Category: Ruminations

2011 Reading Challenges

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations3 Comments

I’ve been searching the blogosphere for new reading challenges to join, and decided to compile them all here in one post.  I found a lot of fun ones, and picked out a few that are in line with what I like to read, but might give me a push in a direction I’d like to go more often.  So here’s what I have:

This one is hosted by A Few More Pages (love that name!)  The goal is to read a number of books that are the first in a series.  I’ve been wanting to look for new series to fall in love with, so that sounds perfect.  I’m going to aim for “Series Expert,” reading 12 books. 

So far this year, I’ve read:

1) Sarah’s Story by Ruth Elwin Harris (and the rest of the quartet too)

StilettoStorytime

I already had a goal to read more classics, so this fits in nicely.  This one’s hosted by Stiletto Storytime and has a great definition of classic on the challenge page.  I debated what level to aim for–from the definition I think I can legitimately count children’s books and classic sci fi as “classics,” so I’ll aim for fifteen.  Alas, I don’t think I’ve read any yet this year…

Photobucket

I think we know by now that these are a favorite of mine, so I couldn’t resist this one, hosted by Among the Muses.  I’m going to aim for the Enchanted level, 6-9 novels.  That’s probably conservative.  Looking forward to following this one for some new book ideas!

Read so far this year:

1) Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley (Sleeping Beauty retold)

I’m moving this one from its separate post to here to join with all the others.  Hosted by Home Girl’s Book Blog, all you have to do is read books from the library.  Since most of my reading comes from the library, I’m being un-conservative on this one and aiming for 100 library books read in 2011.

Progress thus far:

1) Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier

2) Palace of Mirrors by Margaret Peterson Haddix

3) Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley

4) Looking for Marco Polo by Alan Armstrong

5) Stolen by Vivian Vande Velde

6) Enter Three Witches by Caroline B. Cooney

None of these are exclusive lists–that is, you may see books landing on more than one.  A classic novel of a fairy tale retold that comes from the library and starts a series could be on…every list.  I also haven’t seen any rule that says books have to be first-time reads, although I do have a goal of reading new classics, new fairy tale retellings, and new series, so hopefully a good percentage will be for the first time.

I’ll try to update the lists every month or so.  We’ll see how it goes!  🙂

Bloggiesta 2011!

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations4 Comments

Thanks to the blogs I’m following, I found out that this weekend something called Bloggiesta is happening in the blogging community…  Hosted by Nancy at Maw Books Blog, it’s a three-day period for intensive blog improvement.  There are suggested mini-challenges of ways to improve a blog and things to learn, and bloggers post their plans and share their results.  Fun stuff!

So here are my blogging goals for the weekend:

–Clear through my half-written draft posts.  Either finish them so they’re ready to go, or decide they just weren’t meant to be and get rid of them.

–Find more cool bloggers to follow in my reader (not exactly an improvement to MY blog…but related)

–Go through past posts to check formatting is all in order.  As a relatively new blog, I haven’t had much time for things to fall into disarray and disrepair, but it’s still worth checking to make sure that I didn’t miss any strangely arranged posts, forget to add a page break to a long Fiction Friday, or have WordPress pull a fast one on my spacing (I swear I’ve seen a neatly spaced blog post suddenly go haywire for no apparent reason).

–Find new Reading Challenges to join for 2011, and update my one existing one (Support Your Local Library).

–Explore new places where I can add links to my blog, like directories.

–Try any of the mini-challenges that look fun/useful/interesting!

Lucky for me, it’s a quiet Saturday anyway–so we’ll see how this goes!  I’ll post an update later on…

2011 Support Your Local Library Challenge

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations6 Comments

I recently started following a blog that seems to be very much into various reading challenges.  The blogger just posted one that is perfect for me.  Here’s the descriptive paragraph:

Here’s a new book challenge for you. All you have to do is read at least 12 library books by the end of the year. For more information and the guidelines of the reading levels, click here. Happy reading.

The top-tier level is 100 books.  True story: I was rather sad when I realized that Christmas was on Saturday this year because it was going to disrupt my usual weekly library-going routine.  Happy about Christmas–but sad about the library.  So I think I’ll aim for the top-tier on this challenge.  That’s two a week?  On it.

Update: Follow progress on this challenge, and a few others I joined on my 2011 Reading Challenges post.

2010 End of the Year Round-up

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations4 Comments

A lot of blogs I follow are doing End of the Year Round-ups of the books they’ve read.  So for the last day of the year I thought I’d suspend Fiction Friday for a week and join the trend by posting a review of my year in reading…

1) Best Book  –  In some ways I have an easy answer here, because I reread two of my favorite books this year.  The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery, and my favorite Star Trek novel, First Frontier by Diane Carey and James I. Kirkland.  Barring those two, I think I’d have to go with Rapture of the Deep by L. A. Meyer, another installment in the Jacky Faber series.

2) Worst Book  –  The second half of The Time-Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.  I actually liked the first half, but then it went wildly downhill.  Right about when they started trying to have a child.  Just adopt, all right?  Really.

3) Most Disappointing Book  –  A tie here.  Sundays at Tiffany’s by James Patterson had this great premise about an imaginary friend.  I was looking for another White Darkness, and instead I got a badly written romance with a lame twist ending.  Second candidate is Beatnik Rutabagas from Beyond the Stars by Quentin Dodd.  Probably no one but Douglas Adams could live up to that title.  Dodd was plainly aspiring to be Douglas Adams but all he produced was a book of total randomness (and I like randomness!) with nothing at all to tie it together.

4) Most Surprising (in a Good Way)  –  The Far Side of Evil by Sylvia Louise Engdahl  –  This was a sequel to Enchantress from the Stars, and turned out to be both darker and more thought-provoking than I expected…in a good way!  Both excellent books, but very different from each other.

5) Best Series You Discovered – Golden and Grey by Louise Arnold  –  I found this only in the last month, and have really been having fun with it.  I’ll have a review up in the next week or so.

6) Most Hilarious Read  –  I read several Discworld books by Terry Pratchett this year, and I have to place all of them as the winners of this category, with honorable mention to A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag by Gordon Korman.  I might give it to Korman, but it wasn’t a new read, so it feels more fair to give it to the new (to me) books.

7) Most Beautifully Written  –  The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery  –  Her writing is always incredible, and this is one of her best.  There’s just no comparison with anyone else I’ve read this year.

8 ) Can’t Believe I Waited Until 2010 to Read It  –  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen  –  I actually did read this before, long ago in about seventh grade.  But I barely remembered it.  Unfortunately, since I read it when I was twelve, I had this impression it was a difficult read, which made it off-putting to pick it up again, even though I kept meaning to.  Finally I actually bought it, still didn’t get around to it for a long time, went through a period where I resolved to read all the books I owned but hadn’t read, and finally read it then…it’s a lot easier to read when you’re not twelve.  And it’s a lovely book.

9) You Mean I Didn’t Read That in 2010…?  The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean is my favorite book that I didn’t actually read this year.  I wrote a book review and watched the miniseries that inspired one of the characters and altogether feel like I have immersed myself in this novel…even though I listened to the audiobook in 2009, and haven’t actually read the novel since at least 2008.

10) Most Looking Forward To in 2011  –  Tortall and Other Lands: A Collection of Tales by Tamora Pierce  –  I don’t know much about it, but it sounds exciting!  She’s been a favorite author for many years, who does not publish nearly as frequently as I would like…

A Small Confession, and a Theory

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations1 Comment

I recently watched Twilight: Eclipse.

Considering my mixed feelings towards the Twilight franchise, telling people that usually feels like a confession, swiftly followed up by the explanation that I got it on Netflix (therefore: no money spent on it) and that it’s really a sort of morbid curiosity, you see.

So why am I talking about it here?  Because I had this revelation about why people like these books.

It’s pure, unadulterated wish-fulfillment.

Yes, yes, I know, that’s not news.  My previous post about Twilight even already touched on it a little.  But I don’t mean the wish-fulfillment about wanting the really attractive guy to fall in love with you.  I mean, that’s every romance ever written.  But something that really struck me about the movie…it’s all about the wish-fulfillment of wanting to be important to people.

Because Bella is enormously, overwhelmingly, impossibly important to EVERYONE.  This is true in the books too, but maybe it’s the more pared-down medium of the movie that suddenly made me sit up and say, “hey wait a minute, doesn’t anyone in this movie have any priority in their lives except Bella?”  And then I realized this story is the perfect fantasy come to life for anyone who has ever felt unimportant, unnoticed, lost in a crowd, felt like they didn’t know how to make themselves matter to other people…oh wait, that’s probably everyone at some point.  Especially pre-teens and teens who are still trying to find their place in the world.  And maybe that’s why this story is just so darn popular…

I mean, let’s break this down a bit.  (And I’m about to get into spoilers, so if you’re worried about that, stop reading!)  I have the movie uppermost in mind because I just watched it, but the book follows the same trajectory.

Edward is obsessively in love with Bella and apparently has nothing else in his life that matters.  This is a man who actually says things out loud like “You are the most important thing in my life” and “You are my reason for existing.”

Jacob comes across as a little more normal in his love for Bella, but he’s still very much in love with her, is willing to “fight for her” until “her heart stops beating” (that is, until she becomes a vampire) even though she’s clearly chosen Edward, and Jacob’s telepathic pack brothers all make a point of telling her that he thinks about her constantly.  Thanks, guys, she needed to be told how important she was.

The villain, Victoria, raises an army of vampires, commits mass-murder in Seattle, takes on the Cullen clan, risks the reprisal of the feared vampire law enforcers the Vulturi…so that she can kill Bella.  Negative attention, true, but still–Bella is incredibly important to her.

When it becomes apparent that someone is stalking Bella, the Cullens drop everything to go on guard duty to protect her.  You can chalk that up to…them being nice.  They care about Edward.  They make it their business to deal with rogue vampires in the area.  Or they want to protect Bella.  And somehow that last one comes off pretty strongly.  Rosalie grumbles about it a little, but she looks whiny as a consequence.

When the Cullens need help fighting the army of vampires, the werewolves jump into the fray…because Bella is in trouble.  Oh, and because fighting vampires is what they do.  But when Jacob points that out, it comes across more as, “don’t worry, we’ll be fine because fighting vampires is what we do,” not, “get over yourself, we’re not fighting them because of you.”  I think they’re fighting them because of her.

At one point Bella visits the Reservation, and is invited to join the council meeting and hear the ancient stories.  Jacob tells her it’s the first time an outsider has ever been invited.  Because Bella is just that special.

One of the vampire army members is a teenager from Forks who went missing.  His parents have been looking for him, and have been talking to Bella’s father, Charlie, the local sheriff.  Fairly unnecessarily, Charlie comments that he’d never stop looking if it was Bella.  (I’m more willing to give that one a pass; he’s her father, he’s supposed to feel that way…)

The only ones who don’t seem to be totally obsessed with Bella are her human friends.  And they’re always shunted off to the side.  This wasn’t in Eclipse, but in New Moon Bella goes totally off the deep end because Edward leaves and one of her friends–Angela?  Jessica?  I can’t even remember–can’t deal with Bella’s resulting weirdness.  As punishment for not making Bella the center of her life–the way Jacob did–AngelaorJessica gets banned from the rest of the series and now I can’t remember her name.

Bella keeps moaning in Eclipse about how everyone’s going to get hurt “because of me.”  And sure, no normal person wants their friends to get hurt, because of them or otherwise.  But to be surrounded by people who are, literally, willing to go to their deaths for you?  Who are willing to make you the center of their world?  Who look at you and say, yes, this is a person who is truly important, who matters, who we want to keep in the world and in our lives and who we recognize as special…  Wow.

Wish-fulfillment gone mad.

Especially since, me sitting over here outside the book, I can say that there’s nothing all that special about Bella.  Yeah, she’s nice enough.  I could probably talk to her about books.  But I don’t think I personally would be willing to take on an army of ravenous vampires for her.  Not without some other awfully good reason for it.

Maybe one reason I’m noticing this is because I just wrote a novel all about who does and doesn’t get noticed in stories.  Bella is clearly a Sleeping Beauty type, with legions of Fairy Godmothers falling over themselves to rescue her, from Edward and Jacob on down the list.  It does make me wonder if AngelaorJessica could use a Tarry to help her with her problems.  Or why the Cullens weren’t equally worried about the anonymous victims being attacked in Seattle–why aren’t they of equal value to Bella?  Oh right–because they’re not the heroine.

So anyway.  There’s my new theory on why Twilight is so popular.  The saying goes, “To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world.”  I think a lot of the world feels like just one person, and Twilight gives them a story where one person gets to be the world…to everyone.