That is, I read them once I finally got copies of them. They are never on the shelf at the local library and I was not going to buy them due to the number of people who have said they are absolute rubbish. I will admit that I was fully prepared to give the same denouncement because I knew about the sparkly vampire bit. Sparkles? Really? Are the going to dazzle me to death with their sparkliness? I tried to put that out of my mind and read the books. Warning: spoilers ahead. Lots of them.

Conclusion? They aren’t quite rubbish or trash but they are not the most amazing books I’ve ever read. I really worry for people who are so caught up in them that they want to find a guy just like Edward. I’m not going to go as far as saying that Edward and Bella have an abusive relationship but it’s almost there. Fandoms, in general, scare me but this has to be one of the scariest fandoms I’ve seen. How are there so many people who seem to have no serious ties to reality?

I have to say this: I don’t think I have ever disliked a fictional character as much as I dislike Bella. She constantly puts herself down, thinks that there is nothing special about her, and is always on the verge of killing herself, someone else, or both due to her klutziness. She’s portrayed as such a martyr for going to live with her dad so that her mom can have some freedom and continues with the “nobody likes me” attitude even though she has guys falling over her on the first day of school. No, the only thing she can think of is the marble-like god and why does he hate her so much? Then, when she finds out why he hates her she willingly sticks around even though he may kill her at any moment. She never accepts that he likes her for her and always points out how unperfect and normal she is and how she doesn’t deserve to have him. Then she starts on the “I want to be a vampire so I never lose you” spiel. That really bothered me until I read New Moon and found out that if she didn’t become a vampire then the Volturi would kill her. Then the “I wanna be a vampire” thing made more sense. The whole four months of depression in which she does nothing? No one is worth making yourself that miserable over. Even when Edward does come back to her it’s not all hunky dory because she fell in love with a werewolf shapeshifter. The whole thing of wanting to keep her half vampire baby is weird but then you find out it isn’t evil so it’s not so weird. But even when she finally does become a vampire she won’t listen to anyone that tries to tell her that she is special and has special powers and is so lucky to have Edward and Renesmee. She’s pretty much living the perfect life but she focuses on how she still is not worthy to have her Edward forever and always.

Edward doesn’t seem much better. He’s moody and contradictory. I’d love to know how many times he said he should leave for Bella’s own good but is instead a “masochistic lion” and stays around, which nearly kills her several times. And then he starts punishing himself for putting her in danger and always looks pained. I don’t see why anyone would want someone “just like Edward.” Justifying that by saying he’s hot in the movie (which was rubbish) just doesn’t make sense to me. Robert Pattinson isn’t that hot and his acting was terrible. He and Bella were so stiff it wasn’t even funny. I know it was a low budget movie but man was it terrible. Hooray for $1 Redbox.

Also, don’t get me started on the sparkly vampires. I fail to see why that is their one drawback to coming out in daylight. I know it would make it obvious that they are different but one might assume that they’re just wearing body glitter. Do you see how ridiculous this sounds? And they can’t be staked, only burned, and crosses have no effect on them. I know the writer can make up her own world but I really don’t like her characteristics of vampires. They’re all perfect and modelesque.

The final big “What the hell just happened?” moment is Jacob imprinting on Renesmee. Really? A newborn half-vampire baby? I see how it works out for Jacob to still have some part of Bella and I suppose since Renesmee is half-vampire, and presumably immortal, Jacob will be able to stay immortal as well since vampires are what trigger the werewolves shapeshifters abilities and they don’t age while they can still phase. Or something crazy like that. (Also, what kind of name is Renesmee? And the whole going psycho bit over her being nicknamed Nessie? Craziness.)

I think the series had a great premise. The vampires are able to control their killing insticts without being cursed with a soul. (Guess who’s been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer?) Some are even able to live peacefully. Some of the vampires have special supernatural abilities, albeit it seems that so many of them have abilities that it’s not really that special. The idea of a ruling body for vampires, aka the Volturi is an interesting concept, as was the introduction of the Romanian vampires. There are other interesting and semi-unique ideas. In the end I think the ideas were poorly executed. I nearly burst out laughing when in the first 10 pages I found the phrase “had been belonged to me.” Seriously, how does something like that get through editing? The rest of the writing was fairly mediocre. I also have nothing but contempt for Bella. I know that’s harsh but really girl, get a brain!

I’ve read several books since then, which I will catch up on in another post. I’ll just say that I’m also fairly upset about the one I just finished because it’s too perfect. I also plan to tinker with the site some, maybe redesign it, but I’m going out of town this weekend so it’ll just have to wait.

During my first trip to the library I walked into the first floor and found myself in the children’s section. Since I was looking for The Hero of Ages a librarian directed me upstairs. She looked the book up for me and told me that it would be in the science fiction section upstairs. I was a little confused but continued upstairs. Once there I saw that all of the fiction books were not sorted by author, but rather into categories such as Large Print, Romance, Mystery, Western, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. I started my search in the Science Fiction section but couldn’t find the book. Since I think that the book is more fantasy than sci-fi I moved to the Fantasy section and noticed that there was a lot of similarity between the two. On later visits I think I’ve even found a copy of the same book in each section. Either way, I wasn’t able to find the book; it was actually located on the New Books shelf.

Before my last trip to the library I looked up a few books in their online catalog. I was intrigued when I saw that one of the books was listed in the “Oprah” section. I thought to myself surely that’s not right. Do they really have an Oprah section? The answer: yes, they do.

That’s not the whole section, of course, but it isn’t a large section. I’m supposing books that were chosen as part of Oprah’s Book Club are placed here. To me it doesn’t make any sense, mostly because it’s not always easy to define what category a book should be in. The confusion between sci-fi and fantasy should be enough reason to not sort books in this manner. I would think that being able to go straight to an author’s name would be a much faster way of finding a book rather than trying to figure out if the library decided if it was fantasy or sci-fi. To make matters worse, they have a section of books that is simply labeled Fiction.

This whole mess won’t stop me from visiting the library. I mean, who can argue about getting to read books for free? However, I’m sure I’ll have plenty more experiences of trying to deduce where they might have put a book when I only know the author’s name, like when I tried to find The Other Boleyn Girl. It’s in the general Fiction section.

I think the short days may be a big part of the problem. Of course, now each day is longer than the one before but the sun still sets less than an hour after I get home from work. It always makes it feel as if it should be much later in the evening than it really is.

Winter in general just makes me feel like bundling up inside with a blanket and reading, which is a good thing considering that I really do love to read. I’ve recently started The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. I’ve had a couple of people suggest this series to me and so far I’m enjoying it, though I’m only on book two out of the eleven or so that are in the series. There’s a bit of a funny story about how I started reading the series.

My sister read the books a while ago and has bought a good portion of the series. She’s my go-to person when I want to borrow books. I can’t recall if she ever strongly recommended that I read them but I knew she had them. Over Christmas break a brother-in-law of mine was reading Wizard’s First Rule. I recognized the author and asked him about it. He told me that he thought I would enjoy them so I made a mental note about it but didn’t think much more about it. A few days later he mentioned that there was a new series being shown on Hulu called Legend of the Seeker that he also thought I would like. He knows that we often watch episodes and movies there because we don’t have cable.

Once we got back home from vacation I was browsing Hulu for something to watch and saw Legend of the Seeker on the front page so I sat down to watch it. The first two episodes (which are bundled together on Hulu) had a few references that seemed liked they should be familiar but I wasn’t sure why until I saw “Based on the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind” as the credits rolled. It was an “… Ooh now I see” kind of moment. That’s why it was odd to hear a character talk about “the wizard’s first rule” and Confessors.

As previously mentioned I’m now on book two, Stone of Tears. I don’t know if the library has the entire set or not. That might be hard to determine because they don’t have their books sorted into “Fiction” and “Non Fiction” where all fiction books are listed by author and all non fiction books listed by the Dewey decimal system. No, their fiction books are sorted into categories like Romance, Mystery, Western, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and plain fiction. Those categories are then sorted by author but I believe that some of the Sword of Truth series is in fantasy and others are under science fiction. I don’t know that I’ll ever understand it.

Sovereign Stone Trilogy – Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. I started reading these a long time ago (meaning middle or high school) but I was never able to find the third one at the local library. After a while I quit looking and even forgot who wrote it. A few months ago my sister brought them up since she had read the first two as well. It took us a while to remember the name or even the authors but she finally found all three of them at a used book store. The story starts out with the classic tale of a young prince who wants to be king in his elder brother’s place and then dives off into a tale of magic, both good and bad. The trilogy also has the classic races of human, dwarf, elf and ork but it’s unlike any other series I’ve read so far. While I found the ending a little lacking it’s still a good trilogy.

The Halfblood Chronicles – Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton. Again, this is something I started reading years ago. My sister and I found a book called Elvenbane at a flea market. We both liked it but it wasn’t until a short while ago that I found out it was the first of a series. I purchased Elvenblood sometime last year. This weekend I found Elvenborn at a used book store and bought it as well. It appears that the fourth book, Elvenbred hasn’t been finished yet. This fantasy series has a slightly different take on humans and elves. In this world, the elves had to flee their world and found themselves in a world of humans. Since the elves posses greater magic than the humans they have forced almost all of the humans into slavery. Dragons exist as well but they are also not native to that world.

The Sword of Shannara – Terry Brooks. I think I read something dealing with the Shannara universe years ago. For the life of me I can’t remember the name of it. I was looking for something to read a while back and my sister mentioned that she had these and I could borrow them. The Sword of Shannara is the first of the Original Shannara trilogy. While the author’s website claims that it is on par with the Lord of the Rings trilogy I’m not so convinced. (I may be a little biased, though. Just a little.) While the story is captivating and intriguing it often seems that the author was trying to fill a word count quota because of excessive adjectives and other descriptors. I probably will at least finish the first trilogy since they’re on loan but I don’t know that I’ll go looking for the others.

Foundation – Isaac Asimov. Everyone knows the Three Laws of Robotics, right? Maybe not. Again, this is a series that started reading in middle or high school. A couple of years ago I bought Foundation, Second Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Foundation’s Edge, and Foundation and Earth along with a couple of other Asimov’s books. This past weekend I found Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. I think that is all of the Foundation books written by Asimov himself; several other writers have written books set in the Foundation universe. I’ve probably bungled the order of the books since their chronological order is not the same as their publication order. I would like to read through all of these again; seven books is a rather tall order, though.

I know there’s a ton of fantasy books listed with a smattering of science fiction. I do read other types of books but it’s rather obvious that these two genres are my favorites. In fact, the books on my ‘to read” are also fantasy:

• The Hero of Ages – Brandon Sanderson
• Brisingr – Christopher Paolini
• The Wyrmling Horde – David Farland

The last non-fantasy book I read was Persuasion by Jane Austen. I’d love to hear suggestions* about what to read next (or what to put on my “to read” list). You can check out my books page to see everything I’ve already read this year.

*If someone suggests Twilight… I’m already considering it. I highly doubt I’ll be buying the books and my local library lists all copies of the first book as being checked out and/or overdue.