My Favourite Things Monday: Books/Series

My Favourite Things Monday, on a Tuesday - do you see the trend here?

One might wonder how I find time to read, let alone re-read books, with two kids and a full-time job and a part-time job. But I do. I have to. It's a compulsion. I'm the kind of person who has at least two if not three books going at the same time. If I have three books on the go, one of them will be a cookbook. One is usually a fiction and the other is usually nonfiction. I go through the fiction faster than the nonfiction choice, but I like to have variety. And I usually like to leave my various books lying open all the around the house. I like it that way, but M doesn't. I don't really get it.

This week's theme is books that we like to reread. Ever since I had to read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for a university course, I fell in love the whole series. Almost fanatically. As in pre-ordering the books months before they came out. Staying up until the wee small hours in the morning, or sometimes not at all, because I couldn't put the book down. The seventh book came out a few years ago, and the final movie is due this summer. I really don't know what I'm going to do with myself, now that all things HP are finished.

Sigh.



I think I can manage to find something to divert myself from my pain and nostalgia.

As in re-reading the series again. For the nth time.

However, there are other diversions. I've discovered these great books called The Pink Carnation series. Regency era romantic spy suspense combines with a little Bridget Jones or Becky Bloomwood. The modern-day heroine is a history graduate student doing research in England. It's not a huge stretch to see why I like this.

I also return to Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility or the lesser known Persuasion once in awhile. Pretty much anything in the historical or historical fiction category will catch my attention. Other authors I like are Philippa Gregory or Micheal Phillips (although he can be very pedantic at times).

the movie

This weekend I took part in a ritual sure to have been celebrated by people, mostly teenage girls, all across the continent, perhaps even the globe.

I watched Twilight, the movie.

I loved the books, as you can see here. But I was entirely ambiguous about the movie. It was disappointing in many ways, even giving moviemakers leeway with regards to the process of turning books into movies. Like I said on my FB page, at the risk of angering some pretty fanatic Twi-hards (the name for Twilight fans... although I really doubt that any of them would visit this blog...) Edward, who is a "tortured soul" kind of character in the book, looks constipated for most of the movie. The actor finally gets it right by the last scene. Jasper, not a main character but one of the more intriguing ones, looks the same way. I wonder how they could keep up the look that long while shooting such a lengthy movie. The only character I really thought was a perfect fit or who got the role right was the actor who played Bella's father, Charlie.

Another criticism I have of the movie is that it wasn't believable. I don't remember much from the acting course I took many years ago in college, but one thing that really sticks out is my professor stressing that what is going on onstage must be believable. It doesn't matter if it's written in the stage notes, if it's not done in a real way, the audience won't believe it and it will be forced and staged (kind of a paradox, really, that a play shouldn't be staged and it can't be forced even though you have to follow the stage directions).

I didn't really understand this until I was doing a dialogue with classmate and we had our coaching session. We were doing the scene from The Diary of Anne Frank where Peter and Anne have a conversation about movies and movie stars and Peter (finally) kisses Anne. My prof told me, Anne, that even though the stage directions said, Peter kisses Anne, Anne, in the scene, really works to get him to kiss her. If she didn't, and Peter kissed her anyways according to stage directions, it would seem false and fake. The kiss had to be believable. It had to come from somewhere, for some reason. Peter has to want to kiss her and the audience has to see that to believe the kiss is real.

I unconsciously apply that lesson to movies, even though it has more to do with the theatre. Most movies are not really lacking in the believable factor. But I found that Twilight was, especially when Bella and Edward are declaring their feelings for each other. Having read the book I knew that it had it to happen, but in the book you know all the feelings, thoughts and events that precede that scene. You know where they are coming from. In the movie, Edward has done little to cause Bella to fall in love with him and so their relationship feels forced.

But perhaps I'm reading too much into it. Movies based on books are rarely as good as the books are, with changes and shortcuts and different character interpretations. Imagination has no limits, which is what you use when you read; movies have to be within a certain time frame, they have a thrill factor and not be to complicated, etc. I do tend to give moviemakers a little leeway taking all that into consideration. But I guess I am a bit of a purist and tend to be critical when too big of changes are made or major things are left out(like the dragon scene in the movie version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and when the actors chosen do not fit into my reading of the character. A few of the book characters who really come to life (for me) in the movie version were Winona Ryder who plays Jo in Little Women, Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, most of the actors in the Harry Potter series and, in part, the newest version of Pride and Prejudice.

There is a risk involved watching a movie based on a much-loved book. You are asking the director and the actors to form the feel of the book and its characters for you. You risk altering the world and characters your imagination has formed, based on the author's words. Sometimes that first impression doesn't come back and your view is tainted by a bad movie interpretation. I have had that happen and it is sad in a way. The author is the first one who came up with and created this world and those characters in the first place. Anything else besides his or her written words and your imagination is really just getting it secondhand.

in review

So I finished reading the Twilight series today and felt the need to write about it. Spoiler warning: if you haven't read or finished the series, continue you at your own risk.

I first heard about Twilight when the movie came out last November. I didn't even know it was a book, let alone a whole series. I must admit that I dismissed it (and disdained it as a teenage fad) immediately. To me it was just Interview with the Vampire for the next generation, kind of like Averil Lavigne is this generation's Alanis Morisette (although I think Alanis did it better).

I had done the Anne Rice and Interview with the Vampire thing many years ago. And I had moved on. I have a unique approach to reading... I obsess and then read all I can of a particular author or genre. I spent one summer reading Jeanette Oke and cannot and will not pick up another book of hers. I did the same thing with John Grisham (although I will pick up a new book of his if it looks interesting), Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Hardy, Tolkien, Lewis, Irish writers, Canadian lit, Harry Potter, etc. I went through a lot of genres and authors this way. I had probably read a lot that I shouldn't have, or perhaps shouldn't have read certain things at the age/stage I was at. Most of the time I would just wander around the local library and pick up books that sounded remotely interesting. Your reading list is not boring that way, but you do get exposed to a lot of things you might be better off not knowing...

I had the same approach with the Twilight series. I probably would not have read it at all if my 17-year-old brother-in-law hadn't given it to me for Christmas. But once I picked it up, I was hooked. And I'm still trying to figure out why exactly this is. I mean for fantasy it is average. Harry Potter it is not. It does not even reach the same level as Lewis or Tolkien.

Maybe it is pure escapist fiction at its best and I was at a point in time where I needed something frivolous, mindless, vicariously exciting to give my mind a rest from stress, my course, trying to hear and identify the many different terms describing just how many different ways the human body can suffer (the cancer ones are the hardest).

However much I was hooked on the series there are some problems.

The story follows the story of Bella, your relatively average teenage girl who has real self-esteem problems. She falls in love with a member of the local vampire family Edward, who is the most perfect, wonderful, polite, beautiful, sensitive person on the planet. She can't get over how perfect he is physically, emotionally, personally. She reacts like a spineless jellyfish everytime he gets within two feet of her (although I do have to be honest to myself about this... M does the same thing to me). But her spinelessness goes deeper than that. Any self-respecting feminist would read this book and gag (as I did at times). It gets quite nauseating, but Bella just can't help herself... sigh... She's very descriptive.

This book is geared towards young adults/teenagers, an age group that already goes through mental hoops dealing with self-image, self-consciousness, etc. Reading this book would give me an even bigger complex.

I am probably not the best judge of this, being into many different kinds of books myself in my own teenage years, but I figured I was kind of an exception. I was a reader and that already set me apart from a lot of people. I was reading adult books when I was 14 or 15 so I didn't really know what Young Adult (YA) books were like. But I don't think they were as physical and sensual as this series is. Once Edward and Bella get together, the raging hormones take over. But since Edward is afraid of hurting Bella they don't ever take it all the way. However, they do seem to do everything else.

Also, all the characters seem to be stricken by extreme self-absorption and melodrama. Edward leaves Bella because he just can't take hurting her anymore. Bella just can't understand why someone as perfect as Edward can even be with her. Neither one can live without the other, literally (as book 2, New Moon describes). Jacob the werewolf, also in love with Bella, runs around in a funk of unrequited love and self pity.

I've had many discussions about this series with others who are fairly educated and well read. They too were hooked, although perplexed about it. One friend currently in college said she and her friends talked about how they could disguise the books so they could read them in class (the boring ones, of course).

On the other hand, I am a reader, a writer and a strong proponent of the written word. Even though I don't like everything about these books, I like the fact that kids and teenagers are getting excited about them. Anything that gets them away from the TV and computer and into a book is a good thing. Anything that gets them excited about books and reading is a good thing. And if the random and sometimes awkward literary references scattered throughout the series gets them into Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice or even Romeo and Juliet it will be even better.

So, if average writing gets teenagers (and adults) excited about reading and entices them onto bigger and better things then, in review, lovesick, self-absorbed, vampire teenager melodrama just might be worth it.