You Cannot Hate Twilight Like I Hate Twilight

I was planning to write about Twilight at some point. First of all, it’s stupid as shit. Second, it’s about time; people have been going nuts over it for a couple of years, and the fuss is even dying down (thank God). But the reason I haven’t reviewed the book is–a reason that is probably already obvious–is that I hate Twilight so much that I can’t think about it without getting into Evil Grandpa levels of cranky. I know plenty of people I like have a fondness for Twilight but it’s just: why this of all things? Why a vampire romance? Why why why?

But I’m running low on ideas for books that most people have read (send me some!) so today I thought I would just take the plunge. I searched “twilight” on my computer because I knew I had gotten high and written a rant about Twilight at some point fourth year. Instead, I found this gem, which I had completely forgotten about and don’t remember writing. The reason for this is as follows: I turned in my thesis on March 31st and after that, I had not a thing due until May 3rd, when I had a ten-page criticism paper due. And so, in accordance with the way that I spent the whole intervening month, it turns out I did get high and write a rant about Twilight. Rereading it I was half angry that this is what I ended up doing in college, and half totally jealous of myself for taking classes that permitted me to get on my high horse like this.

The paper is called “Edward Cullen and To-Be-Looked-At-Ness: Reversal of the Cinematic Gaze in Twilight.” A) Ridiculous and B) I remember telling my dear friend Walt about it, and he said, “That sounds interesting but what is the reversal of the gays?” Generally it is a thick, silly essay, dripping with formal indignation and feminist rage and the writing of a person who has been drunk and wearing a bathing suit for two weeks. I feel like I have about ten friends who would think it’s funny so I’m posting it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Twilight after all, it’s just so irritating to me. Here are my views in a nutshell: Bella is boring and sucks. Girls only like her because Edward likes her and they want to be her, which is a harmful way to think, because Edward sucks too. Twilight, like a Taylor Swift song but to a much larger degree, seems innocuous and perfectly contemporary but is really passive/objectifying/repressive and most importantly, lame. It’s the same hundred words recycled over and over again (Bella said Edward stared glitter vampire brooding attraction flying werewolf gaze rain silent powerful etc), which again, is just like Taylor Swift (fifteen boy date car eyes window dream love princess etc). And I heard that in the last book Bella has some sort of alien baby that tries to eat her. Yeah, America. This one’s on you.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte

To balance out the hysteria of my previous post, I was thinking: what are books I don’t like? There aren’t too many, or too many I can review, for the obvious reason that if it looks shitty or unappealing I’m not going to read it. L.A. Candy, by Lauren Conrad. It’s a bestseller but, well, that’s ridiculous. The Shack. I know I would hate that book so much that I’m exhausted even thinking about the amount of bitter religious bile it would inspire within my organs. I haven’t really read too many books I don’t like. But there are a few. And there is one book that I find so distasteful that it has a literally narcoleptic effect on me, and that book is Jane Eyre.

I do not like the Bronte sisters. I don’t like any of that business. I couldn’t even really stomach Jane Austen until halfway through the month before I turned in my thesis about national fictions and the American Dream, at which point my upbringing kicked in and every other thought was “Who the fuck cares?” and I started physically craving the sweet relief of reading globally oblivious literature about rich white imperialists visiting each others’ massive cottages for gossip and tea. But at least Jane Austen is funny. Charlotte Bronte is not funny. Charlotte Bronte is this:

“I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.”

You don’t like walking? You narrate your life with the liveliness of a snail crawling through honey? You are going to make me read about people named Bessie and Georgiana? Seriously, when I read this first section of Jane Eyre for the first time, I fell asleep. And then I tried to pick it up again the next night and then also instantly fell asleep. I have no capacity to read this style. Even when the book becomes about Crazy Bertha in the Attic and fire and India and brooding Mr. Rochester, I felt like I was reading a book that Samantha, that American Girl doll, would have written. I have to stop here because even thinking about Jane Eyre this much is making me sleepy.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Holy balls this book is awesome. Holy balls I want to mail you a copy right now. There is a select set of things that are awesome enough to be both mainstream and endlessly fascinating–the things that you’re like “I’m not going to bother explaining, just watch it/read it/eat it.” Like, I don’t know, Arrested Development and the margarita from Chili’s where you get the take-home shaker. The Hunger Games is like that. It’s so satisfying. It’s like late-night. Holy balls.

I will pause the party in my pants for a second to say, to be honest, this is pretty much my ideal book. Badass tough-girl protagonist, check. Post-apocalypse, check. American government gone amazingly psychotic, check. An annual nationally televised event starring twenty-four children who are trained for combat and then forced to kill each other in an elaborate rigged arena, fucking check. I knew that much about the book from reading reviews before I read it, and although my expectations were high, the book was all like, “Pssh Jia you think you know me?” and turned out to be better than I could have imagined. I mean, after I picked it up this weekend I could not put it down. As in, I’ve been skiing all day, I’m snowed into a comfy bed, I just ate a bacon cheeseburger and took three Tylenol PMs and still could not put the book down despite all other signs pointing to coma.

But don’t take my word for it. Read this book. It will take you two terrifically enjoyable hours. Don’t wait for the inevitable, slightly mishandled movie version starring Dakota Fanning with dirt on her face. It’s not perfect, but that’s because it’s too busy being perfect in other ways, do you know what I mean? Like, there’s no room to expand on the sociopolitical richness of the idea of post-collapse America divided into 12 economic “districts” and ruled by a pathological Capitol anchored securely within the Rocky Mountains–there’s no room to work those implications out while you’re guiding a dozen children through a Triwizard Tournament on serious acid. Sorry, I take that back, this book is perfect. Just read it.

The Baby-Sitters Club, by Ann M. Martin

So I know I sometimes partake in the irritating phenomenon that I call grandpa syndrome: the young people’s tendency to say things like “In my day, we didn’t have iPhones, we only had regular cell phones” and join Facebook groups like “I used to have to blow on my video games to make them work” and all the other vaguely kitschy, soapbox navel-gazing that makes me think that this high-pace nostalgia both A) has no place in a world of lightspeed technology and B) is an inevitable byproduct of it as well.

But I am still not okay with these books being edited to fit “contemporary interests” and re-released. There is no need to trade analog for digital here. But better an edited re-release than none at all, because like I said in the Ballet Shoes review, it might greatly benefit today’s thong-wearing, Twilight-guzzling tween ladies to read books in which bake sales, self-employment and wearing your boyfriend’s letter jacket are as exciting as anything needs to be. Even bitchy Lila from Sweet Valley High pales in comparison to little freshman Jenny from Gossip Girl and the sex-capade adventures that she gets up to at boarding school. The framework is identical, almost–it’s just that where Ann M. Martin opened every book by describing Kristy’s baseball cap and Mary Anne’s braided pigtails, Cecily von Ziegesar opens every book talking about the glitzy New York skyline and Jenny’s huge tits.

So while there are a ton of great children’s and young adult books still being written, there’s nothing like The Baby-Sitters Club, a series very grounded in reality. In these books, the families are real and complicated (remember how strict Mary-Anne’s dad was, and how Kristy’s parents were getting divorced, and how Stacey had diabetes–an unglamorous but very real and fantastic detail that would never make it into a book today). The BSC girls had strong personalities and political interests even in middle school–Dawn was an anti-gun vegetarian–a stark contrast to blank-slate, passive Bella of the Twilight books. And it’s important that, while the Baby-Sitters Club is not a fantasy of privilege or a fantasy at all, it was still totally exciting. It showed us that after-school activities and (kill me) good clean fun can still be girly and fascinating. I mean, last year my roommate and I got home from bars and tried to order a dozen copies of #15 – Little Miss Stoneybrook and Dawn off eBay. This shit was good.

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

One of my roommates and I were in this (wonderful) class and received The Blind Assassin, also by Margaret Atwood, as our weekly reading assignment. Several (smart, cool) ladies in the class started to wax enthusiastic about Queen Margaret, specifically speaking the praises of The Handmaid’s Tale, which is famous, honored, widely read and widely adapted. Walking away from class later, my roommate and I awkwardly finished each others’ sentences. She: “So, this book should be–” Me: “–good, but I don’t know, that whole sci-fi–” She: “–feminist, dystopian, ovaries, government thing–” Me: “–yeah, gross, Margaret Atwood’s not really–” She: “–what I want to read this weekend.”

But in retrospect, we were probably just being assholes feeling like it was our cool-duty as post-post-whatever-feminists to deny the absolutely revolutionary nature of this book. For example, I was at the bar yesterday enjoying the beautiful slice of Texas sunshine and this guy said something that reminded me to take my birth control. I took it, and he looked at my boyfriend and goes, “You’re welcome, sir.” I was like, “I’m welcome too!” and he said, “Blah blah our bodies ourselves, no lady shit at the table.” While I thought that was funny, I also thought it was telling of the fact that birth control sometimes seems to have been reduced to a girls’ chore; although we’re long past the Mad Men days, it’s akin to dusting in a French maid’s outfit, it signifies both promiscuity and a weird servility, it’s like a mild daily apology for the combination of liking sex and being pregnable. But then later that night, my boyfriend suggested that birth control rivals the Internet as far as Awesome Inventions go. And I agree so heartily that it should cancel out my previous kvetching. Because…

In The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a future dystopian America where disease and ecological meltdown has led a theocratic, military-enforced white male political party to completely take over the government, women are forced to be one thing to one person. They are either Wives, who are wives, Marthas, who are maids, or Handmaids, who bear children for the wives’ husbands, are named after the man to whom they are assigned, and are not allowed to read. The Handmaids, although forced into their duties, are seen as sluts by the Wives and Marthas. This all sounds ridiculous, but it’s written in the most understated, artful and whip-smart way possible. For example, Atwood doesn’t dodge any of the nuts-and-bolts details; as the magnitude of the situation unfolds, we find out that the women lost their power in scarily reasonable steps, their bank accounts being first transferred to their husbands’ then erased, their rights being suspended under what first was an emergency security situation and then bleak permanent reality. This is a great, important book and from now on I’ll freely admit my embrace of Margaret Atwood’s whole feminist sci-fi thing.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower

You know when you’re trying to find a song that feels like what you want to listen to, and you keep shuffling through iTunes/pressing next on Pandora till it tells you that you’ve maxed out for the hour, and everything either hurts your ears or feels wrongly suggestive of emotion, so you put on Led Zeppelin or Beach House because they’re neutral and by the third song you’re remembering that it shouldn’t be an effort to find the music you want to listen to because some things always sound right.

Well, not that that emo rant made sense, but it’s the same thing for me when I’m trying to pick out a book. I’m usually overly aware of how gendered the book feels, and I’m almost never in the mood to read something intensely slanted one way or another, like Graham Greene or Alice Munro; like with music, I want the middle ground, something artful but devoid of visible construction, something that doesn’t need to be read late at night to make its full impact. All that is to say, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is pitch-perfect. It’s one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read, I think, and it always fits that neutral wish; I could read this any day, in any mood. Two important reasons for this: Wells Tower (what a name) understands both men and women, and he understands how to invisibly deconstruct ordinariness to make it vulnerable, universal, and smart.

Oh, also, the “blood eagle,” from the title story, which, being about crazy pirate Vikings, is an anomaly within the collection (but a pretty incredible one). Read this image, of a man’s lungs being pulled out his back: the blood eagle.

“He placed the point of his sword to one side of Naddod’s spine. He leaned into it and worked the steel in gingerly, delicately crunching through one rib at a time until he’d made an incision about a foot long, then he knelt and put his hands into the cuts. He fumbled around in there a second, and then drew Naddod’s lungs out through the slits. As Naddod huffed and gasped, the lungs flapped, looking sort of like a pair of wings. I had to turn away myself.”

Until Gwen, by Dennis Lehane

“Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.”

How could you put down a story that starts like that? I love “Until Gwen.”

This is one of those stories that I am all about despite it being incredibly overwritten upon occasion–others include “The Hermit’s Story” by Rick Bass and the first chapter of The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier–and it still kills me every time. Something about it is so florid and terrible, and then something about it is so ridiculously good. This passage is like if Faulkner and Beloved had a bastard grandchild who watched Boondock Saints all day long and that child wrote a story, which is probably the actual back story of Dennis Lehane (who wrote Mystic River and also wrote for The Wire). Consider reading this in its entirety.

Wind was pouring into the car, and the sirens were growing louder, an army of them, and Gwen’s face was an inch from yours, her hair falling from behind her ear and whipping across her mouth, and she was looking at you, she was seeing you–really seeing you. Nobody’d ever done that, nobody. She was tuned to you like a radio tower out on the edge of the unbroken fields of wheat, blinking red under a dark-blue sky, and that night breeze lifting your bangs was her, for Christ’s sake, her, and she was laughing, her hair in her teeth, laughing because the old lady had fallen out of the bed and it wasn’t funny, it wasn’t, and you said the first part in your head, the “I want to” part, but you said the second part aloud: “Dissolve into you.”

And Gentleman Pete, up there at the wheel, on this dark country road, said, “What?”

But Gwen said, “I know, baby. I know.” And her voice broke around the words, broke in the middle of her laughter and her fear and her guilt, and she took your face in her hands as Pete drove up on the interstate, and you saw all those siren lights washing across the back window like Fourth of July ice cream.

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

I am laughing alone in my room because my Google image search for “Lord of the Rings” is producing a truly horrifying combination of slash-fiction fansites and images of Frodo looking both constipated and homoerotically servile: example to the left. But like, we love it, don’t we? We love this tacky, ponderous, Zelda-meets-Renaissance-fair-meets-Medieval-Times trilogy so much that the only books that have sold more copies than the Lord of the Rings trilogy are (seriously) the Bible, the Koran, and the teachings of Chairman Mao.

So yeah, who’s read them? At least 200 million people, and that includes me. Multiple times. I’m smoking myself out of the nerd hole with this post right now and I hope that you’ll do the same! Now, clearly there’s something “great” about these books, something actually epic and lovely and whatever. And Tolkien invented his own languages and shit, so that’s awesome. But honestly, I think that LOTR (the abbreviation, when spoken aloud, is enough to send me into fits of giggles–I mean it’s just ridiculous) can best be appreciated by people with vast reserves of longing in their soul, people who really believe they’re on a quest for something. And although I accidentally threw The Two Towers in my suitcase when I went to France my sophomore year of high school, and thus ended up rereading it nonstop for two weeks, I think my days snuggled up with the Witch-King of Angmar are over forever.

Actually pretty much everything about Lord of the Rings is hilarious to me right now. The names: Deagol Smeagol Samwise Gamgee Boromir Faramir Shelob Denethor Theoden Eowyn. Places: Mount Moria and the Cracks of Doom. Races: elf, dwarf, orc, and the lowly, flawed human. Sure, this story is a monomythical giant but it’s very hard to read any of those words aloud with a straight face. But you know who really loves Lord of the Rings? Led Zeppelin and Rush. “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Rivendell.” I feel less bad about the life-size cardboard cutout I used to have of Orlando Bloom dressed as Legolas. Actually, no I don’t.

The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, by Nancy Farmer

Let’s get it out on the table: this book fucking rocks. I reread it yesterday and all my memories were confirmed. It’s one of the only children’s books I’ve ever read where no one is cute or simple or even very book-character-like; there’s less sentimentality in this than there is in Holes or even The Westing Game, and it’s generally just this badass romp through the fascinating setting of crime-infested, spiritualist-cum-scifi Zimbabwe circa 2194.

In the story, the Chief of Security’s three children, who have thus far been raised by robots, sneak out of the house for the first time and instantly get kidnapped. They go to this apocalypse-pollution slum where all the old plastic (plastic is by this time a museum piece revered for its own wastefulness) is packed down into the desert sands; they nearly get sold to a gang, but escape to a land called Resthaven, which sometime in the twenty-first century became its own country that abides very strictly by the customs of ancient Africa. This whole time, they are being followed by the Ear, the Eye and the Arm, three men who were exposed to nuclear fallout and thus developed overly sensitive appendages which make them good for detective work. The kids escape from Resthaven, go into this settlement where the remains of the “British tribe” sit around with their names like Lady Muffy Horsenugget and make guava scones, and then are whisked to the top of a mile-high tower where they are almost made human sacrifices, but escape at the last minute.

But what’s really amazing is how gently rigorous the whole thing is. I mean, this is a children’s book, and like, the book cover looks like you could add a couple of boom boxes and Will Smith circa “Parents Just Don’t Understand” and no one would even notice. Still, within this framework, Nancy Farmer very casually and matter-of-factly addresses wealth disparity, colonialism, tradition, consumption, and morality in an immoral society without ever coming down hard on one side or the other. The powerful are not evil, nor are they the center of society or the saviors of the poor; everyone is what their circumstances have made them, and living a life that they in some way have chosen. Nancy Farmer, a Peace Corps alumna, is right up there with Maeby Funke as someone I consider a role model. And if you liked The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, definitely read The House of the Scorpion, which she wrote in 2004 or something–also amazing.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

So this is one of those required reading books that’s just straight-up good enough that somehow, some sense of its general brilliance usually manages to get through the minds of the millions of eighth-graders whose reading experience is cramped and ruined by the constant intrusion of the chapter-by-chapter study guide. It’s hard to read when you’re periodically turning away from the page to fill out those stupid packets; when you’re dutifully writing “Because he writes his name with his left hand” right below “How does Atticus insinuate that Mr. Ewell might have beaten up his own daughter?” it’s difficult to grasp that this is an incredible, A Few Good Men-volume courtroom moment and not just a question on a worksheet.

(I will say though, after visiting my dearest friend in New York City who had to teach this book in the Bronx under near-impossible circumstances, I’m grateful that I and most all the rest of us attended schools where there was enough paper to make these perfunctory packets, and our teachers did not have to struggle through each hour to produce character posters that say nothing other than “Mayella: she dirty.” Tory, how’s it going, love you girl.)

There’s Atticus Finch (the book was originally going to be called Atticus, which makes me want to watch Spartacus) as a pillar of sheer decency from which all saintly-lawyer types have degenerated (Sandy Cohen?). Scout Finch, the totally badass, precocious six-year-old whose life is saved because she’s dressed up like a big chunk of ham (I feel like every tomboy girl character in a kiddy sports movie is Scout reincarnate: Becky in Little Giants, Julie in D2). Boo Radley, who is the man in Home Alone. Tom Robinson the Saintly Negro, workable as a real character because so many other people in this tiny lil’ Alabama town are Saintly as well, including Calpurnia, the original code-switcher. I’m flipping through my old copy right now and I might reread it instead of doing lesson 7 on my Kyrgyz. Also, I made a flipbook of a stick figure kicking a soccer ball out of the bottom right-hand corner of each page. I’d like to think that was a Scout thing of me to do!