I have a confession to make in regards to this book. The fact of the matter is that I have never been a big fan of the classics, although I’ve tried to read them, and when Vicki recommended Great Expectations, I privately despaired. But, I had vowed to read every recommended book, within my power, so I duly ordered it from the library.

Except that the copy I ordered smelled so awful that I couldn’t read it. And the librarian explained that if I ordered a fresh copy, they would probably send me the same one, and this process would just repeat itself over and over. Fortunately, my father went on a Dickens jag last year, so I was able to borrow his copy. Needless to say, by the time I finally cracked the book open, I had some great expectations of my own.

My father says he doesn’t like Pip, but I felt more pity and sympathy for him, rather than dislike. He’s caught up in dreams of a middle class life, and he gets himself into a world of trouble over it, but it doesn’t make me dislike him. I understand his motivations, his conscious choice to reject his past and attempt to reshape his identity. As I watched him try to cut his past away while he chased after rainbows, I might not have respected him, but I could see why he did what he did. It’s easy to get caught up in a world you don’t understand until it is too late.

Dickens apparently criticized Victorian society rather heavily in his novels, and that certainly came through here. As a social commentary, I think it might have been more powerful with the original ending, rather than the one Dickens was forced to write, but it still came out more or less on top. The world of Great Expectations is filled with surprises and shifty characters, along with events which illustrate the class disparities in Victorian society.

Maybe I can’t bring myself to hate Pip because I feel like I have so much in common with him, and I’ve long gotten over the need to hate myself. I can’t say that I loved this book, but I think it had some merit, and it lent credence to my idea that younger readers really don’t get much out of the classics because they don’t have the experiences to create a context. I hated The Scarlet Letter when forced to read it in high school, for example, and loved it in college; maybe we shouldn’t be cramming the classics down the throats of high school students, but rather allowing people to come to them on their own, when they can actually benefit from them.

Demographics:

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. Published 1861, 566 pages. Fiction.

This is one of my favourite books of all time, and if you haven’t read it, I would highly recommend it. I’m not sure how easy it is to track down, but it is well worth it. Sacred Hunger isn’t just masterfully written, although it is, it’s also the book that humanized the slave trade for me, turning it from an abstract unpleasantness to a very real atrocity.

Although this book is about the 18th century slave trade, it’s also a book about morality, and finding your morality. Several of the characters undergo radical personality shifts as they learn more about themselves and the world around them, and it is really fascinating to see how they cope with their changing worlds. When things click together for them and create a flash of understanding, you understand along with them, in a very visceral way.

It’s also a book about vengeance, and how the desire for retribution can eat away at you so thoroughly that you become completely corrupted by it. And how, when you finally do find “justice,” you realize that it will never really be enough, and everything you have done becomes hollow and without meaning.

Every time I read this book, I get more out of it. It is so rich, so layered, so lush.

I think that, like most Americans, I have always been aware of the fact that the slave trade played a role in American history, but when I first read this book, I started to realize what that meant. It’s sort of hard to explain this in words, because it was a more complex emotional realization. As a third generation American on my father’s side, I can say that at least half of my lineage doesn’t come from slave owners, but the other half probably does, and when I read this book, I felt a real sense of shame and horror about it. My ancestors owned people.

It’s a strange thing to think about, especially right now, with the entire United States being caught up in a serious discussion about race. While most of us have some sort of history of slavery in our ancestry, both as perpetrators and victims, America’s history with slavery is much more recent, and it is sometimes jarring to be reminded of that. 1862 wasn’t that long ago. Am I supposed to atone for the wrongs of my ancestors? I’m sort of curious now to find out if people on that side of the family did own slaves, although I am so estranged from them that research might be challenging. If I do find out that they had slaves, and I somehow manage to track down the modern descendants of those people, what would I say to them? How can words alone possibly compensate for stolen lives?

Demographics:

Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth. Published 1992, 630 pages. Fiction.

Astute readers may remember one of the authors of this book, Raymond McNally, from Dracula Was a Woman, a lurid quasi-history of Elizabeth Bathory. In fact, I recognized some of the material from aforementioned book in this one. I can’t decide if McNally just got into Bathory when he wrote the first edition of this book (which came out in the 1970s), or if he just decided to reuse material and hoped that no one would notice.

To give McNally credit, this book is way better than Dracula Was a Woman. Yes, there were some crazy and totally unsourced statements, but there was also a lot of research to back the book up, complete with good footnotes and an annotated bibliography. That might be the work of Radu Florescu, though, it’s hard to tell.

Anyway, it’s an interesting book about Vlad the Impaler, who is supposedly the real-life inspiration for Dracula. It was neat to see pictures of Wallachia and some of the people involved in the Dracula legend, and the cover design by Edward Gorey was priceless. I can’t say there was much new information in there for me, but it’s a reasonable survey for those who don’t know anything about good old Vlad.

There was also a great discussion of the role of Dracula in film, stage, and fiction at the end, complete with a pretty detailed filmography which is definitely worth checking out.

Demographics:

In Search of Dracula, by Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu. Published 1994, 297 pages. History.

I had a tough time getting into this book, and I think it’s because I am not very knowledgeable about the Indian pantheon. So I had difficulty following the characters, the plot, and the point. As the book rambled on, I found myself feeling less and less attached to what was happening, mainly because I was in a state of total confusion.

Normally, I’d feel inclined to blame my confusion on poor communication. However, I think it might have had more to do with my mood, and with my lack of background knowledge. If I was more hip to the Indian gods and Hindu faith, I think I would have gotten a lot more out of this book.

It’s a blend of…not quite cyberpunk, but something along those lines, and religion. What happens when you transplant a culture to a new planet? What happens when gods are made? When gods harness machines to ensure their dominance, while denying the citizens even the crudest of technology? These are all interesting ideas to contemplate, and I wish that I had been able to engage more fully with this book.

Maybe I’ll read it again sometime, and get more out of it.

Demographics:

Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny. Published 1967, 296 pages. Fiction.

Edith Wharton called this book “the Great American novel,” hopefully in a satirical sense, because if this is the pinnacle of American literature, I am gravely concerned for the future of literature and the arts in this country. Most people know this novel in the form of the film starring Marilyn Monroe, but in fact the story of epic greed and airheadedness was a novel first.

Of course.

I don’t know how to feel about this book. On the one hand, it’s a satire of 1920s American society and the people who inhabit it. On the other hand, it’s a misogynistic book about a main character who is barely literate, and uses her feminine wiles to entrap men. Obviously Lorelei is a caricature, but she’s obviously based on real-world people, or at least the perceptions Loos had of real-world people, which makes me think that Loos wasn’t a big fan of women, especially when I consider the roles played by other women in the book.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about comedy and drawing the line, and this book really underscored the thoughts that I have been having. You should view Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as just a silly novel about silly people, and write it off. But you could also consider the fact that it has a vaguely offensive undercurrent, with the main character being a weak, foolish woman who relies on her looks and charm to get what she wants from life. How do I read the book, and how do I think about it?

Obviously the book and its skewering of society were popular when it came out, but I can’t help but wonder if the book ruffled a few feathers, too. Certainly there are women like this in the world; do we make fun of them, or do we seriously think about the society which enables and sometimes even promotes this kind of behaviour? Maybe that was the point of the book, to get people to think about the world they lived in, and how they interacted with it.

Demographics:

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos. Published 1925, 217 pages. Fiction.

So, before I read this book, I have to apologize. I’m pretty sure that someone (Haddock, perhaps?) recommended this book to me, and I forgot about it, and then I read a review and said “that book sounds sweet,” so I ordered it. But when it arrived, it seemed really familiar, which made me think that someone had told me about it at some point. So if you recommended this book to me, let me know, so I can give you at least partial credit.

This is a book about pirates. It’s also a book about the mythology and legends which surround pirates and piracy. In addition to laying out a bunch of great stuff from the golden age of piracy, ranging from the types of ships used by pirates to the punishments meted out, it also attempts to analyze why we find pirates so captivating and romantic.

Because the pirate mythos is definitely enduring. Even in the golden age of piracy, when pirates were a serious menace to shipping, pirates were romanticized in story and song. Today, with over 90 reported incidents of piracy a year around Southeast Asia (and growing), we are still fascinated by pirates, even though, as Cordingly points out, they are little more than water-borne robbers.

If you are at all interested in the historical reality of pirates, especially New World pirates, you need to check this book out. It’s a really exhaustive survey, backed up with a bunch of solid research. I loved the chapter on female pirates especially, but the discussion of pirate discipline and the pirate lifestyle was also really interesting.

The book profiled a lot of colorful characters without succumbing to the temptation to glorify them (or exaggerate), and it provided all sorts of neat historical context. One might even say (if you can forgive me) that there’s some buried treasure in here.

Demographics:

Under the Black Flag, by David Cordingly. Published 1995, 296 pages. History.

In addition to Breaking Dawn, I also read Dracula Was a Woman (Raymond McNally, 1983, 254 pages) and Legends of Blood ( Wayne Bartlett and Flavia Idriceanu, 2006, 204 pages) this weekend, adding books 225 and 226 to the ever-growing roster of the Book Project. In short, it was pretty vamp-a-rific around here for a couple of days.

It was very interesting to contrast Legends of Blood, which at least tries to be a scholarly work, with Dracula Was a Woman, which was a piece of sensationalist claptrap. I think that the dichotomy really illustrated the split in the publishing industry when it comes to books which address supernatural phenomena, for lack of a better term.

Some books try to take such phenomena seriously, looking at the folklore and anthropology behind the legends and trying to reason out such legends scientifically. Legends of Blood was extremely well researched and sourced, and it was really interesting to read. The authors talked about the vampire “epidemic” of the 1700s in Europe, along with vampire legends from all over the world. They looked at the medical basis for vampirism, both physiological and psychological, and examined the allure of the vampire in pop culture.

Legends was also interesting because it was a joint effort between someone from the Transylvanian region, and a fan of Romanian history. There was a lot of historical context in the book, which was neat to read, and a serious discussion of pop culture. (Although they didn’t do their Buffy research very well!) This book showed that it is possible to write an interesting, academic book on a topic which many people might deem fluff.

Dracula Was a Woman, on the other hand, was like an academic nightmare. The author claimed to have done a bunch of original research, but the book was littered with sensationalist, unsubstantiated claims. Furthermore, the book was very poorly organized, with the author rambling off on tangents and asides which often included anecdotes with absolutely no sourcing. The lurid cover was a good tip-off for what I had in store, and the contents did not disappoint.

Elizabeth Bathory was a very interesting figure, and I was excited to find a biography of her when I found Dracula Was a Woman in the library catalogue. Alas, a definite swing and a miss.

I actually finished this book around five o’clock this morning, but I was too tired after reading it to write a review. And then I wanted to re-read a few bits and ponder it before writing about it. To make sure that I did the awesomeness that is Breaking Dawn full justice. I even thought about the book while I thrashed around in bed this morning.

But first, I have to tell you about the midnight party Baxt and I went to. Baxt dressed up and looked awesome. I didn’t, opting for the old jeans-and-cashmere-sweater ploy. When we arrived at the bookstore, there were three lonely people. As the minutes to midnight (we got there at around 11:50) counted down, a few more stragglers arrived. I think that in total, there were around 10 people, which was very sad, but major props to Gallery for staying open. Seriously, it was awesome and hugely appreciated by those of us who were there. There was a trivia contest.

I am ashamed to say I won, despite pausing for extended periods to answer questions in the hopes that I wouldn’t be revealed for the nerd that I am. And I got the privilege of buying the first book out of the box. So, uhm, yay me?

Anyway, Breaking Dawn. If you haven’t read it yet and you are planning to, you might want to stop here, because I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun for you. Although Baxt ended up hanging out at my house and watching Buffy while I read most of the book, and her Buffy-watching was accompanied with a steady assortment of snorts, and several verbal outbursts, like “oh my,” and “you sneaky devil,” and she wasn’t spoiled. In fact I think she found it amusing. If you want to skip ahead to the feminist analysis, it’s a few paragraphs down.

Basically, the book is broken into three parts. We hear the first part, Bella’s wedding and honeymoon, from Bella’s perspective. The wedding is most silly. The honeymoon is, uhm. Well if you were expecting hot vampire on human love scenes, you’ll have to be satisfied with allusions to teh sexing, but no actual sexing. I can’t really blame Stephenie Meyer for that, honestly, writing sex scenes can’t be that fun. And there is a lot of destroying of bedrooms (hot) and being covered in bruises (also hot).

BUT THEN, in a SHOCKING development, Bella gets preggo with a demon lovechild! I totally knew it was coming, within seconds of the waking after the night of teh sexing, and Bella being all hungry. Because of course normal girls aren’t hungry after a night of pillow wrangling, so Bella must have been PREGNANT! OH MY LORD!

And then, Edward wanted to force an abortion on her. And Bella…finally grew a pair and said fuck off, and it was AWESOME. I’ve criticized these books very heavily from a feminist perspective, so having the main character assert her right to choose was amazingly cool and wonderful, and Mrs. Meyer won some major points.

Then we got Jacob’s perspective on the next bit, which involved the demon lovechild slowly killing Bella from the inside until they figured out that the baby wanted blood (of course), and Bella’s blood-aversion turned into a blood craving (naturally), and then Bella basically died in childbirth. But it’s cool, because that was sort of the plan all along, so that they could vampirize her. Good times. Jacob became…less annoying, somehow, and that was the tip-off that he might be sticking around in some capacity.

The awesome and hilarious part of the Jacob section was the moment when Edward offered to make a deal with Jacob: if Jacob could convince Bella to abort the murderous demonchild, Jacob could, uh, father a child on Bella while she was still human. The idea being that Bella’s fetus was, you know, totally interchangeable with a child by another man. Jacob, to his discredit, was like “boo-ya,” but Bella was having none of it. Again, Stephenie, props. Sort of. I could have done without the whole misogynistic talk with Edward basically giving Bella’s body away, because it was quite unpleasant, but I know where Edward was coming from. And the conversation had biblical basis (Hagar, anyone), so I can’t fault Meyer there. And, in the end, Bella came out swinging.

So the third and final part of the book is written from Bella’s newly turned vampire perspective. Miraculously, Bella doesn’t struggle with the difficulty of being a newborn, thanks to her considerable mental strength (which turns out to be a talent greater than any of her pals), and she gets to be stronger than everyone else for awhile. She apparently craves teh sexing like she craves blood, which is amusing, and the demon lovechild turns out to be extraordinarily precocious, maturing rapidly into some sort of super child with magical abilities.

And…Jacob falls in love with the baby. I mean everyone does kind of because she has creepy charisma, but did I mention the whole imprinting thing? Basically werewolves (it actually later emerges that Jacob and the gang are shapeshifters, but anyway), imprint on people. At any age. At any time. And then fall madly in love. In New Moon, we got to see wolves imprinting on like two year olds, which was creepy, but the baby? Creepier.

Of course, the rapid maturation means Jacob doesn’t have long to wait (around seven years to adulthood), and it means that Jacob magically gets to remain in Bella’s life, albeit as a son in law. So, really, teams Edward and Jacob both win. Yay them. And everyone lives happily ever after, with the werewolves and the vampires being buddies. After a big battle, of course. Oh, and Bella and Edward live in a cottage that sounds totally pimp.

So now that I’ve basically totally spoiled the book for you (aren’t you just SHOCKED by the ending?), it’s time to criticize Breaking Dawn from a feminist perspective. Given that one of the reasons I’ve been reading the books is to rail against them, and the fact that I riled up thousands of people yesterday by challenging the anti-feminist content of the series, it’s only fair.

This book is much less problematic than the rest of the series, although there are still problems. Bella really comes into her own in Breaking Dawn, which is both good and bad. On the good side, we have Bella asserting herself, being much more confident and strong. Which is awesome, don’t get me wrong, and the process even starts before she becomes a vampire, with the pregnancy. The child is a catalyst for Bella’s awakening, in a way.

On the bad side of things, though, Bella only becomes “supermodel beautiful,” strong, and mentally powerful when she becomes a vampire. I mean this is the point of the books, that you are turned and you become insanely hot and strong, and the process refines mental talents. So there was really no way around it, but it still  made me a little sad. I was glad that we had repeated mentions in the wedding that Bella was beautiful, but Bella calls her human form “hideous” after turning, which was kind of depressing. Sure, it was fun to see her perform feats of strength and refine her mental talents, but as Stephenie said yesterday, physical strength isn’t what makes a strong woman. It’s emotional strength.

And in this book, Bella definitely moves forward on the path of being an emotionally strong woman. She does things independently, she thinks for herself, she asserts herself. And that’s awesome to see. The scene where Jacob is offered her body in trade, though, is really problematic for me. It may have biblical basis, and it may come from love, but it’s still disturbing. But Bella’s response to being treated as chattel is to reject the entire idea as the tomfoolery that it is, so in a way the scene sets Bella up as an even stronger character, but I’m still not sure that makes it ok.

I’d say that Breaking Dawn marked a huge turning point for Stephenie Meyer’s work. It may not be quite as girl-positive as I might like, but there were some very real feminist lessons in there, like a woman taking charge, a woman asserting her right to choose, a woman proving that she can be physically stronger than a man, a woman growing into her own.

So either this is the most subversively brilliant book series ever, with Meyer setting girls up and then breaking down their assumptions, or you could consider the series 75% antifeminist, and 25% awesome. Your choice.

Demographics:

Breaking Dawn, by Stephenie Meyer. Published 2008, 756 pages. Fiction.

I’ve known that the American blood supply experienced some serious problems in the 1980s ever since I read The Coming Plague, which is one of my favourite books. And I’ve always had a very personal interest in the safety of the blood supply, because in 1984, before the blood supply was routinely tested for AIDS and non-A non-B hepatitis (as Hepatitis C was once known) I received a blood transfusion. Given the long incubation period for AIDS, I’m sure you can imagine my delight that I continue to test negative for HIV/AIDS, but the thought that I and numerous other Americans were potentially exposed to bad blood makes, well, it makes my blood boil.

So when Vicki sent this book (thanks again, by the way), I thought it would be interesting, but that I wouldn’t learn any new information. I knew (and I hope you know too) that the blood supply was compromised in the 1980s, and that the blood banking industry was very slow to act. As it turns out, I was wrong; this book had a lot of information I hadn’t been aware of, and I think it’s a brilliant piece of investigative journalism.

What I didn’t know was how heavily involved the Red Cross was in the blood supply problems of the early 1980s, and I was also not aware that the problems with the blood supply persisted well through the 1990s, with numerous documented cases of potentially tainted blood being released for transfusion. Let me say that again, because it bears repeating: Red Cross blood banks released tainted blood and blood products for transfusion. And when contamination problems were discovered later, the Red Cross was very slow to send letters notifying donors and recipients. And that made me extremely annoyed.

The Red Cross is already not one of my favourite charities in the world, because a lot of the money they collect goes to administration, rather than actually helping people. But, like a lot of people, I had foolishly assumed that Red Cross blood services were pretty clean, so to speak. In fact, the sale of donated blood (possibly your donated blood, since the Red Cross has such a tight hand on the blood market), generates a lot of money for the Red Cross. So when AIDS emerged in the early 1980s and it became apparent that AIDS was transmitted through blood, the Red Cross response was to protect its income.

And not recipients of blood.

It’s not just that the Red Cross was slow to adopt donor screening techniques and tests which could be used to screen for AIDS, or at least to look for surrogate conditions which indicated that the donor was at increased risk of having HIV/AIDS. No, the Red Cross actively blocked efforts to make the blood supply safer, even going so far as to punish renegade Red Cross centers which tried to screen their donors.

Thanks to luck, I’m not one of the people profiled in this book, like the set of premature triplets who all got transfusion AIDS and all died, or the store owner who received blood transfusions after being shot in a robbery and learned that he might have been exposed to AIDS five years later, when the Red Cross finally got around to sending him a letter. So I couldn’t help but read this book with a “there but for the grace of God go I” feeling.

If you haven’t read this book, I would highly recommend it. If nothing else, it will probably change the way you think about the Red Cross.

Demographics:

Bad Blood, by Judith Reitman. Published 1996, 288 pages. Health.

July marked an all-time high point in the Book Project. I read 46 books, and a total of 14,393 pages. That works out to almost a book and a half a day, and a 465 page/day average. I more than doubled the January low point, and somehow I doubt that I will be topping July in the coming months. Maybe I’m wrong and I will, but this was a pretty book-heavy month. At this point, my total books read for the year exceeds the number of days so far this year, which is a pretty neat trick, if you ask me.

Anyway, the book of the month prize goes to War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a recommendation from Vicki. I also really enjoyed The Power of the Dog, and The Physics of the Buffyverse.

I struggled with First Into Nagasaki, because I disagreed with the positions in the first part of the book, but I tried to remember that the book is a series of largely unedited dispatches, not an assessment in retrospect, so I tried to give it a break. In the middle of the month, my feminist values were severely strained. First I read Madam, Will You Talk?, a book which featured a simpering, obnoxious, apologist female character whom I wanted to smack. Then, because I am a glutton for punishment, I read Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse, featuring another totally weak, powerless female character who relies on the precious manpire in her life to save her from a horrible fate. Get ready for the Breaking Dawn review, which will be posted as soon as I read it.

At any rate, my head didn’t explode, and I read a lot of really good books last month, so I’d say it was a pretty good month. As always, I heartily encourage book recommendations from readers; I will do my best to get ahold of every book recommended (unless I have already read it, in which case I may abstain). If it’s really important to you that I read something, you can mail it to me:

s.e. smith

po box 2764

fort bragg, ca 95437

I’m also happy to accept loans of books; you can lend me books through the mail (include a slip to let me know it’s a loan!) or in person, if you’re local. I can’t guarantee that I’ll like the books sent/recommended, but I still appreciate it, because not liking something still requires critical thinking!