I frequently make references to the stack of books on my nightstand--my "to read" pile. I brought about half the stack with me to Virginia. Currently, in preparation for My Name is Rachel Corrie, I'm doing what I hope will be an adequate amount of background research into Israel, Palestine, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is the backdrop for Rachel's story. After reading Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Confict: A Primer by Phyllis Bennis and The Case For Israel by Alan Dershowitz, at the moment I am wading through A Brief History of Israel by Bernard Reich. Though it may not be possible to ask for objectivity, A Brief History of Israel is proving to be the most even-handed of the three I've read so far. But, as is usally the case with nonfiction and research for me, it's work to get through it.
I have always adored novels. I figured out, in encounters in early elementary with The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, and Encyclopedia Brown, that I could completely lose myself. Lose track of time, lose track of my own hunger, lose track of any other obligations in a day until I finished the book. I'm not sure what it is about that--you'd think (for someone who feels like I've wasted the day if I sleep past ten in the morning) that it would be somewhat disconcerting. But it's absolutely one of my favorite things.
So you may understand why I typically don't allow myself to start novels during the school year. And why it felt like a breath of fresh air to finally crack one this summer. And why I proceeded to spend every spare moment in the next two days devouring every one of the 619 pages.
What novel was it? It must have been something exceptional in order for me to have devoured it like that. Right? And this is the part where I sheepishly glance at the floor and prepare to be judged. It was Stephenie Meyer's only other published work apart from the Twilight series, her adult novel called The Host.I read the Twilight series my senior year of high school. As people noticed me reading the books, I received judgmental glances and warnings of all kinds from all sides (further compounded by living in a Christian community). The well-meaning mother of one of my friends even printed off a Focus on the Family-type review found online and wrote a note on the back explaining that I really probably shouldn't read the books, but if I did, I should beware of the traps in this young adult fiction that could pull my impressionable mind into a sinful spiral. I read the note with a little smile on my face, wondering what kind of note she would have written to me back in seventh, eighth, and ninth grade when I was reading Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code (followed by a couple of Dan Brown's other novels), and every Michael Crichton and Nicholas Sparks book I could get my hands on. But, back to Stephenie Meyer.
Twilight? Well, it's extremely easy reading. As in, you tend to forget that you're reading at all. (Not the books I would recommend if you're looking to expand your vocabulary or evaluate literary merit.) I have the standard problems, naturally, with the heroine's helplessness, self-deprecation, and finding her only worth in a significant other (just like pretty much every other critic of the series). Meyer obviously prefers writing in first person, and though the main character (from whose perspective we experience the story) seems to be selfless to a fault, there's an awareness of it that Meyer can never seem to get away from--a self-conscious martyrdom, if you will.
I will give Meyer this, however: somewhere, in all that, her books have managed to get me to feel. Maybe I shouldn't rely so much on my emotions, but I tend to judge stories on their ability to make me feel something. Obviously, if I'm not drawn into a story at all, there's no way for it to make me feel anything. Every novel, if it does its job correctly, has made you feel something by the end. And Meyer's books have, admittedly, done that. My eyes sped up and scanned the pages faster when the characters were in danger. I found my brain conjecturing about the plot mid-novel, wondering what would happen. I may or may not have even teared up.
I wasn't sure what to expect of The Host, naturally. I found some differences from Twilight, but quite a few bothersome similarities also.
What I liked:
-The Trekkie in me finds the sci-fi premise (parasitic alien life forms using human bodies as hosts, initially undetected, taking over the earth until only a very few scattered underground holdout human factions remain) fascinating.
-Again, the characterization managed to draw me in enough to make me feel something by the end of the book.
What I didn't like:
-I can't describe the writing itself as excellent.
-If you thought the Twilight love triangle was a little too much to handle, try the quadrangle in The Host. There are two beings (the main character--Wanderer--one of the alien life forms, and the human--Melanie Stryder) conscious simultaneously inside Melanie's head. Melanie is in love with Jared and accidentally, by forcing her memories on Wanderer, causes Wanderer to fall in love with him too. But, while she is living in the caves with one of the holdout human factions, one of the humans, Ian, falls in love with Wanderer in Melanie's body. And then, as is Meyer's specialty, she attempts to plumb the depths of the complications that arise.
-All the self-conscious martyrdom we experienced in Bella is present again in Wanderer.
-The turnout of the ethical dilemma at the end of the book in order to provide readers with a "happy ending" left me scratching my head. Meyer and her readers wrestle, for the majority of the book, with the ethical implications of depriving a life form of its own body and consciousness in exchange for an existence without conflict, disease, or war. Wanderer discovers she cannot be at peace with herself because she does not want to deprive any human of life or consciousness, and so (Spoiler Alert) requests to be removed from her host and left to die. Instead, however, the humans kidnap another body (which has, for the majority of its life, been inhabited by another parasitic alien life form and therefore has no human consciousness of its own) and remove the other alien life form to give the body to Wanderer in order that Wanderer can continue living with them without feeling like a parasite. But they jettison the other alien creature off to another planet without that creature's consent. In short, I think Captain Picard would have found the ethics sketchy.
-A repeat of Bella: the fragility, utter helplessness, dependence, and self-deprecation of the main character get rather old. I'm starting to worry about Meyer. She seems to create lots of fantasies of muscular men carrying weak, disoriented, or constantly injured women around.
-Again, a mirror of moments in Twilight, I found myself rolling my eyes at numerous points in the plot, going "Really? Really? This is what's going to happen right now?"
The movie adaptation is set to come out in theaters in March 2013. Will I be there? Oh. Probably. Out of curiosity, mainly, which is also why I read the book in the first place.
I'm trying to have enough discipline to get through some more of A Brief History of Israel before rewarding myself with any more novels, but I just recently purchased Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, also the author of Stardust (from which the movie was adapted), and I keep hungrily glancing at it on the top of the pile on my nightstand.
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