Julia Slaughter

Posts Tagged ‘Books’

I did NOT see the Lightning Thief over the weekend, I have friends who have read and loved the books and they were unable to go so I put it off waiting for a time when we can all go. However, I did finish the fifth and final (?) book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. If you notice, usually I try to keep my reading library (on the left) up to date and when I finish books I tend to rate it and write a mini-review, but I didn’t do that with this series, the problem was that I read them all back to back to back so I’m having a hard time remembering where one book ends and another begins.

The Percy Jackson and the Olympians Hardback Complete Set

For Christmas I got the complete Percy Jackson set, and I love these books – they are technically children’s books (the age range is 9-12) but if you are in touch with your inner child or if you have a vivid imagination the series is captivating.

I love that the whole series is steeped in Mythology. (I am shocked by the negative reviews that comment that there are plot elements similar to Greek mythology – hello, Percy Jackson is Poseidon’s son, really you didn’t see that coming?) I’ve always loved Greek and Roman mythology so these were right up my alley. Once I picked up the first book it was almost impossible to put the series down until I was finished. They are fast paced and so much fun. Yes there are elements in the book that give a nod to some of the old school Greek Myths that we know and love, but I think it’s a respectful nod, not an issue of Riordan stealing from the classics.

I really enjoyed the characters, I liked that the series was chock full of heroes and heroines who were amazing warriors. I also liked that the characters were incredibly complex – the good guys weren’t without flaws and the bad guys were not bad beyond the point of redemption. I liked the dimension that this added to the characters and how, despite their super powers, it made them more real.

Now that I’ve read the whole series I am chomping at the bit to see the movie, I can’t wait to see how faithful they were to the plot and characters I’ve grown so terribly fond of.

I’m here to confess – I’ve read Twilight and the subsequent books in the series, I’ve even read what Stephenie Meyer posted on her website of Midnight Sun. I read the books under protest, my best friend Kim found the books and LOVED them. I caught snippets of her discussing them with other people, Edward this and Edward that, and I was 110% NOT INTERESTED.

Kim tried planting little seeds to pique my curiosity – “vampires, you like vampires.” Me, yes I love vampires – I’ve loved them since I was in grade school and we went on a field trip to St.Louis cemetery and I imagined all the little “houses” inhabited by sleeping vampires, waiting for the sun to set. I viewed vampires like stray dogs, you don’t have to be afraid of them but you have to be cautious and respectful until you’ve established a rapport. Nope, vampires had been in my life forever, I wasn’t interested in the “propaganda” that had suddenly made them part of the mainstream. I would not read Twilight.

Kim tried to draw parallels between myself and the author, mentioning how well read we were and how Stephenie Meyer and I seemed to read  the same books. I believe she saw this as a huge compliment. I was unmoved. I would not read Twilight.

Finally after almost two years and three of the four books being published later, Kim threatened me that our friendship was in peril if I didn’t read the books – I read Twilight.

I am shocked by how polarizing these books seem to be. People love them with a religious frevor – the disciples of Twilight study them, reread them, analyze them, debate them, and devotedly defend them. While people who hate them seem to crusade against them with an oddly intense zeal. I can honestly say that I’m in the middle – I read them, I enjoyed them, and I put them on the shelf and moved on to something else. Like many books in my life I revisit them on occasion, but I have yet to join the fight, on either side.

I don’t care that Bella might not be a great role model. I’ve never really looked to books for role models, well definitely not fiction books, if I encounter one I consider myself to be fortunate. I think Bella is a great “everyman” kind of character – she’s not flawless, she’s not the prom queen, she’s not a gifted athlete, she could be one of millions of girls. In fact I would venture to say that’s why her story has reached millions of people.

I’ve noticed Edward gets called a stalker and accused of being abusive by his detractors. I guess I’m terribly short sighted because I didn’t really see that either. He seems moody at times, but he is eternally a teenage boy so that seems fitting. He watches over Bella, but I never felt threatened by his presence in her world – on the contrary it seems to help her for more than hurt her.

I’ve heard complaints about Meyer’s reinvention of vampire lore. Chief among them seems to be “vampires shouldn’t sparkle” to which I would maturely respond with an exasperated whatever. The beauty of being an author is that you can create your own world and people it with whoever you want, as readers we have a choice to read or not to read. If your vampires *have* to be blood thirsty creatures, why would you even bother picking up the series? (I, personally, found John Carpenter’s Vampire Lore to be much more offensive…really, ask us to believe that vampires are hundreds of years old and yet sleeping in the dirt and hardly able to string a cohesive sentence together, please! He made them glorified cockroaches! I digress…)

I asked Kim once before I read Twilight what the appeal was and she told me it was all about the love that Bella and Edward share, and that he would do anything for her. It’s simple and straightforward but I think for all the Twilight Disciples – that’s it, and in today’s world I think many girls need to believe that there is an Edward out there.

We live in a world where a girl was brutally beaten and raped, a few scant yards from her school. Young men kept coming outside, some of them to join in, and not one of them to alert the authorities or get involved. I wish there could’ve been a gentleman with a conscience among any one of those men, he didn’t have to love her or be willing to die for her, but how about recognize that she was a human being and this was a terrible act of violence.

How can you blame girls who live in a world where that kind of thing can happen for taking solace in a character who watches over the girl he loves? He risks his life for her. Once he reconciles his feelings for her he treats her gently and with respect. He doesn’t constantly try to maul and paw at her – he romances her.

Twilight extols the virtue of love and respect and while I am not a Twilight disciple – I am a disciple of love and a firm believer in respect as it applies to humans, undead, and immortals alike.

I have always liked to read book that give me a little peek into another time or another culture. I admit that I like reading Jane Austen just because it amuses me to hear terms like “countenance” and talk of cousins marrying without a crack made about being from Alabama or Mississippi. (After all this was British gentry!) However, I have to admit that books set in faraway places are also intriguing to me, particularly the Middle East. I suppose it’s because an area of the world that I know so little about and that seems so different from our own.

In was my desire to get a peek into the Middle East that caused me to pick up – Reading Lolita in Theran which I was less than impressed with. I think that the book was trying so hard to be one of the great works of literature in discusses and dissects in the book that it failed to entertain me. I was very impressed by how smart the author was, but my understanding about things in Iran was hazy at best. The meat of the story – the women and their relationships, left me feeling empty and unfulfilled.

My next attempt was Kabul Beauty School which was entertaining but it was the voice of an outsider looking in, and so I still felt like I didn’t quite get the inside view I really wanted. (I also though the author was a little off her rocker – marrying a man she could barely communicate with who was married to another woman but that’s a whole different issue all together.)

Finally along came Mahbod Seraji’s Rooftops of Tehran, here is the book I waited for!

First off this book is Fiction so there can be no shocking expose later to reveal that characters were fabricated causing me to question what else might have been fabricated, (Ala Kabul Beauty School) but the story was beautiful. I lived on that alley, and I laughed at the rash of pranks that erupted amongst the kids there, I cried at the loss of innocence and the loss of love. I carefully considered my own culture as it was reflected to me through the storyteller. (Seriously there have been times I wanted to wail with grief, why is that frowned on here?)

I took my time and cherished this book, I savored the highs and I mourned the lows. I almost wish there was a sequel so I could find out what happened to these characters that I grew to love but the ending was so perfect that perhaps it’s best to leave well enough alone.

This is a book I will reread and every time I expect to laugh and cry, just the way I did this time. What a fantastic book!

It’s funny how my moods are tied to the weather, because when I opened the door and the hot air hit me in the face – I felt myself deflate. I suppose this is Indian Summer. The temperature is rocketing towards the upper 80’s and the humidity makes the air feel like a hot wet towel. Sadly,  the weather was at its nicest while work was at it’s busiest, but I’ve had a taste of Fall and I’m hopeful that more is coming soon!

Yesterday I retreated from the heat to my local bookstore, but the clock was ticking as Rascal was at home waiting to be let outside. I wandered among the aisles and picked up a book, but on my way out I spied this sitting on a table:

At first I thought that surely it was a joke, but upon further investigation I find that it’s not a joke, per say, but rather a parody. See, Pride and Prejudice is in the public domain which means the copyright has expired, it’s why you can download a copy of someone reading it for free from Librivox, so someone decided what Pride and Prejudice really needed was, of course, zombies.

I had rather mixed emotions about this book, see I like Pride and Prejudice. I’ve read it half a dozen times and listened to it about a dozen times, so I wasn’t sure how I felt about anyone messing with Miss Elizabeth and Mr.Darcy but I have to admit – I’m intrigued. I read the plot summary on Wikipedia and I think I might actually buy it.

What is so tantalizing to me is that the author managed to right a few wrongs. There are some characters that I always felt that Austen let get off too easily, but not so now that Seth Grahame-Smith has interceded. It looks like the dastardly Wickham is going to get his just desserts! (Even more so than just by virtue of marrying the flighty, superficial Lydia!)

I have another stack of books on their way from Amazon, but once it starts to dwindle – bring on the undead!

I am in a book club, we’re a small group, there are just three of us but we all share a love for books. I like the way we talk about books, as a group we aren’t into dissecting the writing or the grammar but we like to talk about the characters and the stories focusing on what we liked rather than what we didn’t like.

Mr.Fitzwilliam Darcy

Last month I got to pick and selected Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones, so I suppose it’s inevitable that the conversations turned to Jace. I was fascinated and intrigued to see that my friends were cheering for Jace and Clary, just the way I was. As the discussion went on and on somehow comparisons were made from Jace to Jane Austen’s Mr.Darcy and my friend Lisa wanted to know what it is about men like Jace and Mr.Darcy that makes women like them so much. I have contemplated Lisa’s question for days because frankly of our triumvirate, I am the one with the most dating experience and I have come to this conclusion – Mr.Darcy has gotten a bad rap.

I admit that Mr.Darcy is a bit of clod, but I don’t really think he’s quite the literary bad boy that he’s made out to be. His time was a time when there was a very definite class system in place, a class system that people lived and died by. I mean really think of all the drama that surrounded Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles and that was in 1990’s, Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in the 1800’s.

Here we have a man who takes honor and responsibility very seriously, and when he meets our heroine he is practically engaged to someone suitable who was picked out by his family. (Well actually his future wife IS family, a cousin which was a pretty common place event for that time period as well.) He’s in the company of a friend he is dearly devoted to who is kind and very easily influenced by the people around him, and who Mr.Darcy clearly feels like he has to look out for. Can we really blame him for not immediately recognizing the finer points of our Miss Bennet?

Okay, so Mr.Darcy rises above all of his preconceived notions and falls for Miss Bennet and she, rightfully, crucifies him for being such a clod. Now any other man in the face of the telling off that he gets, would slink off with his tail in between his legs and never be seen my any Bennet or friend of Bennet again. However, our honorable and noble Mr.Darcy doesn’t fuss or fight, but he sets about making things right. (I could also point out that Miss Bennet wasn’t entirely right in all of her accusations but Mr.Darcy doesn’t quibble over these things he is a man of action.) So really, how does any of this translate to him being a bad boy? Clod, absolutely, but not a bad boy.

Jace, who I absolutely adore is a bad boy. He is sneering and rude to Clary when he meets her. He’s later seen canoodling with some pixie chick, and rumor has it he’s done alot more than canoodling. He is a fierce warrior with a ton of redeeming qualities but really can you trust him with your heart? I’m not so sure.

So Jace, beautiful and redeemable but bad boy; Mr.Darcy beautiful, akward, but merely a bit of a clod and really how can you not love someone like that?

My "To Be Read" stack of books

I keep a stack of books “To Be Read” and despite the fact that you can see my list in the Now Reading  section of my website, I couldn’t resist snapping a quick picture of them.  I feel real anxiety if I don’t have at least one book in the stack, because what if I finish what I’m reading and the bookstores are inconviently closed? What would I do? (I know that sounds so silly!) I take at least three books with me if I go on vacation just in case between plane rides and hotel rooms I end up knocking out more than one. Yes it’s true, I am a book loving fool.

I am currently reading and LOVING, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, I found it in the Children’s section of my local bookstore, that’s right not even the Young Adult section – the Children’s section (the age range on the book is 9 to 12). Shortly after I bought the book I noticed that another author I’ve been reading and I admire was pondering why her reading tendencies tend to lean towards the young adults book and it really got me thinking about why I read what I read.

I love to read, I am a devourer of books. My favorite books are the ones that grip you and don’t let go. George RR Martin has often kept me up until the wee small hours of the morning (quite a feat since I am a notorious early bird), Stephenie Meyer has caused me to sneak a book into the bathroom because my lunch ended before the chapter did, and there are countless others that I have read going down the stairs or at stop lights. My love of books goes beyond genres and crosses age barriers, if it’s good and I like it I’ll read it.

I think the appeal of books written for children and young adults is that since your audience has a wide and vast imagination, so as an artist you are free to tap into your own imagination. The ability to suspend disbelief is so much greater when we are younger, because it’s easy to believe that anything is still possible!

I’m reminded of an advertising class I took when I was in college, the professor told us of one of his advanced classes where he asked his students to draw a tiger, they were asked to draw either an imaginative one or a fantastical one – I’m unclear on the wording exactly. He showed us the results, the drawings were beautiful and elaborate but they were all black and white, or black and orange, tigers. He then showed us the results when a class of grade schoolers was asked to do the same thing and the results were spectacularly different. They drawings from the grade schoolers were multicolor, some even used glitters, there were tigers with wings, tigers being ridden like horses, tigers that reinvented what the word tiger means for most of us. My professor encouraged us to try to tap into that inner grade schooler and call up that kind of imagination.

I think Children’s books are fun to read because the author can out any inhibitions to their imagination aside. Neil Gaiman can’t sell every adult on the premise that a toddler, who has just become orphaned, being raised in a graveyard but a kid would pick it up and immediately accept and embrace that premise. They don’t worry about the legality or the logistics and if you let go of those things you lose yourself in an amazing world of fascinating characters. I truly can’t wait to see where this one takes me!

Likewise, I think I like young adult books because they tap into different kind of emotions, and they straddle the line between reality and fantasy rather effortlessly. They remind me of that first fierce flush of love and a time when the road stretched before me full of limitless possibilities. I love these stories too.

Of course I still read “adult” books from a wide variety of genres – George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire (because I can’t say that I read all fantasy), books about people from other times or other cultures but I like for them to be  told with color and texture that makes me feel like I’m there, experiencing with them. I’ve sampled a few historical fictions, sometimes they are a little dry for me, and I must confess that I’ve developed a new affinity for the classics as I’ve gotten older. I couldn’t stand them when I was younger, but I’ve since decided my big objection was mostly that I was being forced to read them; once I decided I wanted to check them out myself, they were marvelous.

I’m trying to think of an exercise to help me get in touch with my inner child, so I can harness some of the crazy imagination I had back then and put it to work! Hmm, this may require further explorations.

If you’re interested, this is the link to the “trailer” for The Graveyard Book, I encourage you to check it out!