Reading

[perennialanna]

Preliminary warning: please bear in kind that my brain has been fried by a hideous bout of infantile insomnia which is still not over, and whatever a certain former prime minister may have thought, four and a half hours sleep a night really isn't enough for anyone.

Because I have a confession. Following a recentish post from legionseagle , I realised that all these years I had been condemning the Twilight novels from a position of utter ignorance, never having so much as opened one. So I thought that I ought to at least try the first, so I could carry on condemning them from a secure position of knowledge, etc.

And so far (not very far into the first) it's quite a lot better than I thought it would be.

I can quite see how my 14 year old self would have adored them. My sensible 33 year old self keeps shouting "He's gaslighting you! Run away now!", but I do keep reading. (I also yell "Two miles to school in the rain is inhuman? Grow up and move to Devon!". Maybe American miles are longer than ours though).

You can rest assured I shall not be writing any fic though.

Comments

[white_hart]

I read the first one a few years ago (a friend who had just finished an Oxford MSt in Women's Studies picked it for book group because she wanted something that would be easy to read) and I have to say I found it worse than I was expecting, but I may have had different expectations to you - I had thought it was a fantasy novel and was expecting it to be poorly written but plotty, and not being a fan of romance novels found it deeply dull as well as badly written and extremely dodgy in terms of gender politics. I'm not sure if my 14 year old self would have picked up on the gender politics but I suspect she would have been just as bored.

And never mind the two miles to school, I had Bella down as a spoilt brat from the moment when she started whinging about how inhuman it was that a house inhabited by two people only had one bathroom.

[perennialanna]

I have read worse written books - when I was 17 I tried to read Anna Pasternak's 'Princess in Love' but couldn't (it was a very wet summer holiday, I'd have read anything, but apparently not that).

What the book really needs is Granny Weatherwax or Emily Longbottom, or both. Bella is certainly no Tiffany Aching.

[antisoppist]

I have decided I am saving the experience until Daughter lands on them. At the moment it is all Percy Jackson, which is like Harry Potter except with summer camp and everyone secretly being Greek gods.

[perennialanna]

I wonder what it will be by the time the children are old enough to read for themselves?

At the moment we have a phase of poems as well as bedtime stories - either A A Milne or Old Possum. She seems to enjoy not understanding them.

[antisoppist]

My grandmother used to take me with her to Morning Prayer when I was five. Lots and lots of gloriously fabulously incomprehensible *words*.

And not three incomprehensibles, but one incomprehensible....

[tree_and_leaf]

That reminds me of the anecdote Sayers tells somewhere (possibly in "The Mind of the Maker"?) about a small boy who wanted the Athanasian Creed read to him as a treat!

Re: And not three incomprehensibles, but one incomprehensible....

[perennialanna]

When I was 6 or 7 I used to curl up in a cave behind the sofa with my mother's Book of Common Prayer.

It really shouldn't have surprised people so much that I ended up an Anglican, and an Anglo-Catholic at that.

Re: And not three incomprehensibles, but one incomprehensible....

[tree_and_leaf]

Practically predestined!

[caulkhead]

Am trying to remember what the equivalent was when we were teenagers, but I really don't think there was one.


Is she still too young for Jabberwocky? (maybe not for bedtime!) Lots and lots of words that mean nothing and still make sense. Heaven.

[nineveh_uk]

Virginia Andrews?

[white_hart]

I suspect that before the internet books didn't go viral in the same way. And fiction written specifically for teenagers was such a new thing then, too. Then again, if there was something everyone was reading, I was almost certainly reading something else (probably Anne McCaffery or Asimov).

[perennialanna]

Certainly there were books that went round half the class ('Forever' in the last year of middle school, Virginia Andrews and 'Clan of the Cave Bear' a couple of years later, and really we'd have been a lot better off with 'Forever' and some Jilly Cooper - just as much sex, rather more fun), but there was no sense that it went wider than the one school.

[white_hart]

My one moment of popularity was when my mother (being broadminded about these things) bought me a copy of Forever which everyone else in my class borrowed, but it didn't feel like a phenomenon in the same way. I do remember other girls reading and talking about Flowers in the Attic, but it never really appealed to me.

[antisoppist]

Talking early-mid 80s, passed round the school were Jaws and Carrie, both because they mentioned periods. Of all things, given the books in question.

After that The Thorn Birds and Lace. And then it was A-level and we got offically sanctioned Renaissance drama and Chaucer.

Yes, but look what it's done to publishing

[caulkhead]

I accidentally started reading a book this weekend* which turned out to contain a vampire who does yoga. Yoga.

*It has a great title and a very attractive cover, and I've picked it up and put it down in the library about eight times. It appears my instincts were right.

Re: Yes, but look what it's done to publishing

[perennialanna]

I got it from a charity shop, I am not encouraging the publishers...

Re: Yes, but look what it's done to publishing

[ankaret]

"And now, ve do ze Downward-Facing Bat..."