Posts Tagged ‘literature’

So today we’ll be treading on dangerous territory.  We won’t call it “the darkest wilds” or anything 1920’s pulp fiction-ish like that.  We’ll label it accurately.

We’ll call it “how Aylad thinks.”

I have trouble… lots of trouble… making New Year’s Resolutions.  It’s not that I’m perfect (well, maybe, but I’m not the type of perfect I want to be).  It’s not that there aren’t lots of things about myself that I want to improve.  It’s not even that none of the things I want to change are achievable — most of them are.  Well, a few, anyway.

The problem is that around the last week or so of December, when someone asks me what resolutions I’m making for the new year, my mind goes completely blank.

It’s probably for the same reason that I blank out when someone tells me to “be creative.”

When a thought finally does filter into the white noise that is my suddenly-empty skull, the thought is usually something like:

“I uh I well I um I can’t do this on demand!!!”  With three exclamation points and everything.

Of course, it’s rude to tell someone that, so I usually stutter out something bland, generic, and meaningless.  Like about a month ago when my wife asked me, my response was (eventually) “I resolve to make good life choices.”

I know.  Total cop-out, right?  She knew it, too, but she didn’t call me out on it.

Then, a few weeks into January, I’ll get an idea for a goal I want to accomplish.  As I’m running it through a mental checklist to see if it’s doable (something along the lines of, “does it cost money?  does it hurt?  does it involve effort?  will my peers think I’ve finally gone totally wonky?”), it suddenly occurs to me:

This could be a resolution.

This happened three days ago.  Twice, in five minutes.  So for the first time in a loooong time, I have not one but two genuine end-of-year-goals-we’ll-call-resolutions that I’m going to tackle.

The first one is that I will read (thoughtfully) all of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (although I’m taking a hiatus from my weekly Shakespeare Saturday posts, as my willpower is waning in that regard) and two, count ‘em, two of his plays.

The other one is that by year’s end, I will have read (not counting The Sonnets but probably counting the plays) ten thousand (yes, I said 10,000) pages of printed and bound text.  In other words, stuff in books, not magazines, newspapers, or electronic documents of any kind.

Yeah, 10K.  I think it’s doable.  It’s been years since I’ve even approached that kind of literary intake.  I believe in myself, though.  I can stay away from the video games and DVDs and get this done.  I’ll even post page counts here on Shreds of Truth (although I’ll probably only update the count after finishing each book… for simplicity’s sake).

I’m already in the neighborhood of 850 pages.

Care to join the challenge or to embark upon a similar challenge of your own?  Feel free to post a comment about it and to keep me informed of your progress.

Two new Wordpress errors:  if you see the “financial advice” post appear in your feed, it’s not supposed to have gone public yet… and if you see this post doing anything weird, it’s because Wordpress is giving me fits with posting at the correct times.

Now that I’ve finished whining, on to the post…

“It wasn’t written like I thought it would be,” he said.

“How so?” I asked, although I had warned him the book isn’t what most people expect.

“I thought it would be written from Dracula’s point of view,” he said. “Instead it’s written from Jonathan’s.”

Written fr… what?

Then I remembered which generation I was dealing with, and it all made sense.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series is now at the height of its popularity (the cynic in me expects the books to be “so yesterday” in a year or two). In case your personal world has been teenager-free for the last twelve months or so, Twilight is about a teenage girl named Bella Swan who falls in love with Edward Cullen, who happens to be a vampire.

Part of me is rolling its proverbial eyes right now.

Part of me wants to send Meyer a thank-you note for getting teens to read.

The English teacher in me is taking full advantage of the situation by pushing my students to read Wuthering Heights, which (according to Wikipedia) is Bella’s favorite book, and Dracula, the granddaddy of all modern vampire novels.

So this obliging young man had paid a visit to our school’s media center and checked out a copy of Bram Stoker’s novel. About a quarter of the way through the book, he commented that he was surprised the narrative wasn’t from Dracula’s point of view.

It’s a Victorian vampire novel, I thought. Why on Earth would it be written from Dracula’s point of view?

Then I realized my confusion was the result of a generation gap. From this fifteen-year-old’s perspective, it made perfect sense for Dracula’s voice to carry the narrative forward. After all, teens and vampires have a lot in common.

…Now, after I make that statement, your reaction indicates your age. If you’re old enough, you’re thinking something like, “Did he just say that? Holy crap… he really doesn’t like teenagers, does he?”

If you’re young enough, on the other hand, you’re thinking, “Well, duh, I mean, vampires rock. I wish I could be one!”

Think about it. Vampires get to stay out all night, sleep all day, and wear all black. Vampires captivate their prey with forceful and often rather sexy charisma. Vampires are, like, dark and gothic and wicked. They’re the rock stars of the undead.

On the other hand, Stoker’s narrator (Jonathan Harker) is a bloomin’ lawyer. Not. Cool. At. All.

My student was fully enjoying the novel, however, and I expect he finished it over Christmas break. Too bad I couldn’t be there when he encountered the character Renfield, who is possibly the coolest vampire-groupie ever.

Never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula? As I told my student (and as he discovered), it’s really not what most people expect. Modern vampire fiction is mostly a pale, cliché-ridden, and rather juvenile imitation of the original. Go buy it… or if you’re strapped for cash, Project Gutenberg has text and audio downloads for free. So you really have no excuse.

Likewise, you might be surprised by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights if you haven’t picked it up yet. Project Gutenberg can help you out again with the text, but you might have to visit LibriVox to get the audio download.

Now, go read.

One thing vampire children are taught is, never run with a wooden stake. — Jack Handey