Vampires

So I started reading Twilight, partly out of curiosity and partly because that book eats people's brains and I wanted to prove I was immune. (Don't worry, I didn't pay any money for it. The Internet and the PDF are both marvellous inventions.) To my intense relief, I am indeed immune. Thank God. I don't think I could stand the humiliation of liking that book. And this is why I will not be finishing it or touching any of the ones that come after it.

First of all, I am not a vampire girl anyway. I'm a werewolf girl. I'm pretty sure there's some unflattering psychology here (I'm extremely anal-retentive, and it would be nice to run around uncontrolled for a few nights a month) but vampires don't interest me and werewolves do. There are werewolves in Twilight, but they suck. And that's all I have to say about that.

And also, in terms of unconventional vampires, no one beats Pamela Dean's Dominic Hardy, the thinking vampire. I love Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary more than any 24-year-old has a right to, and I dragged my copy to England even though it's a hardcover my parents found for me and it weighs about 10 pounds (the book has been out of print for years, and I used to monopolize the library's copy.) To be fair, I mostly love that book for its literary references, and I am still trying to work my way through all of them even though I started around the age of 14. Dominic himself barely interests me at all, but I've spent nearly ten years trying to track down the sources of all his riddles and quotations. Edward never had a chance. His banal conversation bores the snot out of me. This weekend, I will be reading Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary for the 694306648396th time to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

Stephanie Meyer's writing is completely lacking in elegance. Someone buy that woman a thesaurus. And also, her foreshadowing? My God, hit me over the head with a bigger Unsubtlety Hammer. "No one's going to bite me in this town," har har har.

A minor, more specific peeve - you just moved somewhere, people are trying to be friendly to you, and you sneer at them and can't be bothered to remember their names? Come on, that's just shitty.

And finally, as I suspected, I was completely unable to identify with her vapid female character. I can only identify with extremely strong women. This is why I adore Connie Willis, Jane Austen, Margaret Mitchell, J. K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, and other people who are capable of writing these kinds of women, women with definite personalities. The point is not that they defy society's expectations. What interests me is when they question these expectations and decide on their own whether or not they want to go along with them or walk away. Feminism, as I understand it, is about choice. It is just as acceptable for a woman to become a housewife and raise children as it is for her to earn three doctorates and work in a research lab and never marry. The point is to think about it and decide for yourself. Stephanie Meyer's "heroine" never even stops to think about whether she has a choice, and what she wants for herself, and that is what makes me ill. I cannot identify with women who blindly stumble along the path they are expected to follow without even stopping to think about their other options. It is hard to enjoy a book when you spend most of it alternately sneering and gagging at the heroine and declaring, out loud, approximately every other page, "You. Are. Pathetic."

Yes, yes, I know, don't hold back, tell us how you really feel, etc. I believe my point was that I hate these books even more than I expected to, and since I expected to want to burn them after reading, which goes completely against my normal attitude towards books (save them all!) that is extremely impressive. I was prepared to cut them some slack, being written for teenagers and all, and by all means, read and appreciate them for the trash they are, but good lord, now that I've looked at them I don't understand how anyone can genuinely like them and take them seriously. The die-hard fans scared me quite enough before, but now I'm afraid that if I encounter any of them in real life they'll get their crazy all over me, because it's clearly spilling out of their pores and oozing out into the air around them. Maybe the remaining uncontaminated population should be issued with Hazmat suits.

The best part? I know from reading other peoples' synopses that there is even more terrifying crazy to come, and I couldn't even make it that far before I had to give up. Jeebus.