Your one-sentence(ish) catch-up post

So, it was the holiday season, and I read and watched a bunch of stuff without posting anything.  My bad.  Here's my take on it all.

Movies!


Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol (I have no idea how to punctuate that)
Super fun!  Saw it in IMAX and was definitely worth the extra $5 or whatever.  I don't have strong opinions about/really remember the other movies, but this one was a really entertaining and nail-bite-worthy sequel.  Catch it in the theater if you're even vaguely interested; I bet it won't be as good at home unless you have a real butt-kicker of a television.

Winter's Bone
Haunting and excellent.  One of those movies I'm glad I saw but never want to see again.  Jennifer Lawrence was as good as everyone says--can't wait for Hunger Games!

Midnight in Paris
Cute and dorky.  It's probably fun for everyone but more fun if you catch all the references to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the like, which I didn't even manage despite my Comp Lit degree.  (shame)

The Descendants
Well-acted and compelling.  A little too "grief-porn" for my tastes (thanks to whoever came up with that phrase in reference to the AMC series The Killing--it fits well here) but I couldn't look away from Clooney and that girl from ABC Family.  And it was funny and sweet at times too, not all sadness.  Certain to generate Oscar buzz.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Unique and brilliant adaptation.  That super long book became a pretty long movie, but the condensation of an incredibly detailed manuscript somehow didn't glaze over much.  Incredibly suspenseful throughout; beautiful cinematography.

Sherlock Holmes (not the new one)
I love Robert Downey, Jr.  The end.





TV seasons!
Dexter, season 6
Thank you, Showtime preview weekend.  Not as good as the other seasons.  Still better than most shows I'm watching on other channels.  And what a cliff hanger!  (Problem--spoiler alert--Deb and Dexter?  for real?  what's up with that?)



Books!

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (Mindy Kaling)
Be my friend on Goodreads for a slightly longer review.  Funny most of the time, rarely hilarious.  Pick it up if you're an Office fan.

Before I Go to Sleep (S.J. Watson)
Also a longer review on Goodreads.  A Memento-style amnesia mystery, beautifully written and suspenseful to the end.

Room (Emma Donoghue)
Another suspense, this time a best-seller.  Narrated by a five-year-old, which is both impressive and obnoxious.  The plot was exciting but the pacing was a little off--the last half of the book was downhill for me.  Still, worth a read if you want something quick.

Friday roundup: Breaking Dawn, Matched, and more

Happy Friday, readers!  Here's an update on my reading and viewing life of late.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1
Film, 2011, dir. Bill Condon


Ooh steamy! No wait, his skin is icy cold.  Brr!

 Breaking Dawn was just what you would expect if you have seen the other movies and you are familiar with the story.  In case you have managed to avoid the media buzz (good job!), the plot is that Bella and Edward get married, consummate their passionate love, and end up with a vampire baby growing inside still-human Bella.  This makes Jacob (wolfy friend/third corner of love triangle) mad.  I imagine Taylor Lautner's in-character thoughts as something along the lines of "JACOB SMASH! RAWRRRRRRR!" (because he phases into his werewolf form when he gets really mad...)  This led to the most ridiculous scene in the movie--and trust me, that's saying something.  Jacob's pack of wolves can talk to each other mentally when they are in their wolf form, so there's a bunch of CGI-ed giant wolves on the screen growling at one another while the helpful captions let the rest of us in on the conversation.  This is backed by some truly dramatic score--nothing reinforces wolf drama like soaring violins.  Anyway!  Props to whoever did the makeup and CGI on Kristen Stewart, because that girl looked like the living dead for most of the movie (see, her life force is being soaked up by the demon baby because vampires are stronger than humans...leading Bella herself to drink blood...leading everyone in the theater to laugh uncomfortably because it's really gross to watch when her teeth get all red.)  The acting was meh, the writing was meh, the source material was terrible, but I still had fun!  Yayyyy Twilight.

Matched
YA Novel, Ally Condie, 2010

This is a kind of cool cover.
That is the only other nice thing I will say.

Matched is really not very good.  I saw some good reviews of it and I am puzzled.  I will give Ally Condie a little bit of credit for being a pretty good writer.  She puts together some nice images and turns of phrase from time to time.  However, the plot of this book is boring and derivative.  It's like The Giver and 1984 and Twilight all raised a dull child together.  Our heroine Cassia is repressed by her post-some-kind-of-apocalypse overlord government, and has to navigate the troubling waters of her budding rebellious spirit as she debates between the guy the Society "matched" her with (Xander) and the guy she secretly loves because he's dark and mysterious and has pretty eyes (Ky).  I was intensely irritated to find that the "matching ceremony" where people get assigned to their mates seems to be strictly heterosexual, and no other sexual preferences are even mentioned.  Cassia notes that you can opt out of the matching and be "a single" instead, but that doesn't really address the issue.  Anyway, on to other things that bother me. Cassia gets an illegal copy of Dylan Thomas's famous poem "Do not go gentle into that good night."  One thing that really grinds my gears about YA fiction is when a book latches onto a poem, book, symphony, etc. as an example of fine art and then smashes in our faces for the rest of the book (cf. If I Stay's classical music selection.)  That is what happens here, as Cassia adopts "I will not go gentle!" as an obnoxious refrain.  My biggest problem with this book, though, is my own fault--I listened to it on audiobook even though within five seconds I was terrified to find out that chipmunks have acquired the powers of speech and are recording audiobooks.  The girl reading the book just drove me nuts, and every time she used her "voices" for the characters (often) I felt annoyed with her.  Don't ask me why I kept listening--I dunno, I just did.  Actually, I guess it was because I was intrigued by the beginning of the book, before it was entirely clear that it would suck.  Oh well, it was free--did you know you can get audiobooks from the library!  Crazy!

The cover is misleadingly Oscar-centric.

I'm currently in the middle of a second underwhelming book (hard copy this time)--Street Gang by Michael Davis.  The cover promises to be the history of Sesame Street, which it is.  Sadly for me, I didn't read the rest of the summary, which clarifies that it mostly explores the histories of the various writers and producers who brought the show to life and how the idea came to be.  Thus I am about half way through and we haven't even gotten to the first episode being written yet.  I was really looking for more of a behind-the-scenes expose of what went down between Ernie and Elmo, you know?  Oh well.  I'll update again when I finish it. (To clarify, it's not a bad book, just kind of rambly.  I don't do a lot of nonfiction, so maybe I just have a short attention span.)

Oh, is Christina Hendricks in this show?

On TV, I've been watching my usual shows that are currently on air (How I Met Your Mother--decent, Glee--meh, The New Girl--hehe she's so awkward!, Community--ridiculous, Parks and Rec--my personal fave) and supplementing with Netflix streaming of Mad Men.  So far I'm about 10 episodes in, and I like it but I'm not sure I get what all the fuss is about.  It seems like a PERIOD PIECE where we are forced to appreciate every time they say "swell" or all light up a cig together.  But I do like well-drawn character dramas, in the end.

I'm going to see The Muppets this weekend, hooray!  I've heard many of you already saw and enjoyed it, but that won't stop me from opining on it at length next week!

Bite-sized review catch-up! Tron Legacy, The Misfits, Drive, State of Play, Dune

Someone's been slacking on review writing lately, and that someone is me.  So here is a mini-review of each thing I've taken in recently, things which I may or may not expand upon in a full review later (let's be honest, probably not).

Tron: Legacy
Film, 2010, dir. Joseph Kosinski

This is a pretty awesome-looking movie that has few other redeeming qualities.  You don't really need to know what it was about beyond seeing the preview.  It probably was sweet in IMAX.  See it for the nifty new motorbike-thingies, see it for the Matrix-y fight scenes, see it for the aging technology on Jeff Bridges.  See it if it's free on your Netflix and you feel like a no-thinking kind of night.  Otherwise, don't bother.  The story doesn't make any sense and the dialogue is stupid.  Oh, I should mention I never saw the original Tron, so maybe that makes a difference in how much you appreciate the story, but I kind of doubt it.

The Misfits
Novel, James Howe, 2003

A good YA (that's young adult, my friends) book, one that I would have recommended to some of my former students.  It's about a group of outcast friends in middle school who decide to try to shake things up by running for student government on the platform of stopping the name-calling all around them.  It's got a very heavy "everyone is special and you can change the world" theme going, a theme that became too obstructive of some interesting character potential for this adult reader.  (For example, the main character is an overweight boy who works in a department store with a cold, lonely boss so that he can bring home a few extra dollars for his reformed drunk widower father.  So much potential that gets sidetracked for the quick resolution!)  But it's quickly digestible and lots of fun, so if you run across it, recommend it to your young teenage relatives.

Drive
Film, 2011, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn

Here's another rare gem for this blog--something you can still see in the theaters!  But honestly, don't.  Well, maybe do.  But not before you read this warning: it's gross.  Horribly gory violently gross.  The thing is, it was a totally normal movie for the first half an hour or so, and I was thinking, hey, I'm glad Jamie wanted to see this even though I didn't know anything about it.  Then someone's (I won't spoil whose) head gets blown off by a point-blank shotgun.  And there's more where that came from.  Ok, warning over.  Horrifying violence aside, this was a really interesting piece of art, which is I think why reviewers seem to love it.  Ryan Gosling plays "The Driver," who gets mixed up in driving a getaway car for the wrong crowd.  It's a unique story and avoids cliche at every turn.  Gosling pulls off his character surprisingly well, and there are some nice performances by the supporting cast as well--Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, and Albert Brooks, to name a few.

State of Play
Film, 2009, dir. Kevin Macdonald

This movie won't be one of my all-time favorites, but I liked it, and I'd see it again.  Ben Affleck plays a politician whose staffer died in suspicious circumstances on the Metro tracks here in DC.  Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams are the journalists digging around in it, and Robin Wright Penn is Affleck's pretty if mostly plot-irrelevant wife.  Oh and Helen Mirren's in there too, also in a non-interesting role.  That cast list is mostly why I Netflixed this one, and because I like movies about politics.  The mystery was interesting if not totally groundbreaking and the script and acting were good.  The thing I enjoyed most, though, was identifying each scene as "I've been there, that's totally DC!" or, "NO WAY that is totally NOT DC!"  Side note for those who also live here: You see the soon-to-become-a-metro-delay staffer walking through Adams Morgan before she gets to the Metro, but all of a sudden she's on the platform in...Rosslyn!  Amazing!  (Non-DCers, that's a jump all the way across town--in fact, into Virginia.)

Last but certainly not least...
Dune
Novel, Frank Herbert, 1965

I'm running out of steam here, and out of the five mini-reviews here, this one is most likely to make it into a longer review later, so to keep it extra short: A science fiction classic that didn't disappoint.  I found the writing to be a little opaque at times, but the story was exciting and complex, and I was left wanting to read the sequels even though I already decided I wouldn't since I've heard they're not worth it.





And that's it for now!  I'll try not to be a slacker in the future (that's what I always say...), and I promise to consider giving Dune the attention it's worth.

Prey

Novel, Michael Crichton, 2002

My husband and I were on a road trip this weekend, and we have a habit of reading out loud to each other as we drive.  This usually works best if the passenger reads to the driver, btw.  Since I'm in the middle of Dune, we opted for another book that we could get through quickly and that neither of us had started yet.  Enter Prey.  I found this lying on the side of the road, so I picked it up, hoping it would be as much fun as Jurassic Park or Sphere, which are my only other two Crichton reads, I think.

Is it wrong to imagine
nanoparticles as fleas?

Well, it wasn't.  It was certainly good for an amusing car ride, and there were some very suspenseful passages, so I wasn't disappointed on my major expectations.  However, I found the whole thing a little disjointed, and some of the pseudoscience was really insufferable.  More on that after a brief summary for those who haven't read it:

In Prey, Jack Forman (solid hero name) is a computer programmer or something, and his wife Julia works for a nanotechnology development company.  The first part of the book sets up some strange events going down around their house--Julia seems irritable, the baby gets a mystery rash, etc.--that, since this is Crichton, after all, are inevitably the effect of said nanotechnology run amok.  The middle of the book is when the nanotechnology gobbledegook gets thick, as we are led on a tour of the company's creepy desert facilities and are introduced to their product: a swarm of tiny particles that can control themselves as a group, like a flock of birds.  This swarm is rapidly evolving, to the extent that it "learns" new behaviors every few hours.  Oh yeah, and it's trained to be a predator.  Why, you ask?  Well, that's how Jack got involved in this whole mess--he wrote some predator-imitating software that Julia's company bought.  So he's trying to kill the swarm.  The rest of the book really picks up the pace as the swarm develops crazy new ideas and hunts down the humans at every step.

An official science picture of nanotechnology

This last part is pretty fun.  However.  The two thirds of the book it took to lead up to the crazy swarm madness were way too much.  Crichton spends a few hundred pages setting up all these great mystery hooks in a slow-ish pace, then races to the end with an entirely different plot than what he started with.  He took the last two pages to explain those little teasers he started with and blew his climax on a crazy subplot that entered in the last section of the book.  This rapid change in pace (nothing-at-all-happening to holy-crap-everything-happening-at-once to what-it's-over?) is what leads to the book feeling disjointed, I think.

What I kept hoping was coming in Prey

I also happen to have a pretty low tolerance for the technical specifications of the nanotechnology.  I understand that that is probably what a lot of people like about Crichton--the THIS COULD ALMOST REALLY HAPPEN BECAUSE LOOK IT'S SCIENCE sort of feeling.  But I don't like when the story gets interrupted every few pages so that Jack can explain to the reader "key" details like what exactly the nanoparticle assemblers are made of.

Anyway, my husband and I just skipped those parts and used some funny voices for the dialogue, and it turned out to be a very enjoyable trip.

Dracula

Novel, Bram Stoker, 1897

As a Twilight fan (sort of), I felt I owed it to myself to read Dracula.  My dad--who writes an intelligent and entertaining blog over here--has told me that he thought it was one of the scariest books he's ever read.  (Dad, if you're reading this and I'm misquoting you, my apologies.)  I'm not sure if I agree with that, but it was pretty creepy for sure.

500 pages! Ah ah ah!

I thought I knew the basic story of Dracula, but I think that was actually mostly based on the Count from Sesame Street.  So for anyone else in that situation, here's an overview: A circle of friends is plagued by a mysterious demon, so they call in Van Helsing, noted professor of crazy stuff, and together try to identify and destroy the evil force.

To be a little more specific: The book (written in an epistolary style with contributions from all the major characters) begins with the diary of Jonathan Harker, who has been sent by his employer to Transylvania to help a certain Count Dracula get the purchase of his new England home in order. (Gotta love those international real estate agents who make a lot of house calls.)  This is the longest contiguous section of the book, as Harker describes the at-best-unnerving and at-times-downright-terrifying experience of staying in Castle Dracula.  Spoiler alert--he makes it out, but Dracula too makes it to England, and all of a sudden people start dropping like flies.  The middle section of the book concerns a girl named Lucy, who is Jonathan's wife, Mina's, best friend, and her torment by an elusive monster of some sort--bet you can't guess what.  The rest of the books finds our heroes figuring out how to corner and kill the Count and the obstacles they encounter in trying to do so.

Bela Lugosi. Shiver-tastic.

Dracula is WAY longer than I expected it to be.  I read it on my Kindle (it's free! yay copyright law) so I didn't have a clear sense of how long it was when I started.  Not gonna lie, that middle part was really slow reading.  The whole Lucy part is also dragged out by the story of this guy Renfield, who's in an insane asylum and has a bug-eating fetish and seems to be connected to the Count somehow.  None of it seemed to be all that relevant to the major story line.  I really enjoyed the major story line when we did get around to it, though, and found Harker's opening account and the build-up to the climax to be thrilling.

I don't read a lot of Victorian novels these days, so I don't have a huge frame of reference for this, but it was very strange to me that the men in the novel took a very worshipful attitude to Lucy and Mina, the main female characters.  Everything the girls did was pronounced endearing, charming, witty, intelligent, and they were of course angelically beautiful at all times.  That oddity aside, I really liked that Mina was involved in the action and shown as a heroine, because I guess I was expecting that women in a book from this era would be more... dainty--cf. those crazy Bennets in Pride and Prejudice.  The Wikipedia article on the book suggests that there is a lot of critical literature about the roles of gender and sexuality in the novel (oh, did I mention that there are also these wild ghost vampire women who want to either have sex with or suck the blood of everyone? pretty interesting stuff there), which I would be interested in reading.

It was evolutionarily beneficial for Dracula's kind
to develop sparkles and foofy hair.

This post is getting longer than I intended, which is either because the book is long or because it is the masterpiece that many have called it so I end up having a lot to say about it.  So just a couple more points in bullet form:

• In this age of Twihards and vampire mania, it does get tedious when the characters spend the first half of the book wondering where these mysterious bite marks on the neck could have come from, but I can imagine that it would have made for a great mystery when vampire lore was less common.
• The mood of the book is one of its greatest strengths.  I felt more Gothic just reading it.  It made me want a fireplace and a cold winter night.  Just thinking about the castle makes me hear an ominous thunderclap.
• I bet there are some pretty good abridged versions of this book out there (if you believe that such a thing exists in principle, which I'm not sure I do.  But it might be worth looking into.)

Next up for me is Dune, which is also a doozy for length, I think.  Maybe I will post some status updates on the way through that one.  You can check out how far I am by being my friend on my new Goodreads account!  (Goodreads is sort of like Netflix meets Facebook but all about books.  It's awesome.)

World War Z

Novel, Max Brooks, 2006

This is a unique book.  If you are looking to try something a little different, here it is.

World War Z is a series of interviews about what happened when the Earth that we know and love was overcome by a devastating zombie apocalypse.  It's implied that this happened right around our current time (2000s ish).  The "editor" interviews people from all around the world about their experiences and thus chronicles the initial outbreaks, the ensuing chaos as more and more people are infected, and how humans eventually rally to fight and bring about the resolution of the war against the zombies (this isn't a spoiler--the opening pages let you know it's been about ten years since the end of the war).

Brooks works very hard to capture the details of what it would really be like to have an all-out zombie apocalypse on our hands.  The interviews show how different countries' militaries were prepared (or not) for the formation of active armies and massive stocks of weaponry, what strategies civilians took to try to save their own lives, even what happens to the economy in a state of global warfare.  It is a truly impressive feat of imagination, and Brooks' interviewees are fully-fleshed out to deliver all his horrifying details--even requiring footnotes where the "editor" explains the acronyms and other post-apocalypic-critical knowledge.  (Side note: this footnote business was very annoying on my Kindle--I recommend picking up a hard copy.)

Some of my favorite interviews were with an American business tycoon who invented a "cure" for the zombie disease and then moved to Antarctica with his riches, a Japanese computer nerd who has to rappel his way down his high-rise building to escape, and a man who runs a shelter for the dogs who were trained for zombie combat.

As much as these individual and widely varying interviews are fascinating, they also create the book's major weakness--it's very hard to build momentum or engagement in the novel as a whole when it functions more a a series of short stories.  There starts to be a certain dreariness in hearing about the same thing over and over again even though the telling varies each time.  About 75% of the way through the book I had to drag myself through each interview, even though if I had been reading them as stand-alone pieces I probably still would have enjoyed them.  (It did pick up again towards the end, happily.)  There's also a lot of technical military talk that's a little dry for my tastes, but I'm sure other people enjoy all those details.

Still, definitely worth a read (or a skim, if you get bored partway through).  And, in continuing with the theme of every book I read these days, it's going to be a movie in 2012!  With Brad Pitt!  And that girl from The Killing!  I do like her.

The Hunger Games Trilogy

Young Adult Fiction, Suzanne Collins, 2008-2010

I reserve the right to review each book separately in the future.  Right now, I am writing this review as a trilogy because I don't want to bore you, new readers, if you haven't read the series yet.  And, let's be clear, I don't know anyone who's read only one of these books.  They're like Pringles.  Except you read them.

You should read these books in the same way that you should have read Harry Potter.  I personally do not enjoy them as much as HP, but they are about to be a teen movie phenomenon on a somewhat smaller scale than HP/Twilight.  Or maybe bigger, who knows.  But that would be hard to pull off.  So anyway, if you want to be in the know at the water cooler, read these books.

The heroine is named Katniss ("what kind of name is that?" you ask. I don't know.)  She and her mother and sister live in post-apocalyptic-war-America.  In this America, the Capitol is in charge, and to reinforce their power over their states, they force each state ("District," of which there are 12) to send two of their teenagers to a televised battle-to-the-death event called the Hunger Games.  Yes, you read that right--to the death!  It's very dark and exciting.  Katniss has to abandon her childhood friend (slash love interest) Gale to go compete, and then teams up with a new love interest, Peeta, to try to survive the deadly arena.  Many casualties and changes of heart ensue.  I won't spoil the next two books, but suffice it to say that Collins takes young adult fiction to some very dark and dystopian places, full of political intrigue, strategy and battles, and lots more deaths.

Review time:  Super fun, takes a day to read each one--definitely go for it.  Collins does some intriguing world-building and you will definitely get hooked on the story.  Unfortunately, I really disliked the end of the series, but by that time you'll be in it for the long haul anyway, so don't worry about it right now.  (In case you are wondering, I thought the ending was way too dark, and that the third book in general was very poorly paced.)  Shout out to my friend Sasha: you may find yourself in love with some of the boys :)  I'll be interested to hear which side of the love triangle you all pick, readers.  Shout out to my friend Alex: you may really hate Katniss.  If you ask me, she's kind of fun because she's a scrappy action hero girl, but she is annoyingly incapable of emotions or rational responses.

So what are you waiting for? You have until March 23 to get up to speed before the first movie comes out. (look out for Sasha, she's an extra!)

Presumed Innocent

Novel, Scott Turow, 1987

A courtroom/crime/suspense story.  You would think that CSI/NCIS/my DVDs of Ally McBeal would be enough crime drama to satiate me, but you would be wrong.  I picked this up as a vacation read and actually liked it.

It's about this guy Rusty who is accused of murder, but he's a lawyer so the narration is interesting because he captures the finer points of the trial better than your everyman-narrator.  The defense strategy is intricately plotted, and if you're into lawyer-ishness you'll be hooked from page 1.  Of course there are plot twists galore, but what really sold me on this book was each character's shady motivations.  No one in the entire plot is straightforwardly "good", which is pretty cool.  Oh and it's got something for everyone, romance lovers--the whole case is based on an affair between Rusty and the hotsy totsy murder victim Carolyn, his lawyer coworker (the affair was before she was murdered, duh.)  And for you politicos, there's even a heated race for prosecuting attorney!

My major complaint is some latent racism/homophobia, supposedly part of the characters' natural speech, but I just don't like it and am not entirely convinced it doesn't come from Turow himself rather than the characters (this is not just policemen making racist remarks, it's also the way he writes the dialogue for black and Asian characters, among other things).

Other than that, it's a fun summer read.  Plus there's a sequel!  (Innocent, 2010.)  And a movie!  How did Harrison Ford end up on this blog again so soon?  Oh well, Netflix, here I come.

Why People Like Twilight: My official take on it

With the Comic-Con panels this week, so officially begins the upcoming season of promotion for the first installment of the Breaking Dawn movie, which will be released in November.  Like birds heralding the news of spring, so internet commenters will rant or rave about Twilight, mostly nonsensically.  In the past, people have certainly taken on academic-style defenses of what draws fans to Twilight, and others take equally intelligent jabs at why it is a terrible influence on girls, a bad piece of writing, etc etc.  I'd like to take my own (decidedly non-academic) approach to why people (including me) like Twilight.

Plain and simple, it comes down to the force of the love between Edward and Bella.  People often get lost in posts like these by trying to explain WHY Bella loves Edward (and this is where the anti-Twilighters can really have a heyday, because Edward IS creepy and abusive and all those other things they claim he is).  Doesn't matter.  For whatever reason, she is desperately in love with him, more or less from the first time she sees him.  And what draws people to Twilight is that he's desperately in love with her too!  How great is that???  How many people find that their teenage crushes--which we all know are the most violent and inescapable crushes of one's life--are returned with equal force?  Edward and Bella's longing is passionate and yet restrained, which is another facet of the attraction to these books: the longer the consummation is dragged out, the more rewarding it is when it eventually happens.  And boy, do we have to suffer through some drawing out.  But that is why the screaming will be deafening when this honeymoon finally comes to pass.  It's a story of all-consuming teenage obsession/love, finally played out to a happy conclusion.  Everyone can relate to wanting that, which is why the series is so popular.  Done.  Yes, there are flaws in the books and the movies (lots! many flaws!  I do not dispute this!), and if you want to go over all the problems with the writing, the pacing, the characters, anything, go for it--but don't say you can't understand why people like Twilight.  For the fans, the love story is grand enough to absorb all these flaws.

The books were enough to sell the early fans on the intensity of the love between Edward and Bella.  The movies have stoked the flames and turned this into a phenomenon.  The casting was brilliant.  Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are both hot and have both mastered the smoldering stares necessary to communicate the intensity of passion that the readers crave.  Take any stills from the movies of the two of them staring at each other, and you can see how any 12 year old would long for more from them.

I'm about to tackle one other issue that gets bandied around on chat threads: Twilight vs. Harry Potter.  HP fans get all riled up on Twilight boards about how much worse Twilight is than HP.  Yes.  You're right, it is worse.  Now get off the Twilight boards.

They're totally different series.  Just because they are both YA phenomenons does not mean that they need to be evaluated against each other.  Rowling is a better author.  Meyer wrote a better love story.  News flash: HP is about wizardry, friendship, and battles between good and evil, not teenage hormones and undying passion.  (While Twilight may purport to be about vampires, this is my point: that's really a subplot to the love story in terms of what motivates the fans.)  When it comes to Twilight and HP, you can like either, neither, or both--they don't need to be in conflict with one another.  Stop hating on each other and find something new to read.

One final point: an alternate motivation to like Twilight.  Some people who are mega Twihards don't like Edward; they are Team Jacob.  Totally fine.  Unrequited love and/or shirtless Taylor Lautner are equally compelling reasons to love the series, and I am not saying you are wrong.  Just in the minority.

The Gravedigger's Daughter

Novel, by Joyce Carol Oates, 2007

I am an Oates fan, although her prose can be meandering and dense.  Oates is big on characters, not so big on plot, which is something you just have to appreciate going in.  If you're not into that kind of book, just stop reading now and know it's not your thing.

For those interested in character studies, I thought this one was pretty excellent.  The opening scene is something of a chase scene, but the impeccable first person narration follows Rebecca's frantic thoughts to convey the urgency of the scene and take care of a great deal of exposition at the same time.  The story then backtracks, though, to Rebecca's youth.  I found this early section of the novel to be somewhat tedious, because I kept wanting to get back to the time the novel started with; I was interested to read in the "P.S." interview at the end of the book that these early scenes were Oates's personal favorites.  Perhaps this blinded her to the fact that they were kind of boring.  Anyway, we follow Rebecca's entire young adult life, adding incredibly vivid characters to her surroundings and ending with a strong enough sense of closure to appease those looking for some idea of plot.

The book is perhaps about the Holocaust, and perhaps about American in the 50's through 70's, and perhaps about upstate New York (as most of her books are, in some way or another), but mostly about creating a fully realized life for an excellent female character.  More, please.

The back of the book recommends other Oates novels--she has written approximately 1,000,000--among which I would most like to try: The Falls (2004), Blonde (2000), and Black Water (1992)