in which I actually write a post about sparkly vampires
I finished Breaking Dawn the other day. Before the completely insane week began. ("I love my job. I love my job." --No, really, I love my job, I just hate how much time it takes.)
Part of my initial curiosity about the Twilight series came from the fact that the author (Stephenie Meyer, and no, I'm not misspelling her name here) is LDS, so we share a religion. Plus the series became so big so fast that it was almost impossible to avoid news about it. So I bought the book and another novel (different author) with a gift certificate from Amazon.com. I'm willing to buy books by previously-unread authors in hardback if 1) the books are cheap; and 2) I think I might want to keep them to reread or give them to someone else as a present. Neither book succeeded--they're both in my 'resell' pile.
But I did think Twilight was entertaining. Enough so that when a student said she'd loan me the next one, I agreed. And that's how I finally read the whole series.
Man, did I have to do a lot more skimming in the last book. It was too long; plus I couldn't decide if I wanted to giggle each time Bella gazed lustfully at her new husband or if I should start banging my head against a wall because it meant that yet another 'Edward is so woooooonderful' internal speech was coming up. (Also lots of skimming during the birth scene--yikes.)
It was still entertaining, though. I'm not angry and ready to burn any copies--I'm just not interested in re-reading them. I knew that after the first one, though. Heh, and Bella Swan vampires better than you, so there.
If you're interested in knowing more details about the novels, I'd suggest cleolinda's snarky recaps. Or you can ask me--I'm happy to sum up what I can remember. Considering that these books were ideal for skimming readers like I tend to be, I may have trouble remembering. (A book has to be very well-written and detail-oriented to get me to slow down. I'm a fast reader and S. Meyer's writing style makes it easy to speed up even more.)
Fandom is an interesting place--I've seen some hugely funny Twilight series parodies, some well-reasoned posts about flaws in the writing and questionable content, but mostly I'm seeing the usual arguments about Mary Sues. Fandom people, the world likes Mary Sues! And Gary Stus! I'm not saying yay for books (or fanfiction) where the hero/heroine has no actual personality beyond their awesomeness, but generally speaking, people like reading about characters who have extraordinary qualities. Think about the stories we have that are part of the story-telling tradition: mythology, great heroes on quests... Anyway. Mary-Sue is a label that's overused in fandom, but not many people outside of fandom care about it, and they happily keep reading their Mary-Sues and Gary Stus.
I've also seen lots of stuff being heaped on the author because of religion. It's annoying. Did they do this to JK Rowling? I'm guessing yes, but maybe not as much (I have NO INTENTION of looking, because poking around in Harry Potter fandom is just scary). I do have to admit at laughing at some of the ideas, though--apparently we Mormons have to get all published works approved by our bishops before publishing? You'd think I'd have heard of that rule before, heh. Also, if the Twilight series is supposed to be Mormon propaganda, then 1) I can come up with a better idea than that for propaganda and 2) I'm really scared of all the future Mormons who will be drawn in by the lure of sparkly vampire true love. (Ugh. Do people believe their own comments? that teens are going to be flocking to my church because of books about dazzling vampires, hybrid babies and true love?)
One thing I've noticed, though, is that book length is a bit... extreme. Seven hundred plus pages in the last HP novel and in Breaking Dawn--honestly?!
Meyer and Rowling both have writing styles that have been criticized for a reason. Neither is a technically perfect writer. But a good editor would help a lot in overcoming this. It doesn't look like such a person exists at the publishing houses, just from book length alone. Rowling's later novels could've been tightened up some; Meyer's novels, quite a lot. (Hundreds of pages, maybe! *goes to hunt down red pen* oh, wait, I don't have a copy that I can mark up) Add in the weird punctutation (Rowling discovered the colon in the seventh book--too bad she didn't discover how to use it correctly) and purple prose (please, Ms. Meyers, use a few more periods and a few less adjectives!) and I have to wonder if anyone is reading these books ahead of time once they decided they had a winning product.
And that's the thing. With the internet, an author can go from being unknown to a huge success in just a few months; there's a rush to get the next book out even faster while the hype is still there and no one seems to care if the product isn't as good as it could've been. The price of printing extra pages must be outweighed by the expectation of selling more copies.
eta: Just for the record, I like the HP books--enough to keep my hardback copies and re-read them.
Wow. Okay, I think it's time for me to get away from the computer and stop talking about the publishing industry as if I had a clue--'cause I don't.
And now I'm starving--quite possibly because I've been sitting here for an hour typing. Wait, I totally forgot to include my V.C. Andrews comparison up there somewhere! Yeah! Dude, if everyone is worried that the tender young readers are going to be traumatized by the hybrid baby birth scene, I just want to know--where were they back when I was reading Flowers in the Attic?!? Talk about trauma... the non-con incest, the grandmother putting tar in whatsername's hair... Cathy. I wanted to block out her name, but it just came back to me. But I still read the second book in spite of the ick. Andrews made a nice chunk of cash from her whole incest-as-plotline series (multiple--she had lots of these books, all with the same basic idea; though I'm not sure where the cut-off point is, because ghost-writers took over after she died. The books were apparently that lucrative.). So if kids now are fascinated by sparkly vampires having kids at age eighteen, I'm not sure why I'm supposed to think it's worse than what their parents read back in the day.
And now it's even later and I need to go buy groceries before the stores are packed.
Part of my initial curiosity about the Twilight series came from the fact that the author (Stephenie Meyer, and no, I'm not misspelling her name here) is LDS, so we share a religion. Plus the series became so big so fast that it was almost impossible to avoid news about it. So I bought the book and another novel (different author) with a gift certificate from Amazon.com. I'm willing to buy books by previously-unread authors in hardback if 1) the books are cheap; and 2) I think I might want to keep them to reread or give them to someone else as a present. Neither book succeeded--they're both in my 'resell' pile.
But I did think Twilight was entertaining. Enough so that when a student said she'd loan me the next one, I agreed. And that's how I finally read the whole series.
Man, did I have to do a lot more skimming in the last book. It was too long; plus I couldn't decide if I wanted to giggle each time Bella gazed lustfully at her new husband or if I should start banging my head against a wall because it meant that yet another 'Edward is so woooooonderful' internal speech was coming up. (Also lots of skimming during the birth scene--yikes.)
It was still entertaining, though. I'm not angry and ready to burn any copies--I'm just not interested in re-reading them. I knew that after the first one, though. Heh, and Bella Swan vampires better than you, so there.
If you're interested in knowing more details about the novels, I'd suggest cleolinda's snarky recaps. Or you can ask me--I'm happy to sum up what I can remember. Considering that these books were ideal for skimming readers like I tend to be, I may have trouble remembering. (A book has to be very well-written and detail-oriented to get me to slow down. I'm a fast reader and S. Meyer's writing style makes it easy to speed up even more.)
Fandom is an interesting place--I've seen some hugely funny Twilight series parodies, some well-reasoned posts about flaws in the writing and questionable content, but mostly I'm seeing the usual arguments about Mary Sues. Fandom people, the world likes Mary Sues! And Gary Stus! I'm not saying yay for books (or fanfiction) where the hero/heroine has no actual personality beyond their awesomeness, but generally speaking, people like reading about characters who have extraordinary qualities. Think about the stories we have that are part of the story-telling tradition: mythology, great heroes on quests... Anyway. Mary-Sue is a label that's overused in fandom, but not many people outside of fandom care about it, and they happily keep reading their Mary-Sues and Gary Stus.
I've also seen lots of stuff being heaped on the author because of religion. It's annoying. Did they do this to JK Rowling? I'm guessing yes, but maybe not as much (I have NO INTENTION of looking, because poking around in Harry Potter fandom is just scary). I do have to admit at laughing at some of the ideas, though--apparently we Mormons have to get all published works approved by our bishops before publishing? You'd think I'd have heard of that rule before, heh. Also, if the Twilight series is supposed to be Mormon propaganda, then 1) I can come up with a better idea than that for propaganda and 2) I'm really scared of all the future Mormons who will be drawn in by the lure of sparkly vampire true love. (Ugh. Do people believe their own comments? that teens are going to be flocking to my church because of books about dazzling vampires, hybrid babies and true love?)
One thing I've noticed, though, is that book length is a bit... extreme. Seven hundred plus pages in the last HP novel and in Breaking Dawn--honestly?!
Meyer and Rowling both have writing styles that have been criticized for a reason. Neither is a technically perfect writer. But a good editor would help a lot in overcoming this. It doesn't look like such a person exists at the publishing houses, just from book length alone. Rowling's later novels could've been tightened up some; Meyer's novels, quite a lot. (Hundreds of pages, maybe! *goes to hunt down red pen* oh, wait, I don't have a copy that I can mark up) Add in the weird punctutation (Rowling discovered the colon in the seventh book--too bad she didn't discover how to use it correctly) and purple prose (please, Ms. Meyers, use a few more periods and a few less adjectives!) and I have to wonder if anyone is reading these books ahead of time once they decided they had a winning product.
And that's the thing. With the internet, an author can go from being unknown to a huge success in just a few months; there's a rush to get the next book out even faster while the hype is still there and no one seems to care if the product isn't as good as it could've been. The price of printing extra pages must be outweighed by the expectation of selling more copies.
eta: Just for the record, I like the HP books--enough to keep my hardback copies and re-read them.
Wow. Okay, I think it's time for me to get away from the computer and stop talking about the publishing industry as if I had a clue--'cause I don't.
And now I'm starving--quite possibly because I've been sitting here for an hour typing. Wait, I totally forgot to include my V.C. Andrews comparison up there somewhere! Yeah! Dude, if everyone is worried that the tender young readers are going to be traumatized by the hybrid baby birth scene, I just want to know--where were they back when I was reading Flowers in the Attic?!? Talk about trauma... the non-con incest, the grandmother putting tar in whatsername's hair... Cathy. I wanted to block out her name, but it just came back to me. But I still read the second book in spite of the ick. Andrews made a nice chunk of cash from her whole incest-as-plotline series (multiple--she had lots of these books, all with the same basic idea; though I'm not sure where the cut-off point is, because ghost-writers took over after she died. The books were apparently that lucrative.). So if kids now are fascinated by sparkly vampires having kids at age eighteen, I'm not sure why I'm supposed to think it's worse than what their parents read back in the day.
And now it's even later and I need to go buy groceries before the stores are packed.