In which it becomes obvious why I am not a public librarian...
It rained all weekend, big ambitious downpours. My guitar lesson was canceled because Guitar Teacher was out of town. I did do some playing--in fact, I bought YET ANOTHER Beatles fake book and spent a chunk of the weekend playing "Across the Universe," yet another song I didn't know until the current obsession hit. There's an oddball F6 chord (I think it's F6 something, if I was a good student I would draw it out and see exactly what notes are involved*) which is just barring the first three strings at the first fret and playing the first four strings. It's such a pretty sound I look forward to playing that part of the song!
Also got a couple of DVDs out of the public library and watched them Friday--one of George Harrison and another on the Who. And thus forgot about the "season premiere" of Flashpoint, but considering I have seen it twice and wept extensively over it already ('ware spoilers in that link), perhaps that's for the best. I've already established that the ending doesn't change when you watch it again.
The Harrison "documentary" was an unauthorized clip job with no actual Beatles or Harrison music... but it had its charming moments, and focused on Harrison as a spiritual person, which I found very interesting. It's got really bad Amazon reviews (actually, Amazon.ca goes easier on it than the .com or .co.uk sites!) but I quite liked it, possibly enough to buy a copy of my own.
And speaking of quite liking something, I dropped into Chapters on Sunday, for reasons I will get into in a minute. Before I get into that, here is the reason it's just as well I am not a public librarian:
Stephenie Meyer has written a new Twilight-universe book, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. Thanks to Internet snark I know a great deal more about Twilight than a person who has read one book and seen neither of the movies movies has any right to. I probably wouldn't have looked at this one, either, except that I read this interview with Meyer on Friday. I was interested in her reasons for wanting to write this book--the whole idea of the newborn vampires' story going on sort of behind the scenes while Eclipse was going on in the foreground. I liked the fact that she had a sense of their independent existence. I've said before that, while I have no interest in the Twilight books except to be creeped out by the dynamic between Edward and Bella (and I've said before, I also find Bella to be more Bonnie Parker than I think was intended) I find myself liking their author, in a peculiar way. She's got some of the good points and some of the failings and some of the mostly-benign mental quirks I expect of writers. And the fact she is unabashedly in love with her icky, icky characters is oddly endearing. I mean, there doesn't seem to be anything calculated about her success--it's not like she cold-bloodedly plotted "What will sell tons?"--she just wrote a story she loved, and it turned out to be a story a whole lot of other people loved too. The fact that I do not and will never love it myself doesn't take a thing away from that.
Still, I had pretty much forgotten about Bree Tanner when I got to Chapters, but in the course of trying to find the book I was looking for (a YA novel about which I will have more to say presently) I spotted the new Meyer novella, picked it up, and read the first and last few pages. That was really about enough--I may like Meyer herself, but I still have no urge to read her stuff. I will remark in passing that prudent vampires apparently follow the Robert Pickton school of preying on the most disaffected and vulnerable, which of course makes sense--Bree explains that vampires and their prey come from "the dregs" because there is no one who will notice they are missing. As we learned from the Pickton case, it's actually not that nobody cares about street people and sex workers. It's that nobody in power cares much about the people who care about them, so even though their families and friends know damn well something horrible is happening, it can take far too long to bring any focus on the fact that a lot of really vulnerable people are going missing.
Ahem. I'm not going to draw any conclusions about the author based on the fact her vampire character finally acts more or less like a vampire (at least in the pages I read.) However, I continue to find nothing particularly attractive or glamourous about serial killers. I also have a bit of a logical problem with first-person past-tense narratives in which the narrator gets killed at the end. (I assume that's not a spoiler, since it's the whole point of the book.)
Anyway, I read the pages I did and put the book back. Then I went over to the YA section and found the book I had actually come looking for (more on that in another entry, I think) and while I was there I figured I'd look at Eclipse to see how the two stories matched up (and also, I guess, to find out what happened immediately after Bree closed her eyes.)
As I was crouched by the book shelf, flipping through Eclipse, a young guy carrying a baby came over and spoke to me. I now defend myself on the grounds that the way he worded his question threw me: he asked, "Are there only three books in that series?"
Me: "No, there are four..." I looked, and found a copy of Breaking Dawn out of order on the shelf, and handed it to him. "This is the fourth one."
Him: "Did this one just come out?"
Me: "No, I think it was released last summer."
And he put the book back and went on his way, but later I walked out of the store behind him and he was carrying a big bulky book (I know more than enough about the fourth book to be quite icked out by the idea of someone carrying that book and a baby but never mind.)
And I got to my car and was just fastening my seatbelt when it hit me--and I bet has already hit all of you--the poor guy had been sent to pick up The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner.
The book I had in my hand not ten minutes before the young man spoke to me.
Reader advisory FAIL, folks.
I defend myself on the grounds that the new book isn't really part of the Edward-and-Bella story arc, but still. I just hope the poor guy kept the receipt!
___________________________________________________
* F Minor 6th, actually.
Also got a couple of DVDs out of the public library and watched them Friday--one of George Harrison and another on the Who. And thus forgot about the "season premiere" of Flashpoint, but considering I have seen it twice and wept extensively over it already ('ware spoilers in that link), perhaps that's for the best. I've already established that the ending doesn't change when you watch it again.
The Harrison "documentary" was an unauthorized clip job with no actual Beatles or Harrison music... but it had its charming moments, and focused on Harrison as a spiritual person, which I found very interesting. It's got really bad Amazon reviews (actually, Amazon.ca goes easier on it than the .com or .co.uk sites!) but I quite liked it, possibly enough to buy a copy of my own.
And speaking of quite liking something, I dropped into Chapters on Sunday, for reasons I will get into in a minute. Before I get into that, here is the reason it's just as well I am not a public librarian:
Stephenie Meyer has written a new Twilight-universe book, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. Thanks to Internet snark I know a great deal more about Twilight than a person who has read one book and seen neither of the movies movies has any right to. I probably wouldn't have looked at this one, either, except that I read this interview with Meyer on Friday. I was interested in her reasons for wanting to write this book--the whole idea of the newborn vampires' story going on sort of behind the scenes while Eclipse was going on in the foreground. I liked the fact that she had a sense of their independent existence. I've said before that, while I have no interest in the Twilight books except to be creeped out by the dynamic between Edward and Bella (and I've said before, I also find Bella to be more Bonnie Parker than I think was intended) I find myself liking their author, in a peculiar way. She's got some of the good points and some of the failings and some of the mostly-benign mental quirks I expect of writers. And the fact she is unabashedly in love with her icky, icky characters is oddly endearing. I mean, there doesn't seem to be anything calculated about her success--it's not like she cold-bloodedly plotted "What will sell tons?"--she just wrote a story she loved, and it turned out to be a story a whole lot of other people loved too. The fact that I do not and will never love it myself doesn't take a thing away from that.
Still, I had pretty much forgotten about Bree Tanner when I got to Chapters, but in the course of trying to find the book I was looking for (a YA novel about which I will have more to say presently) I spotted the new Meyer novella, picked it up, and read the first and last few pages. That was really about enough--I may like Meyer herself, but I still have no urge to read her stuff. I will remark in passing that prudent vampires apparently follow the Robert Pickton school of preying on the most disaffected and vulnerable, which of course makes sense--Bree explains that vampires and their prey come from "the dregs" because there is no one who will notice they are missing. As we learned from the Pickton case, it's actually not that nobody cares about street people and sex workers. It's that nobody in power cares much about the people who care about them, so even though their families and friends know damn well something horrible is happening, it can take far too long to bring any focus on the fact that a lot of really vulnerable people are going missing.
Ahem. I'm not going to draw any conclusions about the author based on the fact her vampire character finally acts more or less like a vampire (at least in the pages I read.) However, I continue to find nothing particularly attractive or glamourous about serial killers. I also have a bit of a logical problem with first-person past-tense narratives in which the narrator gets killed at the end. (I assume that's not a spoiler, since it's the whole point of the book.)
Anyway, I read the pages I did and put the book back. Then I went over to the YA section and found the book I had actually come looking for (more on that in another entry, I think) and while I was there I figured I'd look at Eclipse to see how the two stories matched up (and also, I guess, to find out what happened immediately after Bree closed her eyes.)
As I was crouched by the book shelf, flipping through Eclipse, a young guy carrying a baby came over and spoke to me. I now defend myself on the grounds that the way he worded his question threw me: he asked, "Are there only three books in that series?"
Me: "No, there are four..." I looked, and found a copy of Breaking Dawn out of order on the shelf, and handed it to him. "This is the fourth one."
Him: "Did this one just come out?"
Me: "No, I think it was released last summer."
And he put the book back and went on his way, but later I walked out of the store behind him and he was carrying a big bulky book (I know more than enough about the fourth book to be quite icked out by the idea of someone carrying that book and a baby but never mind.)
And I got to my car and was just fastening my seatbelt when it hit me--and I bet has already hit all of you--the poor guy had been sent to pick up The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner.
The book I had in my hand not ten minutes before the young man spoke to me.
Reader advisory FAIL, folks.
I defend myself on the grounds that the new book isn't really part of the Edward-and-Bella story arc, but still. I just hope the poor guy kept the receipt!
___________________________________________________
* F Minor 6th, actually.