Currently reading
Madame Bovary
Siddhartha
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (Collected Essays)
The Children Star
Manstealing for Fat Girls
Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New
Radio Crackling, Radio Gone
Radiant Days
Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction
Footnotes in Gaza
Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1)
My young charges at camp this summer were obsessed with this series, so I decided to see check it out. I mean, I enjoyed Anne Rice books very much as a youth, and love Octavia Butler's Fledgling, so I thought I might find some actual pleasure in this teen-vampire book. No such luck. One of the primary pleasures of vampire stories for me is the pleasure of the passing narrative, and this series doesn't really indulge. The vampires are not very cagey at all, just extraordinarily good at everything they do, rich, generous, possessed of a moral compass, and also extremely pretty (we're told). The most distracting problem for me, besides the shockingly bad prose, was Meyer's uncritically-applied racist standards of beauty. The vampires and the vampire-chaser are all especially beautiful because of their extraordinarily white skin. Yuck!
