I’m somewhat ashamed to admit it, but I’m going to. Here on the WWW for all the world to see. Yes, I read Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. Why? I guess I don’t have a good answer except to say that I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Having now read the teenage romance story of a girl who loves a vampire (based almost solely on his looks), I still have no idea what the fuss is about. For one thing, the story is amazingly vapid. For another, the writing is poor. Consecutive sentences are fully contradictory. But his eyes. They are so intoxicating. /vomit
From sometime in the mid 90s to the mid 00s, I read (and watched) George Will pretty regularly in the Washington Post. But I haven’t done so for whatever reason as of late. Reading his collected opinion columns on the late Reagan and early Bush 41 years in Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and At Home 1986-1990 was a nice reintroduction to a substantial set of his work, especially so since the timeframe covered is early in my own political awakening. Topics smartly covered are the fall of communism generally and of The Wall specifically, the good and bad of Reagan and Bush 41 (mostly the bad of the latter), the terribleness of the Bork nomination, and a variety of other odds and ends of that time.
I’ve never really had any plans to read any of Joyce Carol Oates’ works. But I was in the Horse’s Mouth, a used bookstore in Buffalo, last month, and We Were the Mulvaneys was just a couple of dollars and I thought Madysen needed it for a school project. Turns out she didn’t need it, so I decided to read it myself. And it makes the second book about the impact of sexual trauma on a young girl on her and her family that I’ve read this month. Comparatively, the narrative here was much bulkier than Alice Sebold’s Them Lovely Bones. Oates’ story is different in that the trauma is only alleged, which causes a whole different set of personal and societal ramifications. The Mulvaneys are no longer who they were in the community–or even in their own family. Too clunky for my tastes, but I understand why Oprah liked it.
