I Suck At Reading

Well, I could make up a litany of excuses as to why I have not been reading Hard Times by Charles Dickens (or much of anything else for that matter.) I had my wisdom teeth out a week ago, the economy is shit, I'm worried about money, blah blah fuckity fuck. Generally, I've been looking for distractions. Any kind of distraction. And, well, Hard Times is a shitty book to read if you are in pain and depressed about money. I guess that's sort of obvious.
Anyway, I am not at the moment feeling so good about books I think I "should read" because of one reason or another. There is a time for that, but it's not now at this particular moment. If I'm going to get anywhere in this competition, I need to focus on my natural inclinations - which are not always the most, uh, lofty. (gleefully claps hands together)TRASH TIME!

Anyway, instead of Dickens I've been reading and doing other things that do not fit into the parameters of this competition because they are less than 200 pages or are not books. So I can tell you what those are. Then I'm going to put Dickens aside for the moment and read something less weighty. Yeah? Good.

Locke and Key:Welcome to Lovecraft - Joe Hill


Locke and Key: Welcome to Lovecraft is the first issue of a 24-issue series written by Joe Hill, who happens to be Stephen King's son. He has won a bunch of Bram Stoker awards for his short fiction and this is his first comic. A co-worker and comic freak lent this to me. Her taste is very good, but I took one look at Gabriel Rodriguez's cutesy art and was like "Augh! This looks like Bratz! Terrible!" and didn't pick it up for two weeks. Then I started reading and finished it in two hours. It's damn good.

I wish I hadn't known that Hill was King-spawn, because I can't help but make comparisons between the two of them. Hill has King's knack for dialogue, especially with kids. A lot of the story comes from the perspective of a small child so this is important. And the story ultimately belied the cutesy artwork by being very, very dark, dealing with kids and murder and unspeakable paranormal terrors. And yes, it's not an accident that the town the story is based in is called, uh, Lovecraft. The Lovecraftian elements especially ring out when one character discovers a secret door that literally turns people into omniscient ghosts. The supernatural elements never overwhelm, though. It's heartfelt, too, and not in the melodramatic way that some horror comics are. Hill pitches his tone in a way that somehow matches the medium and the artwork perfectly. I don't know anything about comics, so whatever, take this as you will. But I eagerly await the next installment.

Elmore Leonard - When the Girls Come Out To Dance



I generally find I'm in the minority here, but I just fucking love Elmore Leonard. His books are so satisfying. I love the way his characters talk and always say the right thing. I love how most of his female heroines either carry guns or know how to shoot them. I love that the assholes in the stories always get their comeuppance in a very classy and/or hilarious way. I love that all his characters talk hard and drink ten of the hardest drinks in a row (generally made with some kind of horrible whiskey like Tullamore Dew with a twist of lime) and they can still rattle off one-liners. So all of these things happen in this collection of short stories and I was tickled, amused, saddened and most of all wistful. That's what Elmore Leonard does to me. He makes me wistful for experiences I couldn't possibly relate to. And yet I DO. Let's all quit our jobs and be con artists.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

I used to hate silent films. The few I had seen (mostly in some film class or another) struck me as cheesy or painfully melodramatic. And worst of all---unnecessary. I thought I was a "dialogue person." Then last weekend, I was supposed to go wish a friend farewell. I was vaguely anxious about this and drank a bunch of wine and watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on YouTube with extremely low expectations. I was completely mesmerized. Everything about this film is mind-boggling. The acting, the music, and most of all, the shots and the set-pieces:



YES. So beautiful and ahead of the times. Imagine an entire film designed like this about a hypnotist, his sleeping and very creepy subject, and MURDER. Also, there is a twist, and I found it genuinely SHOCKING. Who thought a movie could be so shocking in 1919? My goodness. After it was all over I was terrified and immediately went to the party because I had to be around other people. Also, I felt like an artless troll. Never again will I doubt the paralytic power of the silent film era. No, really.

Oh, and here's the YouTube link.

Ok. Thanks for indulging this diversion. Hopefully I will be back on track in a few.

9) I Hate Myself

Book Read: Um, Twilight. Book the first.

Pages: Enough.

Preamble: So you guys know the basic story, right? This is the book that has been on the New York Times bestseller list for like, five years, has made millions of girls cry and do obsessive fan art, and culminated in three sequels and a movie that got terrible reviews but made millions of dollars and broke a box office record in its opening weekend. Damn. I've been curious about this phenomenon for awhile now, stole the book from Bea, and began. I have used images from the film to illustrate my hack plot synopsis, which is as follows:

Girl moves to sunless Washington town, meets strange boy, who, according to the film version, looks like a glam rocker with ridiculous hair:



She spends half the book wondering why he's so weird and superhuman and can crush moving cars with one hand (HE'S JUST NOT LIKE THE OTHER BOYS!) and realizes he's a vampire with agonizing slowness (she meets a werewolf, who tells her this) and then the vampire takes her to a treed area where he shows her that in direct sunlight, contrary to popular misconception, vampires sparkle. Then he explains he's a "vegetarian" vampire, which is a stupid and nonsensical way of saying that he and his family drink the blood of bears instead of humans.

Then (and as I understand it, this is the driving conflict of the entire series) he explains that he craves her blood more than other humans' blood, which makes her love him all the more. Because it's dangerous, see?

And then there's a vampire baseball game.



Then some other vampires show up and everyone almost dies, but then no one dies and Edward and Bella go to the prom. THE END.

Distraction level: The first 40-odd pages of the book took me a few hours. I spent two hours putting it down and getting up to eat crackers, smoke cigarettes, make tea, watch videos of cats sneezing, make tomorrow's peanut butter sandwiches and basically do anything that did not involve me reading any more of this book. The third hour, I threw it at my boyfriend with glazed eyes and shouted in an unfocused manner while he listened politely.

You see, Twilight is not a good book. It is not good at all. It is in fact very, very bad. I am an ardent fan of bad, at times, but it must be followed by the qualifier "good." Bad-good. Craptastic. Some other examples of craptastic work in the florid goth-romance genre include anything by Poppy Z. Brite, or, say, Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews (the novel AND the movie, natch!). The thing is, I'm not sure whether Twilight (the novel) qualifies as good-bad or just bad-bad.

The Bad-Bad, The Good-Bad, and the Just Shitty: One trait that may qualify the novel as bad-bad are the many, many long passages where Bella dwells on Edward's handsomeness and godlike perfection. There is also many long conversational passages where Bella and Edward talk about how she likes him, how he likes her, and how he wants to drink her blood all the time because it's like "heroin" (that's a direct quote) and how she doesn't care because she loves him so much, over and over and over and oh hell I'll just show you some of my favorites.

In no particular order, these are three of the passages that made me basically stop reading and sent me into a fit of laughter/incredulous coughing sounds.

Page 91: Bella(girl who likes vampire) and Edward (vampire she likes) discuss driving to Seattle over the weekend.

Edward: Well, I was planning to go to Seattle in the next few weeks, and to be honest, I'm not sure your truck can make it.
Bella: My truck works fine, thank you for your concern.
Edward: But can your truck make it there on one tank of gas?
Bella: I don't see how that is any of your business.
Edward: The wasting of finite resources is everybody's business.

Page 331: Bella and Edward in the midst of one of about 60 conversations about liking each other, or something:

Bella: Well, do you find me attractive, in that way, at all?
Edward: I may not be human. But I am a man.

Page 357: Bella confesses to her father (who up to this point in the novel has shown no discernible personality) that she likes Edward.

"You are going out with Edward Cullen?" he thundered.
Uh oh. "I thought you liked the Cullens."
"He's too old for you," he ranted.
"We're both juniors," I corrected, though he was more right than he dreamed. (BECAUSE HE'S A VAMPIRE GET IT)
"Wait..."He paused. "Which one is Edwin?"
"Edward is the youngest, the one with reddish hair." The beautiful one. The godlike one.

Page 476: After some vampire-related adventure and near-death experiences, Bella explains to Edward for the first of the 600 times that she wants him to turn her into a vampire, too.

He rolled his eyes and set his lips. "Bella, we're not having this discussion anymore. I refuse to damn you to an eternity of night and that's it."

Flowers of Romance? This is the type of writing that is making girls all over North America insane. They are going insane over the character of Edward Cullen---his beauty, his perfection and his raging inner conflict over whether he should like Bella or eat her. As The Guardian astutely observes, Twilight is nothing more than a romance novel packaged cleverly as a young adult book. The bad dialogue, poor character development, cheesy attempts at humor and lingering passages of Bella smelling Edward's breath and Edward breathing on her face all sexy-like remind me of every bodice-ripper I've ever read in the bathtub.

Despite all my sneering, I have to admit this isn't necessarily an awful thing. V.C. Andrews employed the same trick and I loved her novels during my most hormonal years. And the bitch of it all is that Twilight is absorbing---absorbing in an addictive, soul-sucking sort of way. Once I got past my initial horror, I tore through the thing in about three hours. The book weaves a sickening sort of spell that you can't escape even as you curse yourself for ever picking it up in the first place. A reviewer at Pajiba put it aptly:

That’s Twilight. It’s intoxicating. And I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s intoxicating like convenience-store malt liquor — you get a hangover before you’re even drunk. It’s addictive. Like crack cocaine, only you don’t get to experience the high, you just skip straight ahead to the blackout and wake up in a stranger’s bed with a matchbox car six inches deep into your rectum. But you can’t turn away.

Bella Swan: Empty Vessel: I can understand why teenage girls---and all girls---eat this up. One of the big reasons is that the main character, Bella, is so passive and indistinct that you can literally insert yourself into her body---and thusly into the handsome Edward Cullen's arms. My friend Bea made a good point as she was tearing her way through the beast, saying that Bella is nothing but a vessel for the readers' own unresolved romanticism and adolescent crush tendencies.

That's the one thing Meyer does well: she helps you remember what it was like to be a teenage girl having a crush on the cute boy at school. We were all there. The constant hopefulness that the boy would be in class, pretending not to notice him so he wouldn't notice you, the hours of thought devoted to what is he doing? where is he right now? what is he thinking? and being generally irrational and insane. I remember being there (although my objects of affection were not nearly as cavalier and indestructible as Edward Cullen. Also, at Bella's age I looked like the dorky kid from The Wonder Years in drag, so my crushes were largely unrequited.)

There's been a lot of arguments amongst friends of mine and in various media about Bella's passivity and vaguely nauseating role as the sacrificial lamb here. She loves Edward so much that nothing else matters in her life: not her goals, her dreams, college, anything like that. Her dream is to be with Edward forever. That kind of supplication definitely made me queasy as I read. I also found it compelling.

I have never read a young novel in which a female character was so passive. Most of the authors I read as a young girl (S.E. Hinton, Roald Dahl, Gordon Korman, shit, even Stephen King for Christ's sake) featured women who were strong or vengeful or brilliant or sassy or quirky. Bella is none of these. She is simply a simmering cauldron of love for Edward, who lets him save her over and over again. Others will find this completely objectionable or irrelevant. I'm torn between both of these sentiments. Either way, I would kill someone to get ahold of the next book. And yep, I kind of hate myself for it.

Final Numbers for January

Well hot dog!

Total books read: 8

Total pages read: 2612

Number of books left to read: 92

Goals: More Charles Dickens, less HBO on DVD, Joan Didion...and a certain insanely popular young adult novel that has kicked off three sequels and a movie and made a star of a tall gaunt young man with incredibly shitty hair. Guessed yet?

Double Book Attack: 7) Three Day Road and 8) Flight

Book(S) Read/Authors: Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, and Flight by Sherman Alexie

Pages: Three Day Road (382) Flight (181) And yes, I realize Flight is a little short for the, uh, RULES, but I figure TDR's whopping girth more than makes up for it.

Distraction level: Um, I dunno? I managed to negotiate the reading with a vigorous schedule of listening to the new Bruce Springsteen album (meh) watching Takashi Miike films (and enjoying the resultant nightmares) and drinking gin and tonics with Bea and Eric. Yep. Vigorous.

Method of Acquisition: Three Day Road has been recommended to me by a few people whose tastes I completely respect. Thanks Mike and Keith! Meanwhile I picked up Flight on a whim in my local library's Native section.

Flight and Three Day Road are both about the Native experience, but that comparison is extremely broad. They're both very different books. Three Day Road deals with two Cree best friends who leave Moose Factory to go and fight in France during World War One; Flight is set in 2007 and follows a half-Indian fifteen-year-old pimply protagonist and budding criminal who experiences time travel. At the same time, the boys in these books are also linked by their overwhelming awareness of their culture, its rituals and the stereotypes born from those rituals.

Three Day Road was an interesting read. It's one of those critically adored sprawling Canadian novels that will no doubt find its place in the canon of very good, enduring historical Canadian literature, snuggled alongside In The Skin of a Lion and The Wars. In that light, it is a very good book indeed. Boyden writes in sparse, controlled sentences. He doesn't waste a word. Considering that two of the three main characters have only a rudimentary grasp of English, the simple prose makes sense---the characters speak, think and reflect with a necessary economy.

I read a review somewhere that pointed out that although Boyden is dealing with stock characters---the mysterious native medicine woman, the two best friends destroyed by a war, etc etc---somehow it doesn't feel tired. I wouldn't entirely agree with this. But that's a personal thing. I'm pretty numb towards the World War One theme as rendered in literature and film, even one as well-conceived as Three Day Road. At risk of sounding a bit callous, I've simply seen too much of it. Although the scenes in the trenches are well-plotted and occasionally wrenching, I couldn't get entirely swept up in them. I was more taken by the smaller moments in the book...the moments lost in translation as a white sergeant shouts at one of the boys, who curses at him in Cree while the other boy snickers...the medicine woman whispering in the ear of her morphine-addled nephew, her arm slung across his body as he lies half-dead in a sweat lodge...the boys pushing a canoe through a shallow lake as a forest fire rages around them. Boyden is able to inhabit the brains of his characters and push breath through them. It's here where he really shines, and I think he'll only get better as time passes.

Flight styles itself like Russell Banks' Rule of the Bone crossed with a Kurt Vonnegut novel, but without the whimsy. This is a dark book that makes no bones about the intensity of its subject matter. Alexie says it loud and clear: White people fucked Native Americans up first, but Native Americans have also fucked themselves up. Who's to blame? Where does this cycle end?

Zits is Alexie's antagonist. He's smart and funny but he's been delivered a shit deal in life with a dead mother and a father who ran out on him the day he was born. Zits bounces from foster home to foster home and occasionally prison with seeming aimlessness, but we soon see that beneath the cratered skin, there is a rage quietly seething. After hooking up with a white cellmate during a stint in "kid jail," Zits begins developing a political and historical consciousness that culminates with him marching into a bank: a paintball gun in one pocket, a real .45 in the other. As he draws the guns and gets ready to shoot, he blacks out and wakes up in Red River, Idaho in 1970 in the body of a burly white cop. And---to whorishly cop some Vonnegut---so it goes.

Like Boyden, Alexie attempts to re-create historical situations---although he does it much more quickly and in fragments due to the nature of Zits' predicament. Most effective is the scene where Zits finds himself in the body of an elderly white Indian tracker in the 19th century. The battle that follows is more visceral and immediate than many of the war scenes in Boyden's novel. There's a lot of high points like this in the book but it's also really uneven. Alexie's super-blunt style is both exciting and off-putting: After a certain point, I started to get sick of Zits yelling at me through the pages. At the same time, there's no denying that what he's witnessing through these various bodies is affecting. It's 2007 and native Americans and Canadians are still living in third-world conditions, shouldering the burden of a heavy past and the continued platitudes of politicians. (Ahemcough, Stephen Harper!) Alexie is an able and entertaining guide through these worlds. I just wish he was a little more subtle in his methods. In that regard, he could certainly use a lesson from Joseph Boyden. But Alexie also shows a fearlessness that Boyden doesn't quite attain in Three Day Road, and in that sense, Alexie's hammer-over-the-head approach has resonated longer with me.