeta’s parents
Boggs
Darius
Lavinia
Cinna
Rue
Thresh
Mags
Wiress
Madge
Cato
Foxface
President Snow
President Coin
and about a million others.

There are fire bombs, horrible mutant killing machines, deadly waves, deadly earthquakes, beheadings, eviscerations, suicides, electrocutions, and dozens of other ways to die, kill, or both.

Collins establishes in the first 5 pages that these people live in a scary, dangerous, unfair world, and she sticks to her guns the whole way through. Even the ending, while undeniably positive, isn’t without reservation. I think it’s my favorite thing about the books. The books end with Katniss being released from custody after assassinating the new president of Panem (after the revolution). She’s on the verge of insanity. She’s been attempting to kill herself. She’s broken. Her mother isn’t by her side. Her sister is dead. She has no idea until later where Gale is. The world is broken. Even after she and Peeta finally sort of merge together for good, there’s a heavy heartedness to it. She ends the book wondering how she’ll explain The Hunger Games to her children, and how the world will be. It’s the ambiguity that draws me. After so many resolute moments throughout the book, I really loved how Katniss’ story ends on a positive, but certainly bittersweet note. She finds her true love for Peeta. They have children. They live in peace. Except in their memories that still haunt them. It’s really very sad, and very hopeful at the same time. That’s not an easy balance.

There’s an important theme in the 3^rd book. “Real or Not Real”, where Peeta, having been brainwashed, tries to make sense of the very confusing feelings he has, as his deceptions and his true feelings mixed around.

Really, all of the books play with this in an ever maturing way. I love how so much of the books deal with perception and not necessarily reality. It’s not important in the first book whether Peeta really loves Katniss, but it IS important to the viewers. It’s not important in the second book if Katniss was really trying to defy The Capitol with the berries, but President Snow knows that the people perceive it that way. The wedding doesn’t have to be real except to those watching it. In the final book, District 13 is viewed as a force for positive change, so it doesn’t really matter if they’re just as manipulative and unscrupulous as those they’re overthrowing.

In the end, after all of the confusion, and tracker jacker induced hallucinations, and lies, and amnesias, and everything else, the perception finally dies away, and we’re left with the lovely ending where Katniss, finally confirms for Peeta the one important thing for him in the world.

“You love me. Real or not real?”

“Real”.

It’s really a beautiful way to end a surprisingly well written, and exceedingly entertaining book series.

I have a friend who doesn’t finish books because she doesn’t want to let go of the characters or the world they live in. That’s how I felt about these books.

Read them. For real.

The Time Traveler's Wife or: The Chicken/ Egg Dilemma

There's a huge portion of The Time Traveler's Wife that deals with the idea of time being circular.

It's really the old Chicken or the Egg question without an answer. Did the egg appear magically or did the chicken?

This ties into my feelings about the book and the movie versions of The Time Traveler's Wife.

I really liked the book. I found it heartbreaking without it falling deep into sentimentality. The structure of it, alternating between perspectives from Henry's to Clare's worked really well, and helped us sympathize with both people, even if we related more to one or the other.. The internal struggles of each of the 2 main characters were real and legitmately trying, and truly at the center of the book. It's interesting... Both characters have some big problems. Henry is an alcoholic at points and a drug addict at points. He's reckless. He definitely has some, at least, nebulous morality. When we first meet him in Clare's “present”, he's still dating Ingrid (who later kills herself, at least in part because of him). Despite these issues, by putting the reader inside his head, and to see the struggles he goes through, and to see his awareness of his flaws... This makes us love him. It makes us root for Clare and him together. The writer shows a definite knack for putting us in the characters heads.

Also, there were some truly beautiful moments of story-telling. I wouldn't go so far as to call the writing outstanding, in terms of language, (Audrey Niffenegger sometimes delves a little too far into the realm of pulp), but the details of the story itself were interesting and emotional.

Henry, watching his mother get killed in some sort of never-ending loop, is heartbreaking enough, but then to add the notion that "if you looked closely" you'd see him literally EVERYWHERE within the scene as all of his "selves" from different points in time appeared to watch the accident take place and yet have no way to change it.... that's not only heartbreaking, but it's tragic.

The scene where Henry avenges Clare's date/assailant was extremely disturbing, but also sort of made you want to cheer....The scene perfectly capped by his return to the present day and Clare immediately knowing where he'd come from as he did something as simple as touching her scar.

There are many small moments and details like this that make the book very readable, very appealing, and very emotional.

And then you have the movie...

I soooo wanted to like the movie. Partly because I like Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams.. Partly because I really like the book, and partly because I'm a contrary sort of person, and just about everyone I talked to didn't like it.

Well... I didn't like it. I kind of hated it, actually. Maybe because I wanted to like it so much, but maybe also, because it was a bad adaptation of a very entertaining book.

It lost all of the heart. It played fast and loose with storylines. We never had a chance to invest into the relationship between Henry and Clare. Whereas in the book, we are thrown immediately into the story, and yet also have immediate investment, despite the likeable actors, I found myself not caring about these people. We don't see the growth of their relationship from Clare's perspective at all...

Henry learned about his ability during the time he time traveled at his mother's death instead of during his lovely adventure (as escorted by his older self) to the Field Museum. There's no mention of how he convinces Kendrick to help him (though, admittedly, I felt the “Kendrick, the geneticist has a kid with Downs” was a bit heavy-handed in the book.). There's no real foreshadowing with his death ,as opposed to in the book when Clare sees him right before... There's no real tension between Henry and Gomez. There's no Kimy. There's no Ingrid (or Celia), or the subsequent suicide of Ingrid that haunts Henry. There's no Ben or any of his Library colleagues. There was none of the fun, good times, between Clare and Henry when Clare is a teenager, throwing herself at him. No parties attended by Clare's friends. No Ouiga board session naming the mysterious "Henry". No harbinger of the end where Henry loses his feet to frostbite.

Most sadly, there was a revisionist ending where Henry meets Clare in the meadow like.. 4 years after his death, and then he sort of mumbles through telling her not to wait for him...and END.

This is total bullshit, because the entire book builds up to him dying, Clare finding a letter he wrote to her where he tells her not to wait, and how she's spent her whole life waiting for him, but then giving her this tiny carrot saying that one-day, when she's old, they'll meet again. BUT DON'T WAIT.

Then it cuts to her being an old lady, waiting by the window, and the book ends with their embrace. It's a truly beautiful end, and sad, and bittersweet, because it is clear that she did wait her whole life for one final meeting with him, and how waiting is all she knew how to do.... but also that you sense it was enough for her. You also think about how cruel it was for him to give her that glimmer of hope that they'd see each other again... He couldn't help it. He loved her and longed for her too, but she had to live another 50 years, waiting for that one day to come.

Did that appear in the movie? No.

Perhaps this book was doomed to fail as a movie for the same reason so many of Stephen King's books haven't adapted well... The things that make us love the characters are all internal. The writers create these rich and juicy and joyful and lustful inner voices of these people. How in the hell does a film maker/screen writer convey these voices in a traditionally presented film? They don't. Instead they make bland and disappointing crap like The Time Traveler's Wife.

I mentioned at the start of this blog that the book plays with the Chicken/Egg question, and that it somehow related to my own experiences with the movie and the book.

While I hated the movie, if it wasn't for the movie's trailer, I wouldn't have read the book. And I wonder if I would hate the movie as much if I hadn't read the book. The experiences of each colors the experiences of the other, but in which order?

Every one of the things the movie lacked were things I really felt gave the book texture. I get that there's not really a way to get every detail from a 540 page book into a 95 minute movie, but maybe that tells us that either they should have taken the chance that the audience may actually want to like the movie, and make it longer...or, crazy idea, let the book stand alone.

I Saw "Eclipse" and it Dawned on Me.

Quote of the day:
Beefy Muchacho: "I'm writing a blog about Eclipse"
Tofu Muchacha: "Is that the movie we just saw?"

What is it about vampires that compels us to write novels and shoot movies and sing songs about them?

When you think of vampire what do you think about? I think of blood. I think of seduction. I think of sex. I think of death. The great vampire stories are those that interweave the duality of vampires NEEDING the blood that keeps us alive to keep them dead. The stories that bring the characters to the knife’s edge between life and death and play with the eroticism that can only be found right on the tip of that blade. Vlad the Impaler became a vampire to avenge the death of his one true love. Elizabeth Bathory bathed in the blood of virgins to give the illusion of her own purity. It’s all about sex and blood, the givers of life. And the lack of blood and sex, the creators of death. Vampires are the literature’s deadest reminders of lifes' animal urges, and that’s what makes us read on.

And then came, charging into the lexicon, the Twilight Saga. So immensely popular. So pervasively in our faces at all times. I read all 4 books at once, in a straight line, and I was entertained. And I liked them. And I watched the first movie. And I liked it.

And then, perhaps incongruously, I thought.. “Wow… I never want to hear anything about these stories ever again.”

So, why did I suddenly get bored with something that should be decidedly not-boring?

Because Stephenie Meyer created the first book about vampires where their teeth were made of putty. She created these vampires with dazzlingly sparkling skin made of marble and eyes of amber, but with no life at all. She created stories told from the perspective at the one person whose point of view makes the vampires uninteresting. There’s no conflict or fear in Bella Swan. Not with the vampires, at least. She finds out that Edward is a vampire and instead of recoiling against her desires and finding the conflict there, she runs straight toward them. Instead of experiencing conflict between her disgust with the very nature of what it means to be a vampire and her urges for Edward, she just is all “yeah.. this is fucking awesome.”

The possible taboos of being violated by these two long pointy teeth and finding it both repulsive and pleasurable can’t be explored when the protagonist is essentially fucking begging for it from the first 100 pages of book number one.

And why shouldn’t she be? Edward is perfect. He’s in a clan of the only vampires in the world who can withstand the smell of human blood. He is the only 17 year old guy who, when faced with an adoring girlfriend that wants him to ravage her, is all “Aaaaactually…let’s wait until we’re married.” He’s got perfect skin, perfect ethics, perfect memory. He’s a genius. He writes her music. And despite what he claims, he doesn’t ever want to bite the girl and suck her blood.

Why would Bella want anything OTHER than being just like them. They don’t stink of death or die in the sunlight or dislike garlic. They turn into vampires and become creatures who are indestructible (except by another vampire or werewolf…don’t even get me started on the werewolves…), perfectly intelligent, kind, NOT thirsting for blood, immortal, and oh..did I mention also the physical embodiments of perfection. This happens after they get bitten.

Hell… I want to be THAT.

How fucking boring does it get?

Stephenie Meyer spends hundreds of pages building up to battles and confrontations. Thousands of words telling us how desperately all of these natural dead killers want Bella to join them in the ranks of the soul-free. Millions of breaths discussing how each of twenty five characters more powerful and interesting than her will break their own necks to defend her and her precious, clumsy honor.

Then…. When the time comes to see these battles and confrontations, Meyer keeps the action far, far away. In Eclipse, they spend all of this energy training and preparing for the battle with the Newborn Vampire (a concept that is ACTUALLY interesting), and when the battle finally comes, we hear about it like it’s on the fucking radio, while we sit with boring ass Bella and perfect Edward (whose family is so awesome they all put their lives on the line to protect his dumbass girlfriend who is all but throwing her neck at his teeth so she can be a vampire anyway. Why are they even fucking bothering? And if they are going to bother, why can’t Stephenie Meyer throw us a bone and show Emmett (The purported beast of a vampire) ripping the arms off a newborn. Or Jasper (easily the most compelling character in the entire series, simply because he actually has seen some shit go down) show that he’s a badass warrior for once instead of being this mental invalid because he actually wants and has urges for human blood… as is in his nature. Instead to hear about it all from a field far away from the action, where no danger exists.

It just makes me want to throw the book against the wall. It makes me want to walk out of the movie.

I just don’t understand it.

I was talking about this with The Tofu Muchacha on the way home from the movie, and she contends that the books aren’t about the blood and the sex on purpose. It’s about the romance of the relationship between Bella and Edward. Well… the 17 year-old girl’s idea of romance, where the ideal is a shining, living statue of their own father figures, wrapped up in a tight-abbed little ball to pant at their doorsteps and watch them sleep, and tell them that they know what’s best for her, and have neutered little fights about here while she sleeps in their cumulative arms. It’s gross and weird, but in that light.. the lack of sex is actually comforting, because while the idea of holding hands and being protected by a father-boyfriend is nice, the idea of sex with him is icky and weird.

But honestly, if Meyer had pushed that a little more and confused Bella all to hell by having her sleep with her daddy-boyfriend… maybe the whole thing would have been more interesting. That’s the kind of fucked up, twisted sexual confusion that a good vampire story might have. But no…

Anyway… I’d been having a hard time putting my finger on exactly why I went from liking it to disliking it, and it’s because it doesn’t stick with me. There’s no real conflict. It’s told from the perspective of the least interesting and least self-possessed character. And I enjoyed the story… It’s just the completely bloodless telling that turns me off. I want to be titillated and grossed out and offended by a vampire story.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m not a psycho. I love a good biography. I like a really good adventure novel. I mysteries and zombie books and books of weight… it all depends on my mood. It’s just that when I’m in the mood for a vampire story, I don’t want to be bamboozled into reading a book about 2 angsty teens…

The most recent episode of True Blood ends with 2 vampires having violent sex born out of hatred and weird familial ties, and in his hate the male vampire literally twists the female vampire’s head clean around as her mouth drips with blood. It’s disgusting and weird and brutal and not at all tender in any way… And it was kind of awesome, because it was the kind of taboo that only an immortal couple of vampires can explore.

If only Edward had popped off Bella’s head like a dandelion in a fit of uncontrolled passion.

(Except not Shitty)

As you all know, I've been on a bit of a "post-apocalyptic/ zombie" kick of late when it comes to my book reading. This is, in no small part, the influence of the Tofu Muchacha who has possibly the darkest taste in stories of anyone other than my dad. I asked her for a recommendation when I finished Go Go Girls of the Apocalypse. She immediately rattled off about 15 books within the post-apocalypic/zombie genres. One of the books that stood out most to me was The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan. I remember her reading it when we were in Michigan, and commenting repeatedly how much she liked it.

The book is considered "Young Adult" fiction, which sort of made me hesitant to read it... I mean, I'm generally at such a sophisticated reading level that I feared "young adult" would be too boring... Kidding.... I really just typically like more detailed descriptions of boobs and drug use. What made me even more hesitant was that the book is about a 17 year old girl. Oh... and there's supernatural elements AND a forbidden romance AND a love triangle. Now... call me crazy, but when I hear "Young Adult fiction about a teen aged girl, where there are both elements of the supernatural and forbidden romance with love triangles".... I think of mother fucking Twilight.

Well... I read Twilight. I read it based on less trustworthy recommendation than that of The Tofu Muchacha. You can read my full thoughts on Twilight HERE. (Interestingly, I think my overall opinion of Twilight has degraded significantly since I wrote that.) So, based on the recommendation alone, I decided to read it The Forest of Hands and Teeth.

I'm glad I did. I really enjoyed it... In fact, I enjoyed it for succeeding in many of the areas where Twilight failed. Allow me to discuss...

The Writing...

Carrie Ryan does an excellent job of writing the whole book from the first person perpective of her heroine, Mary, without making her seem like a completely self-involved idiot. On the other hand, Stephenie Meyer also writes her books from the first person perspective of her heroine, Bella Swan, and utterly fails to make her even remotely likeable. The structure of her prose is graceful... intricately weaving the internal monologue of Mary with the first person observations about the factual events going on. I think my favorite thing about the writing is that while the events in the story are fairly repetitive, the descriptions never get stale. It's really an interesting read. Meyer fails to create any sort of variance in her descriptors. In fact, she does the opposite of Ms. Ryan. She has these incredibly varied scenarios, and yet describes them all using the exact same 20 words. (if I have to read about Edward's diamondy skin again...) . The biggest strength of Carrie Ryan's writing is her understanding of stakes. It's so important, in a good thriller, for the stakes to be high throughout, and in The Forest of Hands and Teeth, the threat of death is literally present from the start. I could read The Forest of Hands and Teeth again... I don't know if I could get through Twilight a second time.

The Main Character...

I sort of alluded to this already, but god......damnit do I hate Bella Swan. She's annoying, self-involved, and perpetually in peril. Stephenie Meyer managed to create a book series that is hugely popular with teen girls, with a teen girl as the main character, while making her the most forgettable and unlikable character in the whole series. I'm not one for causes, really, but when I hear about feminists bemoaning how awful a role model Bella Swan is, I find it 100% impossible to disagree. She's helpess, irritating, irredeemably boy-crazy, and makes one insanely bad choice after another.

Carrie Ryan's Mary isn't all that much different, on the surface, than Bella. She has family problems. She analyzes and analyzes and analyzes literally everything that passes through her head. She has a crush on a dude. She's got a legion of the undead wanting to eat her at all fucking times... Still, despite all of those similarities, she's more interesting in the first 6 pages than Bella is in her entire damned saga. She becomes an athiest. She has to deal with her possible fault in her mother's death. She finds herself torn between her loyalty to her best friend and her love for Travis. She's got complexity. She's not always likable, but she's always relate able. Also, it likely doesn't hurt that when Mary is in trouble that she actually does something about it (like decapitate some effing zombies) as opposed to Bella, who lets Edward and Jacob do all of her fighting for her.

Villains...

I acknowledge that vampires are effing awesome. I further acknowledge that the Volturi are especially effing awesome. Awesome Ancient Vampires notwithstanding, they are no match for The Unconsecrated. The Unconsecrated is what the characters in The Forest of Hands and Teeth have given the zombies. They're not as cool as vampires who drive fast cars and engage in witty repartee, but they will actually kill someone, which Stephenie Meyer seems to avoid a lot for a book about fucking VAMPIRES. That's always been my biggest problem with Twilight... the bad guys never do anything bad. In The Forest of Hands and Teeth, the Unconsecrated kill hundreds of people. They cause the deaths of the main character's mother, father, sister-in-law, and beloved. They're bad. They have no feelings. They only thirst. It's fucking terrifying. They fight and claw and push until they get what they want or literally fall apart and degrade to the point where they physically can't continue. As long as their brain is connected they never stop. That's a scary villain.

The Romances...

I said it during my review of Twilight that I thought the love of Bella and Edward was fucking creepy. They went from meeting to madly "irrevocably" in love in the span of 4 pages. It's not romantic that way. It's weird and obsessive and gross. The love of Mary and Travis in The Forest of Hands and Teeth isn't completely different... Mary is willing to give up everything she knows to be with Travis. Even with that similarity, the realism is much, much greater. I love the complications that Carrie Ryan imposes... There are familial loyalties. There are sacrifices of safety and comfort and the feelings of best friends. Every decision Mary makes is weighted with the knowledge that it effects someone she cares about. There's a lot of uncertainty with their love. It may not be as blazingly, crushingly romantic as Twilight, but it has texture to it. It's compelling because you don't know from the first page how it'll end. (Which I may suggest is what is compelling about love in general.) I also really like that Mary doesn't completely lose herself in her romance with Travis. In the end, she's still acting heroically on her own.

All of this is not to say that the book is perfect. There are places where the meandering mind of Mary gets a little maudlin. The story is unfocused in places. The payoff of reaching The Ocean comes too quickly and couldn't possibly live up to the thousand or so references that serve as build-up. The secondary characters are barely developed and in some ways completely inconsequential. It bears more than a passing resemblance to the Shamalyan movie The Village.

Still... I'd read it again, and I'm excited to read the sequel, which came out last month. The book perfectly segued into the likely sequel, and the scope of the first book was small enough, and the frame of reference of Mary was so limited that there are still many books of discoveries she can make.

A Delightful Romp Through the End of the World

The third book in my book review trilogy, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse by Victor Gischler, was exceptionally enjoyable and yet also in some tiny way a little disappointing. I went in to this book with higher expectations after the Tofu Muchacha highly recommended it to my dad (by giving it to him for Christmas), and then in turn my dad recommended it to me. It definitely didn't disappoint.

It's a really quick read, and that's primarily because the pacing is like lightning. There's no long rumination on the nature of life, or the nature of some tree, or the nature of nature.... Gischler doesn't settle on anything for more than a few sentences, and this definitely lends to a sort of cinematic quality that seems to be cultivated throughout. More on that quality later.

The characters are broadly drawn and mostly straightforward. The protagonist, Mortimer Tate, has basically ridden out a nuclear apocalypse in a cave in the mountains of Tennessee, largely because he was doing everything he could to avoid finalizing the pending divorce with his wife Ann. He's smart and resourceful, but certainly not exceptional. He finds allies in convenient and coincidental ways. He finds himself in scrapes quickly and gets out of them just as quickly. He faces adversity, but always seems to find himself just this side of lucky.

The scrapes Mortimer finds himself in are all escaped just slightly too easily. If you analyze all of the different predicaments he gets into, and all of the ways he seems to just happen his way out of them. Whether it's being held prisoner in a forgotten mental hospital for women (where he's being held to provide his "seed", blatantly robbing from both The Odyssey and Arthurian legend.), or he's tied to a post and witnessing a guy get eaten limb by limb, and yet somehow getting free.

The people he meets are juuuuust slightly too archetypal. You have the self-glossed "Buffalo Bill" who dresses like a cowboy. Mortimer hypothesizes this is due to people's innate need to have identity, and how the nuclear disaster robbed people of their classical identities. There's the brutish "Kyle" who Mortimer simply knows as "The Beast" for their entire encounter. His entire character is essentially there to be a horrible violent rapist.

One particularly interesting thing about the characters, to me, is that the women are much, much more complex. It's funny, after reading Dan Brown's faux-Feminism, to read a book that on it's surface is far more chauvanistic, but in actuality is far more empowering. The 2 strongest characters in the book are Sheila, the teen-aged sex-slave of Kevin, who after his death becomes a prostitute, and Ann, the ex-wife of Mortimer who also becomes a prostitute after the Armageddon, who flat out declines his assistance when they're finally re-united. It's the secret good writing of Gischler that places these women in traditional roles of subservience and yet finds ways to make them empowered. Sheila's journey is especially satisfying.

That's about as deep as I'm comfortable getting with it... I think the book can be compared pretty aptly with movies like Pirates of the Caribbean. Nothing deep at all, and wildly funny and exciting and sexy, but also probably not up to intense scrutiny.

It's difficult to pin down exactly what makes the book so satisfying...It's not the characters, which are conventions or variations on conventions. It's not the scenarios which are all a little too similar to others we've read. I really think it's the language and style and economy. The language has a familiarity to it that edges around the colloquial almost constantly, but it also makes it completely accessible. The dialogue especially is so funny and clever. There's this great exchange between these two reluctant female cannibals that made me laugh out loud. When I say "economy", I mean that where Dan Brown will use 2 pages to explain something that may really only need 2 paragraphs, Victor Gischler uses 2 sentences and makes them suffice nicely.

I have barely discussed at all the creative and interesting future that Gischler invents. A world of cannibals and strip clubs and budding economic powers and in-fighting and martial law. It's so dense and detailed, I can't possibly do it justice, but it almost makes the book worth the read simply as an interesting "what-if".

I mentioned earlier that I found the book greatly enjoyable, but also a little disappointing. You know how almost every movie ever made that's based on a book gets the classic "it's not as good as the book" comments? Well, this book actually feels like the opposite for me. It's disappointing only because I think it would make a better movie than book, and from what I can find, there's nothing in the works. It's an amazingly visual book with potential to provide great "ruined skylines" and these seedy Go-Go clubs and blimps and trains moved by giant muscled freaks. The dialogue is truly funny and sharp. Almost like a play. The book is divided episodically, and can easily be broken down into scenes.

For the fun of it, here's my main cast:
Mortimer Tate played by Mark Ruffalo
Buffalo Bill played by Viggo Mortensen
Sheila played by Amanda Seyfried (Sheila is described as being only 16 or 17, but the movie would be a definite Hard "R", so that age would likely have to be adjusted to like... 20)
Ann played by Isla Fisher
Joey Armageddon played by Paul Giamatti
The Red Czar played by Stanley Tucci

It's easily in the top 2 books I would line up to see as a movie (along with The Wolf's Hour by Robert McCammon). I think the movie would actually be able to improve on the book, and the book is really great. I hope they do it.

Dan Brown is a Hack (and other observations)

Dear Dan Brown-

Please, for the love of all that is holy, hire a writing coach. Hire a ghost writer. Hell... Hire a third grader. Anybody. Please. I just read your newest book The Lost Symbol, and let me tell you... I hate you. You make me sad. You have stolen hours upon hours of my time. You've lured me in with your interesting secret clubs and weirdo religious artifactual do-wah (they may not be words, but they should be), and then you pull the tapestry out from under me. Well fuck you Dan Brown. Take a writing lesson.

Sincerely,
The Beefy Muchacho

So many things to say about The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's most recent addition to the Robert Langdon "Histo-Adventure" lexicon. Let's start with why I read it to begin with...

I readily admit to really enjoying The DaVinci Code. I never exactly thought it was this immense work of genius (I mean... it IS beloved by the American public, afterall... How truly good could it be?), but it was entertaining. Then I read the lesser known Angels and Demons, and actually actively LIKED that one. Again... it's not a candidate for the National Book Award, but it was really enjoyable and I'm a sucker for weird Catholic mythos. So yeah... I was down with The Lost Symbol. And Brown sure as hell had plenty of time to make it good. He'd been working on it since 2004... God damnit did he fuck it up.

Here're the problems:

1) The formula is far too formulaic.

The plot is almost literally identical to the other two books. I understand that he's basically working on a formula, not much different from an episode of CSI (I bet they figure out who the killer is right around minute 48), but jeez man... The writers of CSI need the formula to churn out an hour a week for 10 years. What's your excuse? Langdon gets roped into some piece of intrigue under the premise that he's some genius symbol expert. Langdon ends up alienating the law enforcement, who seem to be working against them, but really are on the same side. Langdon joins forces with an attractive and exceptional woman of some kind, in this case a Doctor of Noetic Science (don't even fucking ask...), who has a personal and emotional connection with a victim of the bad guy. Oh... And the bad guy is some loony religious zealot who has a predilection for self-mutilation in some way.

Too familiar. Too cookie cutter. Even if it IS a cookie cutter to his own work, it's still lazy.

2) The ticks are too ticky.

Dan Brown's writing has more ticks than a fucking field guide to the Insects of Pennsylvania. There's something overly repetitive on every page. It's not like Cormac McCarthy, who cultivates a rhythm that some people would call repetitive. For McCarthy it's a choice. For Dan Brown it's hackery.

The New York Times liked the book a lot more than I did, but they did point to (as one of their lone pieces of criticism) something I'd also noticed... At different points in the book, it seems that nearly every other piece of dialogue starts with a variation on "What in the hell...".

When I was in the 2nd grade, I wrote a story called "Short Duckie Blue". I remember using the phrase "Short Duckie Blue was short" and I remember the teacher (Mrs. Roberts) telling me that I should be more creative. It seems that Mr. Brown missed that lesson from the 2nd grade. It's all kinds of "What in the hell"s and "Who in the hell"s and "Why in the hell"s, and it gets old after about 10 pages... too bad there are 440 more. And you know...that's just one example. How about the number of chapters where something is revealed to a character but not to the readers that CHANGES EVERYTHING? How about a character describing another in the exact same way every time? How about every lecture scene, every phone call, every new clue uncovered fitting into the same exact pattern. How often can Robert Langdon's primary trait be incredulity?

It's not just the tired dialogue. It's the characters too... Brown seems to have this obsession with religious zealotry in his villains, but also he obviously wants to fuck them, and badly. Honestly, if he wasn't such a weird misogynist on top of being clearly a little too in love with the physical traits of his characters, it wouldn't be so bad. He's got these man-crushes on his male characters while at the same time over-sexualizing his female characters in a much grittier, grosser way. Brown spends a good amount of his books talking about how strong these women are, but then being amazingly quick to put them in times of peril that only Robert THE MAN Langdon could get them out of... forgetting, of course, that Langdon is essentially giant pussy most of the time.

Oh, and also I could definitely have done without a dozen long descriptions of how ripped the bad guy is, and how giant his junk is, and how the guy spent all this time quenching his insatiable sexual thirsts. If it were in any way relevant to the plot, that'd be one thing, but it's just superfluous nonsense.

I think my least favorite portions of the book are the flashbacks to Langdon when he's teaching. Maybe the students at Harvard are actually mentally retarded, but I've never heard of students get so intensely interested over whatever random theory or notion their professor discusses. It's all "They leaned foward in their seats. You could hear a pin drop" and "Their eyes went wide. Langdon knew he had them!". It's so unbelievable that it takes me right out of the story. I just keep thinking these Harvard students are far too easily moved to awe.

3) Is this a lecture or an adventure?

I liked the same things about The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons that everyone else did. It is really interesting to read about all of these true historical facts about these familiar landmarks and pieces of art. It's fun to postulate the conspiracies of Bernini or DaVinci. It's interesting to hear about these real organizations and locations and get these inside takes. Dan Brown's strength is his incredibly deep research, and the way he interweaves (however flimsily) the facts of his research into a plot. The Lost Symbol had all kinds of potential too. It'd be really interesting to hear about the secrets behind the architecture and art of Washington D.C.... I suspect Dan Brown agreed, which is why he started writing it. Then something unfortunate happened. He got allllmost done with his book and discovered there wasn't really all that much applicable stuff for him to delve into. There isn't a thousand years of religious art and intrigue. There aren't four-thousand year old buildings to find layered in conspiracy and cover-up. Ultimately the Masons aren't all that interesting. So what does Brown do?

He finishes the plot about a hundred pages before he finishes the book. He runs out of Masonic secrets to divulge. He runs out of Washington DC architecture to break-down. So instead of doing the wise thing and ending the book when the villain is beaten (oh... uh... Spoiler Alert), he has Langdon win the day and then he lectures philosophically about the nature of the human brain and Noetics (that's some effing crazy shit). . And the worst part is that the payoff... the big Mason Secret he's built up to for hundreds of pages. This thing that supposedly will endow the bad dude with incredible power... It's fucking LAME. It's so, so lame. I invested all of this time thinking there'd be some awesome payoff, but there wasn't. It was just a lame, silly thing.

This is the thing that pissed me off the most. I could have handled the bad writing, and the weird sexual obsessiveness, and the strangely mottled dialogue if the payoff had been cool. But it wasn't. And then, instead of sucker-punching us all and running like a decent asshole would do, he rubs salt in the wound by talking on and on and on (much like this review) about shit that I don't care about. If I want to know more about Noetics I would look it up. If I wanted to know what Kryptos says, I'll go to Langley and stare at it. Tell me a story or give me a lecture, but make a choice, and don't trick me into thinking I'm getting a story when the story is fucking over.

You know what makes me saddest? There is potential here. I would love to read an adventure story about the secret holdings of the Smithsonian. That would be awesome.

Instead I was subjected to a dumb story about a dumbass, unlucky, bumbling, indignant douchebag named Robert Langdon, who despite his having saved the world (to some degree or other) 2 times previously, seems to forget everything he's learned about himself the moment he returns to Harvard.

Beefy Muchacho's Book Club

Long time, huh? Yeah... that's what happens when all of my writing opportunities have been either severely limited by work changes (yes... I've occasionally blogged from work) or just the general lack of available free time. Once again I've overextended myself in my hobby time. In the last 2 months I've been deeply involved in 3 different theatre productions. I sang in a Valentine's Day Weekend musical revue, I've done the fight choreography for a production of The Rainmaker, and most time consumingly, I've been performing in a production of Comic Potential at The Drama Workshop in Cincinnati. Comic Potential has been an interesting experience... It's not a play that I particularly like (I was originally Stage Managing the show, but after an actor dropped out I was asked to step in). More strangely, it's the second time I've performed the exact same roles in this fairly obscure British play. Truth be told, I'm working on it to be able to spend time with the Tofu Muchacha (she's playing the lead, and is absolutely awesome.)

The biggest side benefit of doing this show has been that I've had the opportunity to do a great bit more reading than I typically get a chance to do... Over the course of this production I've read 3 books (after The Road). They were all read-able, but definitely of varying quality and structure.

The Tofu Muchacha has gotten me into reading post-apocalypic writing. Well, that and zombies. In a way, they go hand-in-hand... The best zombie books rely on absolute desperation and the removal of humanity. Reducing civilization to its deepest, darkest base. Same goes for post-apocalypse stories. Two of the three books I read fall into these categories, and they were certainly the class of the lot.


I started with World War Z written by Max Brooks. As an introduction into the world of Post-Apocalyptic zombie books World War Z is probably a blessing and a curse... It's an unbelievably detailed, creatively written, and meticulously compiled work. I say "compiled" because Max Brooks writes the whole book as a series of interviews with people who survived the zombie plague that wiped out over half of the world's population.

It's an excellent book, though not the Zombie carnage fest you'd expect from a Zombie book. Sure... there are animated corpses, epic battles between zombies and the army, swarms of the undead roaming the ocean floor, and the human survivors resorting to cannibalism, and all of the vivid horrors you expect from a book featuring the undead as its main character. But really, this book isn't about zombies at all. First, the zombies rarely make a direct appearance, even in the interviews. They're discussed in the abstract. Most of the interviewees witnessed the zombies directly in some way or another, but the stories they tell are rarely about their first-hand experiences dealing with the undead. More often it's about dealing with the other humans dealing with them. The account that sticks with me the most was that of a girl from Wisconsin who was a teenager when the "Great Panic" started. She and her family took to their RV packed with supplies and headed North to where the zombies would just freeze. That I recall, they barely encounter a single actual zombie on their travels, but it details the psychological destruction of her peaceful, loving family. The food runs out. The parents who she'd never seen raise their voices at each other start to call each other terrible names. The mother questions her husband's masculinity. The husband questions his wife's fidelity. They do what they have to do to save their daughter, possibly damning themselves in the process. It's an incredibly moving sequence in the book that doesn't feature a zombie at all.

The zombies themselves are a metaphor. They're the nuclear war in this particular post-apocalypse "What-if". They suppose what happens when the end of the world doesn't involve giant explosions or radiation poisoning, but is completely human-made. The thing about post-Nuclear scenarios is that there was a bomb. A great, wrenching, physical change. This book takes that away, but still leaves the desperation and wanton dehumanization.

It's interesting that Brooks removes the best thing about the zombie genre, the suspense and terror and the precariousness of the sitatuation, but succeeds in creating a compelling, addictive novel anyway. I realized it wasn't a traditional horror novel when I figured out that there was no danger. The book starts 10 years after the war ends. The writer is interviewing people who survived. They talk about death and nightmarish scenarios from the safety of the present. Because there's no danger, there's a freedom to take the time to ask any question and look at all of the potential answers.

I said at the beginning that reading this book as my first foray into the zombie genre was a blessing and the curse... I think I've made it clear why I felt it was a blessing. Why is it a curse? I think it would be difficult to truly reach these heights again.

Read it. For serious.

(soon, Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol.... I don't want to give anything away, so I'll just say that it was the biggest pile of shit I've read in a long time. Stay tuned.)

The Road; A Clumsy and Meandering Review.

This is sort of embarrassing to admit, but I have never had a library card as an adult. I had some late fees when I was a kid, and whatever amount I owed seemed huge at the time (probably like 9 dollars or something). It never stopped me from reading. I've read a lot over the years. It also made reading pretty expensive, because almost without fail I'd end up buying the books I had heard about, or saw laying around. Getting me near a book store was (and still is) dangerous.

Among the many, many other factors that make the Tofu Muchacha so awesome, she has been a good influence on me in regards to my aversion to the library. She usually has at least 3 or 4 books out at a time, and she seems to plow through them prodigiously.

So I finally opened up a big-boy library card. It's actually pretty awesome now. They have a drive-up window! I don't even have to leave my car to pick up the FREE books. I know!!

Anyway, the first two books I picked up were “World War Z”, which is about the Zombie Wars and whatnot, and the other is “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. I was inspired to pick up The Road by the trailers I saw for the movie. I thought it looked really interesting and kinda desolate and whatnot, and The T.M. Recommended that I read the book, as she'd really really liked it.

One of the best things about reading a library book is that it has a history itself. It's been read by dozens of other people, or even more in some cases, and there are old dog-ears and coffee stains and quotes underlined. I love that. It shows that someone else had traveled that exact path you're on. It's very appealing. And with The Road, I found this even more appealing than usual. There was one particular past reader who found more than a few noteworthy passages. Even going so far as to write in the margin on an occasion or two. I almost looked forward to the next selected passage to see what my predecessor found important. I didn't always agree, and that was even better... It was like a debate with a stranger without all of the annoying fighting. Why did this person underline the word “red”? Was it because colors aside from gray are so rarely mentioned? Was it because blood becomes such a prevalent symbol of pending death? Not sure, but even when an opinion wasn't obvious, it often raised questions, and that's not something you can get out of a book bought new.

I've heard from several people that they started, but couldn't get into the book. The Road is not written conventionally, with long and looping paragraphs of prose. Much like the wasteland setting offered up in the book, the voice of the author here is portrayed as bleak and halting. There's a feeling of anxiety and urgency conveyed by the haste of each sentence. Sometimes only a word or two. There's hardly any time wasted on punctuation. Not a quotation mark or question mark in the whole book that I recall. The dialogue mostly just simply separated from the text as a new paragraph. There's a lilt to the prose that starts to make a rhythmic sense, and the reader can build up quite the head of steam. It's an interesting momentum too, as so much of the important moments happen suddenly. Sometimes I'd be 3 or 4 sentences past before I realized something new had happened. Suddenly the tone would change and I'd have to go back and carefully re-read to make sure I caught what I'd missed.

There were certain motifs that I really loved for the emotions and imagery they evoked for me. The un-ending gray (as mentioned before). Whether it was the burned trees, or the never ceasing shower of ash. I especially loved it when the snow was tainted with the ash and came down gray. There have been hundreds of books and poems written about the purity of snow, and how the clean, perfect white of a fresh snow is symbolic of the world renewing. Not in The Road. Here, even the snow is already tainted by the burning world, even before it touches the ground. The relentlessness of the gray really punctuates those moments when color "bleeds" in. It emphasizes the importance of each of those moments.

I read a review (one of my favorite things to do is to read something or see something and then to see what other people have to say about it) where they mention how the book is "harrowing" but saved by the occasional glimmer of hope. I totally agree with this assessment. I really liked how despite the horrible trials these two people are going through, the father will still allow for moments of joy. Tiny breaks from the pain. A few of these come to mind especially... the swim in the waterfall. The drinking of the old can of Coke. The enjoyment of something so simple as morel mushrooms.

Another thing I really liked was the establishment of the Son as the secret hero in the story. Though almost the entire book is told from the point of view of the father, the son consistently is the voice of morality, and of conscience. The only points in the book where there is friction between the father and son come when the father's humanity is compromised in some way... When he leaves the lost child on the road.... when he strips the thief of all of his belongings. The times when the father becomes most cruel or cold... those are the times when the relations between the two travelers become most strained. I really like the feeling that the only thing keeping the man from giving up completely, or from going to the other side is his absolute, and unquestioning devotion to his son. It really makes the absence of the mother even more glaring...and we are shown fairly early on where she is... She gave up on them. It makes the relationship between the father and son to be even more endearing.

This blog is starting to have the same glowing tone that my Spring Awakening blog had, so let me break the admiration up a little by discussing my biggest issues with The Road...

[ Spoilers Ahead ]

1) The ending is a little too neatly tied. I realize that once the father died, the primary voice of the narrative died with him. The son is a true secondary character for the first 220 pages, only being viewed from the perspective of the father, and only speaking when voiced in conversation. When the father dies, the narration/ voice of the book immediately shifts to the son's perspective, which is interesting as a writing choice, but makes for less interesting content. The kid does have a depth that surpasses his age, but nothing of the perspective of the “pre whatever” that the father does. The author's solution to this is to essentially end the book almost right away. The father's body isn't even cold when the son is met by a “family”. It seems a little too fortuitous. Or you know... maybe it's not at all. The new people come across as being the “good guys” but that's certainly not fleshed out. There's definitely an ambiguity to it, which is the only thing that saves the ending for me. That possibility that the father and son were stalked by these new people, who waited for the father to die to swoop in for some nefarious purpose.

2) The father's mystery illness is inconsistently established. There's one or two early mentions of him coughing blood, and then there is probably a hundred pages or more when it doesn't come up at all. Then suddenly he's coughing blood and dying quickly, and then just as suddenly he's dead. To be honest, I'd forgotten the first bloody cough until the second one happened. Seems like, if that's the ultimate downfall of the man, it would be more consistently mentioned.

3) Some of the encounters with other people seemed rushed. The author spends pages describing what kind of foods and supplies the father and son come across on those rare occasions, but when the final encounter occurs where the father gets shot with an arrow, that whole sequence takes less time than the time it took for the author to describe the uncovering of the bunker.

4) There are a couple of points where the text goes a little more philosophical, and the thesis is a little muddy. The Old Man is a really interesting character, because he's the first that truly discusses God's place in the disaster. It's refreshing to read a character that sort of mirrors my own feelings about God's hand in the natural disasters that have shaped our world. People are quick to give God the credit when great things happen, but what about when the majority of humanity is killed off in some undetailed disaster? I appreciate that the Old Man will ask those questions, but I think that, while ambiguity is certainly understandable, it should be more evident that the author himself has a real solid grasp on his own stance. There were some points where it seemed that the McCarthy was using the book to sort of work it out for himself. It tended to wander in those places.

The thing is... these are quibbles mostly, and almost certainly each a very specific choice by the author. He has engendered enough good will throughout by being so specific and deliberate with every period. Every word used that I have to at least give him the credit that even if he's making choices I don't like, they are certainly intentional.

In the end there are a couple of things I take away from The Road that will stick with me...

First, it's incredibly stark and upsetting. The totality of the world the author creates is extremely impressive and the detail, while sparse, is specific enough that there's this feeling that McCarthy may have attacked this book like J.R.R. Tolkein did the Middle Earth books. You just know that he's got an entire history of this alternate universe of Earth, and I'd love to hear him fill in the gaps.

Second, it's an arresting read. It's very difficult to put the book down once you get into that rhythm, and despite the numerous mundane activities that take place, they all seem to be interesting in their own way. That's undoubtedly the result of a craftsman who truly knows exactly how to tell a story, and who most likely went through a ton of writes and rewrites to get it just right.

Third, I can't see myself reading it again soon. It was excellent, don't get me wrong. I loved the style. I loved the cadence. I loved the story. It's just a little unrelenting when it comes to the darkness of the vision. You know it's dark when a guy who spends time reading about serial killers and listening to Assassins and Spring Awakening is all “Wow... that's pretty effing dark.” I'd liken it to movies like Schindler's List or Children of Men... They're so artfully created and so unique that it's easy to admire them, and appreciate them, and even enjoy them (as much as you can enjoy those kinds of things), but you certainly don't want to pop them in on any Sunday afternoon.

Definitely worth a read, though. That's for sure.

Let the menstruation begin; My Twilight Blog

Hey Folks-

I consider myself relatively well read, or at least knowledgable regarding current phenomena and popular culture type thingys. That said, I didn't really know anything about the Twilight Saga (books) until earlier this year when the 2 stars made the cover of Entertainment Weekly. I still didn't pay it much mind. It's actually very similar to how I was totally in the dark about Harry Potter. I only vaguely knew it existed until right before the 4th book was released, and then suddenly it seemed to be everywhere.

How I Came to Read the Saga

So I was in the dark regarding Twilight (ba dum bum), and then I went to dinner with my friend Jill and she mentioned that I should check it out as it would make good reading for the long plane rides to Rome and back. So... I bought the first book (Twilight), and started reading it lightly before the trip, finding myself really enjoying it, and also realizing that despite it's girth, it was a quick read. I'd clearly be finished with it way too early into the plane ride. Jill then loaned me the second book (New Moon) right before I left. Surely, I thought, that would be enough to get me through. I packed both giant books and headed to Rome.

Well... about 2 hours into my 6 hour layover in New York (on the way) I was more than halfway done with book 1, and I decided to buy book 3 (Eclipse) at the airport. Now I have 1700 pages worth of Vampire fiction to satiate me on my trip to Italy (featured in book 2, oddly enough). Hard to say that I was wrong, exactly, as I plowed through book 1 on the plane, and most of book 2. I finished book 2 completely during my stay, and I got about halfway through book 3 before even heading for the airport home. because of that, I had to borrow book 4 (Breaking Dawn) from my sister's roommate (Thanks Sarah!). I actually almost made it through that before getting back to Cincinnati as well.

The last portion of the Saga is, of course, Midnight Sun. Stephenie Meyer started re-writing Twilight from Edward's point of view and stopped writing after the first 12 chapters were leaked. It's available on her website, and I killed the remaining couple of days before the movie's release by reading that. I liked it more than I liked any of the others, so of course it stands to reason that she'd just stop writing it.

The Books... a question and answer.

Are they actually GOOD?
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that they ARE good. Not just addictive in that same way that a showing of Cat People on AMC will suck you in, despite it's general shittiness. That's not to say that I think it's particularly well written, but if you look at the 4 books as a whole, I think the story is strong.

That said, I think Stephenie Meyer is a pretty bad writer. How is this possible? Well... I think the story and the writing are basically two separate things. She's like George Lucas, in a way, in that the story is good and interesting, and the characters are cool, but she really needed someone else to put a stronger voice to the actual writing. There's a lot of repetition. I honestly think that there's a cumulative 100 pages of the series dedicated to how the Cullens look. That'd be one thing if she'd been expansive in a more specific way, but it's usually the same things. There are repeated actions (Every kissing sequence in books 1-3, every time anyone smells anything, the incessant inner monologue regarding Jacob).

Sounds like I don't like them, but basically it amounts to me being more interested in plot and character than I am about the cadence of the prose. In fact, I almost think that too creative a narrative voice would have distracted from the flow. I certainly can't complain about the readability. In that the plot is the driving determiner in whether I think a story is good, Twilight is good.

Oh...and hey... The books are not meant for me. I read a review of the book that called it "Essentially professional fanfic." and that's not far from the truth. She's writing a mash letter to these characters. That's allowed. It's a good read.

What bothers me about the books?
Well... There wasn't a lot that really bothered me, but there are a couple of things...
1) Edward is portrayed as being pretty much perfect. Supermodel looks, a genius (or just someone with a perfectly sharp mind and 90 years to gain knowledge), amazing will-power, extra super-powers, all that. That's not what bothers me... Stephenie Meyer didn't really give him any flaws at all, except that he's possibly overprotective...so... why create the conflict within Bella that flows all throughout Book 3? I mean... I get that Jacob was there for her in Book 2 and I get that for some reason she loves him. I also think that the outcome was sort of a foregone conclusion, so why prolong this "triangle" when the time could have been used to flesh out backstory.
2) The love between Edward and Bella is great and all, but jeebus was it fast. It went from confusion to outright "forever yours" in like 16 seconds. I can't recall what chapter it was, but it was after the dinner in Port Angeles...they've been in eachother's company for like.. 2 hours and she's saying she's "completely and irrevocably in love with him." I mean... yikes. So intense it kinda creeps me out. And it never really waivered at all. In the second book, the girl literally puts herself into dangerous situations just to hallucinate his voice. God. On the other hand, I again realize this book was written for people who would find that sort of blind, blazing love to be romantic and they're not wrong.

Who's my favorite character?
That's a tough one, but I think I'll have to go with Jasper Cullen. Personally, I'd prefer to just read about the Cullens anyway, and he seems to be the most damaged. Damage is interesting to read. He's also one of the more fleshed out of the vampires. (No pun intended). His backstory is interesting. And I think Alice is the one I'd most like to hang out with, and they're all soul matey and stuff.

Are the Harry Potter comparisons apt?
While I see what people are saying... I'm gonna say they're not really that comparable. Except that they are both these huge deals with teens, and there is that magical element to both. The main differences are along those same lines.
-- Where Harry Potter has a much more universal appeal.. it's grander in scale, it takes place over a larger number of years and places. The story is more adventure and less romance.. Twilight is very focused in who it was written for and who it most appeals to. I mean... My DAD read and enjoyed Harry Potter, and while he'd probably read Twilight just because he reads constantly, and there are vampires, I'm not quite as sure he'd like it.
-- The writing in Harry Potter is better, generally. Rowling was pretty raw at the beginning, but you sort of get the feeling that she gave herself time to grow. There were 10 years or something between Book 1 and Book 7. On the other hand, Stephenie Meyer wrote all 4 Twilight books in a 3 year period, so she didn't have a lot of time to self improve.
-- The magic in Harry Potter is more... magical. The magic in Twilight is more incidental. In fact, there's rarely even mention of "magic" itself, and it's more of a thing that isn't really understood.

Really I think that Harry Potter has some real cultural staying power. The movies are huge. The books are all enormous best sellers. It seems to have permeated the lexicon a bit more completely.

The Movie... Yay or Nay?
I liked it well enough, but I think they REALLY have to put more money into the next ones. I really liked the casting (Edward and Bella specifically). They did a great job with an average script. The biggest issue was definitely the special effects, and well.. they weren't good. There are basically 3 truly important effects in the whole movie. The car crash where Edward saves Bella, the running through the woods, and the "sparkle Edward".
The car crash was done well enough. In fact, really well.
The running is just weird. I don't know how to make it look better, but it looked blocky. I don't know how else to describe it. Maybe it's just the mechanics of this exact type of effect, because one of the very few effects in Lord of the Rings that I didn't like was when Merry and Pippin were being carried on the backs of the Uruk-Hai. You could tell that it was a combo of dolls and tiny stunt people. I dunno... It's gotta be fixed
The "Sparkle Edward" is such a HUGE deal in the book. I mean... Stephenie Meyer describes the "diamonds" over and over and over and over and over. And poor Robert Pattinson just looked like he'd put on some glitter. It was bad bad bad.
I think the larger budget that's been promised for New Moon will be helpful, but I'm still worried. The effects in New Moon are way more difficult. You have werewolves. You have to do chases through Italy. And the Volturi stuff... it's all just MORE. Harry Potter made huge strides between movie 1 and movie 2 in terms of effects. Hopefully so will Twilight. I don't know if it has the power to hold the audiences otherwise.

Okay... I'm done talking about this. There's a lot more I could say. I tried to keep less spoilery. Let me know what you think.