In Which I Have Literary Angst

I can’t tell a lie – I read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight in one six-hour sitting last year, fulling engrossed in her love story of the everygirl Bella and her vampire love, Edward. There was something about that first book – the desire of a writer to have her story read, to create a world that hadn’t existed before – that propelled me through the mass of pages. I kept up with the series as Meyer introduced new characters and plot twists in New Moon and Eclipse; these books weren’t as engrossing but were entertaining all the same.

When Breaking Dawn, the last book in the Twilight Saga, was released, I was in Norway, Michigan, hanging with the family and managed to snag one of the copies at my local K-Mart the day it was released. I had just finished Edgar Sawtelle and was ready to begin something lighter, thinking Breaking Dawn would be exactly what I needed. After Craig and the boys had gone to bed, I curled up on the couch, book in hand, and began. Then I stopped. And I couldn’t pick the blasted thing back up.
In the quest to bring a satisfying conclusion to the Twilight Saga, Meyers totally loses that which made her initial trilogy so readable: the tensions that Bella faces as she navigates her life. There’s the push and pull as Bella struggles between her love for Edward and her love for Jacob, the shape-shifting wolf from up the coast. There’s the anxiety Bella faces as she attempts to make sense of and fit in a world filled with extraordinarily beautiful creatures and unbelievable happenings. Bella is an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances and it tends to make for decent reading.

By the end of Breaking Dawn, all is well. There are no losses, there are no choices made. Everything comes easily, which left me feeling cold, stale, as though I didn’t recognize any of the characters I had come to enjoy over the course of the first three books. I believe I actually threw the book several times as I made my way through it, always hoping there would be some redeeming quality to it all by the end. Alas, not so much.

Turns out I’m not the only one disappointed in the conclusion:

Don’t Burn It, Return It! – an Amazon.com discussion encouraging people who read the book and hated the lack of quality to return the book to bookseller from whom they purchased. Whether you agree that this is appropriate or not, the discussion is filled with hilarious commentary, some seriously flawed logic, and the ramblings of some insane fans.

LA Times - Why did Breaking Dawn fall so flat? This writer does an excellent job outlining the reasons why this book failed to resonate with me in any way, shape, or form.

NY Mag – While I’m unhappy, there are those who are happy with those final pages. NY does some looking at whether or not the entirety of the series was ruined by the faulty installment. My thoughts: I won’t be rereading the series any time soon.

One of the interesting pieces I don’t see noted anywhere is my feeling that this book was a morality tale, that Meyer was pushing really specific beliefs in this story. There were issues of abortion and education throughout the book as well as some other concepts I haven’t quite fully hammered out, but I definitely felt as though Meyer was attempting to sell a way of being, a code of ethics with some of her writing here.

It’s probably the last, if not one of the last, fun books I will read before the semester starts. I feel cheated and want my time back.

Why, Augusten, How Serious Your Latest Tome Is!

I first learned of Augusten Burroughs in the Barnes and Noble on Grand River in East Lansing. I was procrastinating from writing up lesson plans for the coming week and living across the street from a book store was ridiculously advantageous. I saw his book Running With Scissors on one of those tables they put in the middle of the aisles for schmucks like me who they know can’t pass a table of books without manhandling and reading the backs of two or nine. I purchased it quickly and spent the rest of the weekend reading; lesson plans were done Sunday night after my weekly meeting with my RAs.

Sarah had recommended that I pick up Dry and it was even better than Running with Scissors, which I wasn’t sure was possible at the time. Later, Susan sent me Magical Thinking: True Stories, which I didn’t enjoy as much. The writing lacked the tightness of his previous works and led me to skip his second collection of essays altogether.

I was excited to learn that he would be releasing a new book and greedily waiting while my request made its way through the library queue. It arrived in my hands right before I went to Michigan for the weekend, so I was able to spend many hours reading it on the dock, in the shade of the porch, in the lounge chair on the beach. Yeah, ideal reading spaces. I was blown away by his story. Gone was the carefully crafted cleverness of his two memoirs and in its place was an intensity as he wrote about his relationship with his father, the head of the philosophy department at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It was beautifully written and I kept finding myself wanting to underline passages but I am not one to do that in library books. While a departure from the books that made him famous and spawned a movie (apparently there is a movie in the works for this work as well), it is an enjoyable, disturbing, tight read.