I don’t remember a time when my parents said I couldn’t read any book I wanted to read. There were some frowns and “shouldn’t”s thrown around (regarding Stephen King, Peter Benchley, and Michael Crichton, when I was in elementary school), but never a “no.” They let me decide for myself.

For fourth grade reading class, we read Lois Lowry’s The Giver*. I didn’t understand it then; in fact, I distinctly remember having a nightmare about it – Imagine being told what your future career will be at a young age, I thought, the horror! — but then I read it again as a teenager and… wow. I was left chilled. In fifth grade, we read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time* and it was the first book I’d ever read for school where I connected with the protagonist. Meg Murry was ME, albiet 12. I was 10 with plain brown hair and glasses and although I was good in school and never felt as rejected by my teachers as Meg did, seeing her made me feel so much better about my own life. Reading that book gave me self-confidence. (It also made me desperately long for brothers.) When we read Julie of the Wolves*, I distinctly remember that never before had a book evoked such strong emotions from me. (I also remember being annoyed that Julie didn’t turn into a wolf. I similarly read The Witch of Blackbird Pond* thinking it was about magic.) Out of school I was happily devouring Goosebumps* and Roald Dahl*.

Even as an older kid, the Scary Stories series of books by Alvin Schwartz (with those amazing illustrations!) was still one of my favorites. Before I even knew that fantasy was a genre, I loved the historical/mystery/suspense feel to those stories, loved the exploration of the impossible and implausible they presented. Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw that that series was listed at #1 on the most-banned/challenged books of 1990-1999 list, as well as #7 on the 2000-2009 list.) In A Dark, Dark Room is still one of my favorite picture books/easy readers of my childhood.

I read To Kill a Mockingbird* for the first time when I was 10, the summer after fifth grade. I remember thinking, “I didn’t think an old book could actually be so interesting.” Reading it made me mad. I’d grown up in a school district that took celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day very seriously, but I had never gotten so upset about racism and bigotry until I’d read this book and felt it for myself.

I read The Catcher in the Rye* the summer before tenth grade, when I was 14. I hated The Catcher in the Rye. But I read it once for myself, and once again in class in tenth grade (still hated it), but I read it. I can now say that I’ve read it and I hate it for a variety of concrete reasons. I read The Great Gatsby* the summer before I was in eleventh grade, when I was 15. The Great Gatsby, unlike with Catcher — that book changed the way I thought about language in fiction. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose — I’d never read anything like that before. I’d been reading Star Wars novels and contemporary YA and anything fantasy in the children’s section of the public library. I’d never read… well. A book about “a great, sad rich guy and his life” and thought I’d ever connect with the characters, or find it interesting enough to read three times. I thought the only books I would love would have to involve space or dragons or swords or magic. For all of my much-maligned school district’s faults, we read some serious literature. Before Gatsby, we’d read Richard Wright’s Black Boy*, then Native Son* for another class; we read Song of Solomon* (surprising) by Toni Morrison and Of Mice and Men* (amazing) by John Steinbeck. There was The Jungle* (long), The Age of Innocence* (annoying); I read The Fountainhead* and was so affected by its message of individualism I obsessively isolated myself for a while. Outside of class, I kept reading science fiction and fantasy. I read YA fantasy, naturally, (like the first several Harry Potter* books) but also Dune, The Lord of the Rings* and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*. Somewhere in there I discovered and gave up many nights of sleep for the His Dark Materials* trilogy by Philip Pullman (just after The Amber Spyglass came out, thank goodness, or I would have imploded from the wait).

I had no idea until I was seventeen or eighteen that many of those books I’d read for school or for myself, that I’d loved, hated, endured, and that profoundly affected me had, at one point, been either challenged or banned in other places around this country.

When the anti-Harry Potter fervor was first hitting libraries, I was a page in the children’s section of my local library, shelving books, and overhearing parents come to the librarians asking for a book “like Harry Potter, so my kid will read it, but with none of the silly witchcraft. Do you have stuff like that?” They’d recommend titles by authors like Louis Sachar or Jerry Spinelli for the boys and Katherine Paterson and E. L. Konigsburg for the girls, but insist to the parents, “You ought to read Harry Potter yourself. I actually enjoyed the books, a lot. They’re fun, and the witchcraft stuff is completely overblown by the media.” Some of these parents frowned thoughtfully. Win? Possibly. But I loved the librarians for not giving in to the fervor.

In conclusion to this ramble of a post, I adore books. I believe everyone should read books of all kinds and have the freedom of choice to be able to decide for themselves what they ought to read. And as people across the internet have proved in the past few weeks, there’s a power in speaking loudly against book banning. I love the internet community of writers and readers. Let’s keep talking and spreading the word and ensure every reader has a chance to read the books that could change their lives.

(* appear next to titles of recent books and older classics that have been banned or challenged at some point in the last 20 years – according to the ALA.)

Unlike the rest of New York, however, my husband and I aren’t taking a chunk of time off this month to do anything interesting. We’ve taken one weekend trip already and we’re planning another, but since we’re skiiers, not beach folks, we tend to hang out around the house this time of year rather than go out of town. We also have the kitten who, being only six months old, requires more attention than an older cat. So like new, paranoid pet parents, we’re not taking any far-away trips any time soon.

But I have been going on “vacation” in a manner of speaking. I’ve been devouring books. The past three days have been occupied by The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. Those are some serious thwwwp books! Mockingjay comes out next week and I am very, very excited. (I preordered it weeks ago. I’m hoping the delivery guy gets it here on the same day.) I’ll be twitching until then. *twitch*

My to-be-read list is long. While I am trying to prioritize books I haven’t read, I keep getting interrupted by the desire to re-read books — and then there are the two writing projects that keep calling to me. Very different in characters, setting, scope. I keep getting snippets of dialogue for them as I’m washing the dishes or in the middle of a scene while reading. Just — bam, insert my characters into my brain, insisting on a little bit of dialogue. Drives me crazy but at the same time, this is how it always happens. Until I get the whole thing out on paper (or, well, metaphorical paper on the computer screen) the characters will keep popping into my head and running through their lines over and over like actors in a play until I just write it simply to get it out of my head. Once it’s out of my head, there’s relief. For a little while.

*twitch* Is it Mockingjay release day yet? No? Sigh. *twitch*

So my vacation isn’t much from a physical leaving-the-house standpoint, but when I’m sucked into a good book I may as well be far, far away.

What about you? Are you reading and/or are you actually leaving town this summer?

Well. Not until yesterday.

Yesterday I was on the L train, where the ambient subway noise is so loud under the East River that I usually have to pause or turn up my audiobook or music in my headphones. But brilliantly, I forgot my headphones yesterday. Neither did I remember to bring my stalwart mass market emergency paperback (usually something I’ve already read) in its little fabric protective cover (for both subway privacy — I can’t stand people being nosy! — and for protection in my backpack). So I was without a way to amuse myself for my commute. My commute isn’t an “easy” one, either: it’s 10 minutes on the L, 5-10 minutes of waiting at the next platform, then 10-15 minutes on the ancient, creaking, and loud C train. Meaning, I can’t snuggle into a plastic seat and read for a good forty minutes. It’s all starts and stops. Half of the time when I am listening to an audiobook, I have to have it paused for at least half if not more of the commute simply because the extra noise is too deafening. (But I never “read” an audiobook for the first time, I always read it first, then listen to it if I can get it from the library or online, to read it again.) Not only are the subways themselves loud, but the platforms are loud (every time any train, even the ones going in the other direction across the way, pulls into the station, it’s all screeches and creaks). So I end up either not hearing half the book or getting annoyed that I have no distraction. Thus, reading is usually my preferred distraction. I can still hear when a train is coming without actually having to stop what I’m doing. I prefer reading during the brief stretches of inactivity throughout the day, too. When I’m on the bus, or when I’m sitting on a park bench, I enjoy being able to pull out a book and dig right in.

Getting back to the point, I pulled out my iPhone while on the L. I browsed through my apps, thinking maybe I’d play a game. Then I realized I had downloaded the Barnes & Noble eReader app because I’d gotten a bunch of free downloads the other day from their website. I started playing with it and opened up Robin Hobb’s Dragon Keeper, which I also own in hardcover but haven’t gotten around to yet. I tweaked the font, size, and page animation, then got to reading. The L stopped, I locked the iPhone and shoved it in my pocket, darted between slow folks up the stairs, then settled on the C platform to wait. I pulled out the iPhone again, and I was still on that same page in the eBook. I kept reading. I read as I walked. I read as I waited later in the day. I sat on a bench in the sunshine in Central Park idly watching the small children play as I continued to read. When someone required my attention — lock. iPhone in the pocket. “Yes?” Done, I pulled it out again, and kept reading. I read a good third of the book across the course of the day. (Helped in part by my ability to simply lock the iPhone and throw it in my pocket when I needed to pay attention to the real world.)

I was so impressed.

I’ve disliked the idea of eBooks from the start because I am one of those people who loves getting ink on my fingers when I tear through a brand new paperback the day of its release. (I get ink on my thumbs and left pinky, from the way I alternately hold it with my left hand or with both hands.) I love seeing my bookshelves lined with colorful spines of much-read books. I love seeing that I have a complete series on my shelf, next to other series. I love the idea of being able to thumb through the pages and find that quick-reference scene or sentence I was trying to quote from one of my dog-eared favorites. I geeked out when I went to a rare book room and got to touch an original version of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, in the compiled serialized format of its first publication. (I don’t even like Dickens and I was geeking out!) I’ve held a page of the Gutenberg Bible printed hundreds of years ago! (GEEK OUT.) I am a book person!

But yesterday was the first time I could see myself, say, reading an eBook on the iPad and loving it. Or simply reading more eBooks on my iPhone — though admittedly it’s a small screen with terrible battery life economy! I found, despite my love of the feel of pages in my hand, that I really enjoyed the idea of a book on the go. Even more on the go than a book by definition already is. Scary, that.

It felt, oddly, as I felt when I first transitioned to an .mp3 player, when music used to be about having that collection of discs in that folder and carrying that with your CD player, or remembering to throw the right disc into the CD player before going to the gym or the track. How many times did I open my CD player to find I’d remembered the wrong CD! That’s… obsolete now. It’s all loaded on my iPod, my iPhone. If I forgot to update it lately, that’s terrible, but I don’t have the choice of 13 tracks, I have thousands. But I think about the way that music’s shift to digital has changed my life and I try to transpose that to books… books… ah! But see, I don’t want books to go the way of diskettes and vinyl. I don’t want to see magazines and newspapers become entirely digitized. One of my friends, an iPad user, showed me the Wall Street Journal’s iPad app. Embedded videos! Searchable keywords! It makes getting the paper version delivered somewhat silly. But I think: as a teenager I ripped pictures of hot guys out of magazines and taped them to my walls. Will my children copy-and-paste them to their laptop desktops — to their touch-screen digital crazy devices? I see digital photo frames in homes, with scrolling slideshows of family vacations, and wonder where photo albums and scrapbooks have gone. No doubt the digital age has made information safer and more easily accessible — no running into a burning house to save the photos when there are backups stored online — but it’s not… tangible. Not in the same way. That was and still is my big question mark about eBooks. How will it change the way we read, the way we consume books and other media?

Two days ago I could have said I’d never read an eBook and I wasn’t certain I’d like the experience if I tried. Today I can say that while I did pick up the hardcover version of Robin Hobb’s Dragon Keeper (which is excellent so far) when I was home and able to pull it off the shelf, I am planning to read more of it today digitally. This experience has made me curious about eReaders in a way I haven’t been until now. I could have cared less, but now I’m thinking about it. Seriously. Ah! Someone pinch me.

Silver Borne was great. It felt, for the first time in a few books, like Mercy was back to her old self—though with a clearer maturity than before. The series regulars/favorites were back, but in some cases with deeper characterization than in any previous volume (Darryl and Auriele, Ben; even Samuel) and overall while the plot tended to veer this way and that a few times, I really enjoyed it. Glad to see Mercy is going strong again.

Tales of the Otherworld felt like an indulgence, like that extra dollop of whipped cream you really want but know you should probably abstain from if someone else is watching…but what the hey. It felt like that. The stories were pure backstory, enrichment, extra tidbits and explanations, the little pieces here and there finally fleshed out in narrative form (my favorite, naturally, being Clay and Elena’s backstory story). The two novella-length stories (Clay & Elena’s and The Case of El Chupacabra) were probably the strongest, but that’s probably because I think Armstrong is at her strongest with novel-length fiction.

Other than being sick, my other despite-being-sick accomplishment this weekend was installing Office for Mac on the new computer. Not that I wasn’t surviving without Word and Excel…not that I couldn’t… but yes. I caved. I need them. I am too strangely addicted to Excel for organizing character detail in extensive chart form for me to purely go word processor, and I’m too used to Word to think I could adapt to a different program without Word as a standby (though I am planning on using Scrivener, at least for the free trial, because it’s so clever).

Also in regards to the [shiny, lovely, new] Mac, I am trying to get used to the idea of the touchpad. I have been an external mouse devotee forever; the Mini made it not only necessary but absolutely vital for me to use an external mouse because my hands were almost too big for its keyboard and it’d always jostle the touchpad accidentally. With the Mac, though, I am delighting in its multi-finger functionality so far. Call me easily entertained, but it’s very fun to scroll down a page with two fingers. Much smoother than the scroller thinger in a mouse. (Technical term, that.) Though for dragging and dropping, an external mouse is still undeniably necessary. Wow, I can’t believe I talked about that for a paragraph. I am a wordy, wordy lady today. (Cough. Always…)

Must now dive back into work. It’s so exciting, finally being able to write again!

I’ve been spending my time in these last weeks not worrying about the wedding with as much enthusiasm as possible, instead writing and reading. The draft now has 76,000 words and I’m on target for a really nice-sized first draft. I’m almost done with it. I’m currently procrastinating writing the climactic scenes and the denouement, but I figure those will get done this week. I’m excited to get through them, though. I’m still not entirely sure how the details will play out given what’s in my outline. We’ll see.

I finished Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand by Carrie Vaughn on Wednesday (which was good and thematically appropriate, with Kitty getting married) and started Watchmen that night. I am now halfway through Watchmen, the graphic novel, and I am addicted to it. I’ve actually (gasp) never read a graphic novel before. I’m seriously enjoying it, though its form did take my novice eyes a few pages to get used to. The film trailers are only heightening my anticipation of finishing the novel — as well as seeing the movie. When I see images in the trailers that seem to have been lifted from the page, I get very antsy about seeing the movie version. The casting, furthermore, seems to be very excellent. I’m loving the choices for the various main characters — I’m a fan of the other work of Billy Crudup (Dr. Manhattan), Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl II), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Comedian), and Matthew Goode (Ozymandias). Even Malin Ackerman, whom I loved to hate in 27 Dresses, is a surprising but intriguing choice for the Silk Spectre II. Knowing the cast as I’m reading the graphic novel — images on the pages aside — is definitely making this a bit more interesting.

The wedding is the day after the opening day of Watchmen, incidentally, so the night-before-the-wedding mayhem with my Maid of Honor might have to include seeing Watchmen. My sister and I are admitted nerds, which makes this an ideal sisterly activity. Even more ideal is that going to see a cult comic movie the night before the wedding sounds so un-stereotypical, making me even more enthusiastic about it. (Anything that sounds un-stereotypical regarding the wedding makes me excited, because the stereotypical things are stressful, or so the stereotype tells us.) I would go to the Thursday-into-Friday midnight show, but every time I’ve done that — the Star Wars’ prequels, Spider-Man 2 & 3, one or two of the Harry Potter movies — I drag for the next three days. Dragging on the day of the wedding is no good.

In less exciting wedding-related news, I finally went ahead and ordered some favors and things. Apparently these are crucial elements for the event, these favors. Sigh. Plus a few gifts — gifts make sense to me in a way favors don’t. TheKnot.com has some interesting stuff but I managed to stay away from unnecessary kitsch, I hope. I am still very much anti-wedding establishment. I’ve relented on a few fronts (grumble, guestbook and flowers and candies) but I’m still fighting being too commercially traditional. At the end of the day, though, a wedding is still a show, and it’s hard to not want that show to have a few minor flashy touches.

In both novels, these men are not the “narrator” character — Cat/Eric in Charmed Life and Nick in The Great Gatsby — and both men without doubt dominate any scene in which they appear. Also, the time period (and by extension, the costumes and settings) are also similiar. Charmed Life is set in this strange time period that is at once late nineteenth century, 1911, the 1920s, or some other vague time (hints of the ’40s/’50s, maybe), mostly because it’s set in an alternate reality that diverged from ours some time in the past and because of the existence of magic has inherently evolved differently. Gatsby is of course very straightforwardly a Roaring Twenties novel of society, classes, money, power, lost love, etc. Really. The suits, top hats, dressing gowns, big houses, and stuff… they really remind me of one another. Is that really strange?

I know. These characters are more different than they are alike but they remind me of each other. The same way Disney’s Beast in the Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast evokes Robin McKinley’s Corlath from The Blue Sword. (Robin McKinley’s personal novel affair with the Beauty and the Beast retellings notwithstanding.)

On the NaNoWriMo front, I am struggling to get to 50,000 words by next Tuesday — before I leave for Thanksgiving. Oh, dear. I hope I can write 15,000 words (or slightly less) by then.

I actually spent a lot of Tuesday/Wednesday (and the few days before it) reading the first two books of Trudi Canavan’s Black Magician Trilogy, called The Magicians’ Guild and The Novice. I started the final book The High Lord but early on I shut it and said, “No. You will not get wrapped up in this book. This is bound to be an awesome book. You do not want to read this. NO.” Thus, I stopped and started working again. I actually never meant to read those books in November. I actually – gasp – bought them the last week of October, intending to read them all in 3 days, as is customary usually when I finally break down and buy a book I’ve never read. So I started The Magicians’ Guild… and read it… and read it… and forgot about it… and forgot… and guiltily picked it up again… and pushed and pushed… and then I got to one scene, mid-book – MID-BOOK! The hook of a good book never takes that long for me! — and THWWWP. I finally, finally saw possibilities branching out for this world and its plot and I dove head-first after them. By then it was the first week of November and I’d been casually reading a chapter here or there before bed or while bored because, well, it was not a hooking but a diverting book. So I finished the book with the stunning final scene’s revelation and I… well. I went right over to the shelf and picked up The Novice and went right into it.

I saw The Novice‘s plot picked up a few months later and that it was about to go into the boring-ness of the beginning of the book and its set up (Trudi Canavan is a plotter. Her books’ characters are interesting by virtue of the things they do — or did, or have done — and when/how they do them, not how they say them or what they look like. There are no complex images; the writing is blunt and direct. Thus, I could sense there was Plot to set up, so I was able to calm down a little.) A little meant waiting a day before spending the whole of the next day (Tuesday) reading it. I wrote maybe a dash that day. I really worked hard at night to overcompensate and I did a little. I started The High Lord just enough for the brief synopsis set up and to discover if there’d been any revelations in the year between the end of that book and the start of this, then read a biiiit more to see where the plot was likely to go (I’ve got a few firm suppositions now) and I put it down. I hid it. I ran to the computer, opened my NaNo story, and started vigilantly resuming my word count. The way I write is so vividly different from Trudi Canavan, it’s funny. That, and I find myself so much more interested in character-character stuff rather than setting up world structures (like, for instance, a school; though I must mention I do not enjoy writing stores that take place within the confines of a school, much like Diana Wynne Jones). I think when I do write structures like schools they end up feeling more like Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea‘s school, which was there, and developed, and involved some scenes and some characters, but was by no means the reason for the book nor did the bulk of the plot take place there.

I’ve already learned a ton about myself because of NaNo. Firstly, when I’m in the zone, I can pump out thousands of words easily. When I’m not, a hundred is torture. Getting in the zone take as little as rereading the last stuff I wrote, or honestly working to immerse myself in the word by doing world-building stuff in my extraneous documents or pumping up the music. (I write to mindless pop and/or musical soundtracks I can sing along to. I usually prefer to write to musical soundtracks because I like that each musical’s song evokes a part of a plot with character motivation, desires, and stuff like that. Musical songs bring a character or characters from Point A to Point B through their singing, and that’s more interesting usually than a plain old pop/rock song. Though I occasionally do like me some rock. Or lyricless movie scores.)

Next, reading a book when trying to meet a deadline is clearly just a Bad Idea. Thus the rather large and intimidating pile of constantly renewed library books (I am keeping them around for Thanksgiving’s train ride, I tell myself). Next, I am easily conflicted — ooh, not really a surprise — and I am, or can be, really creative. I am proud of myself, actually, for some of the things I’ve come up with. When creating two important secondary characters, I deliberately chose new and interesting character directions for them and came up with some dynamics I’ve never written before — but the kicker is that they work so beautifully in conjunction with the main character and the plot. I get a bit gleeful sometimes when I surprise myself and I find myself doing that a lot with some of the blundering decisions I’ve made because of time constraints with NaNo. I do not, however, think that it’s solely because of NaNo. I knew I did that in one of my novels ages ago (when 80K words in a document was me not finishing the book and realizing that I’d written some behemoth of no coherent villain motivation and a lot of necessary-but-not scenes of world-building).

Oh, back to the grind I go.

And I did love it. It was such a fun, clever book. The plot is simple: The sheltered, teenaged Charmain is volunteered to look after her Great-Great-Uncle-by-marriage’s house while he recovers from an illness. While living in and exploring this house, Charmain discovers a door that has many ways to it and encounters several crazy, funny, and fascinating characters, including, of course, Mrs. Sophie Pendragon and her family. Hilarity, magic, and life lessons ensue culminating in a satisfying, classically Diana Wynne Jones style of revelation-conclusion. (In that regard it was very Conrad’s Fate.)

I have to say, though, this book felt more like a Chrestomanci book than Castle in the Air did. Had Howl (and yes, he of course has a role in the book) not been so very… Howl, he would have been very Christopher. (For those of you who have read the book: Christopher would never have pulled the Twinkle stunt. Never. He’s much too haughty.) Even so they’re very similar characters — both somewhat selfish and self-important, both powerful magic users (in different worlds with different systems of magic; Howl is a wizard, Christopher is a nine-lifed enchanter) — but also distinctly different. Howl is obsessed with his appearance in a vain, almost endearingly self-conscious way; Christopher is fastidious and prim. What’s interesting too is that these men capture the attention and admiration of those around them but their wives are very simple, compared to them. Though Sophie is certainly a spitfire compared to Millie (in Charmed Life Millie, not the younger versions of Millie).

Charmain was an interesting protagonist, as was Peter as the sidekick/counterpoint character. I’ve never really encountered a character who is really a cleverly, well-drawn “sheltered” character who nonetheless thinks she can do anything she puts her mind to — and fails and fails at it. Her successes are brilliant accidents. Then there’s Peter, also sheltered but much better and more practically educated but anything he sets his mind to — with perfect form, perfect methodology — ends up going hilariously awry. Together they make a bumblingly real pair. I saw them so vividly in their arguments, their pitfalls and disasters, and their terrific successes. Talk about terrific characterization.

Then there’s Sophie, Morgan, Calcifer, and Howl. There is something to a series (or companion books) when you know certain characters already so you can appreciate the riotous one-liners that the author throws out there. And there are a lot. They are terrific. I laughed out loud the most reading this book than I have reading any book in a long while. Witty banter is all well and good but sometimes it’s just a really well-timed one-liner that can bring you to giggling tears. That, and Diana Wynne Jones is absolutely excellent when it comes to the set-up and pay-off. She sets up a lot quickly and drops clever details constantly, but you can never tell when a set-up will pay-off — but when they do… they are perfect. Maybe these books are simply perfectly in line with my particular brand of humor? (I absolutely did find myself laughing a lot while reading the Chrestomanci books and the Dalemark books — The Lives of Christopher Chant and The Crown of Dalemark probably involved the most laughter of their respective series.)

One aspect I really enjoy about the Howl’s and Chrestomanci books are the fact that the kids and teenagers involved as protagonists and supporting cast are always at the point in their plots where they’re still learning how to do things and they make mistakes. Frequently. Neither are they usually “in school” but they’re usually outside of a consistent structure (or fight to escape that structure) and they find themselves in a place where they have to create their own structure, goals, and discipline. (Thank God for an alternative to the “school story”-driven plot of Harry Potter.)

A lot of the plots involve the children/teens making the very mistakes that grow into the problem of the novel itself that they have to solve. (Or, as in Christopher’s case in The Lives of Christopher Chant, finding his loyalties divided and all of his “good” intentions making everything worse.) These characters must take responsibility for their own mistakes and must bring themselves to ask for help, even when they think they don’t need it … these are themes that really resonate. They feel so particularly real. In Dalemark, for instance, there is a distinct element of fate and things beyond one’s control but even so the kids/teens are the ones who make the big choices and who must live with the consequences of those choices. Unlike in adult epic fantasy where sometimes the protagonist is forced along a path he/she doesn’t want nor choose, the element of choice is so vitally crucial to the plot of Diana Wynne Jones’s books. The kids/teens are the ones who convince and win others to their cause, who see the truth that some of the partisan, selfishly greedy adults can’t see. But these kids aren’t pure and innocent either. Dalemark’s Mitt, by fourteen, is a several-times-over criminal and manipulator; Eric Chant, called Cat, in Charmed Life, is almost cripplingly meek and shy; Christopher is so self-motivated and self-centered for so much of The Lives of Christopher Chant, almost every negative event in the book can be traced to decisions or neglectful actions Christopher has taken to make it so — all of which he has to then work to correct. Even Charmain, in House of Many Ways, finds that burying herself in a book whenever something goes awry doesn’t magically make the problem disappear; wishful thinking isn’t what changes things — taking action is the only way to change things.

So in conclusion to this rambling entry… Diana Wynne Jones’s House of Many Ways was a terrific book, though you’ll appreciate it a lot more if you’ve read both Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Air first.

I took so long reading The Spellcoats because it’s written in a completely different, foreign voice from the others (first person, too) and it takes place hundreds of years before the events in the first, second, and fourth books — but its events help explain and illuminate the others, as well as provide the foundation upon which the fourth’s plot is built. I’m glad I didn’t skip it! (I admit, I was tempted. I saw Mitt and Moril’s name in the blurb of the fourth and I was almost — almost — off like a shot, skipping book three. Good completionist me, though! Saved by my own obsessive compulsive completionist nature. Also, looking back, the third book is unusually wonderful. The way it’s written is… beautiful. Its narrator, Tanaqui, is a clever thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl whose narration is actually her weaving. She weaves coats, on which she weaves the story of her and her family’s adventures, and so the book is actually the “translation” of this weaving. It’s a wonderfully unusual way to tell a story — and naturally has consequences for the story’s conclusion and the way the story is discovered and found later on in that world. How fascinating!

Which brings me to the point I found I’d come to after finishing the fourth book: I love Diana Wynne Jones’s stories. So, so much. Every novel of hers (and short story) I’ve read demonstrate a terrific efficiency of language, consistent — and quick! — characterization, and an imaginative level of storytelling that astounds me. Even this, her “epic fantasy quartet” was as good and wonderful, fully, as any of her Chrestomanci books or those set in the world of Howl’s Moving Castle. I obviously need to read more of her works, though I think I’ve hit the “big” “famous” ones.

But back to The Crown of Dalemark and the whole quartet. These aren’t perfect, to my sense, but then again, I am a completionist. I finished the fourth book and thought, “Oh, no! There’s no fifth book is there? Is there? IS THERE?” and moaned about it for a good ten minutes of frantic pacing and cleaning. (I do that when I finish a book. I need to extract my mind; I need to clean and moan about the bereft feeling I’m too often left with after leaving a terrific world. If Bryan is around I jump and try to give him the five minute plot summary and he looks at me, annoyed, and says, “You know I haven’t heard any of the words you just said at me, right?”)

Diana Wynne Jones leaves out a level of detail (and completion) that I wish I could see, but to some degree it fascinates me. These are, in truth, children’s books, and it gives a greater depth of the “what if” to leave a lot unsaid. I know as a kid I always asked myself (and when my parents read with me, they encouraged these questions, and I recall this vividly) about all of the detail left un-detailed. I noticed there’s a lot of lack of particular inflection after each character’s dialogue. Some authors use the dialogue to show the character’s personality (through a lot of particular adjective and verbs attached to the dialogue) but Jones (Wynne Jones? Diana? Ha.) has a knack for characterizing through short bursts of personality demonstration or anecdote more in general. She’ll demonstrate a character arguing back unnecessarily in an annoying manner and make a comment like, “And he was always doing nettlesome things like that” or “He was the last person you wanted to start an argument with” or the like, to demonstrate that person’s nature, so when you see dialogue pop up with a particular line of, say, “No I certainly will not” then you automatically find yourself inflecting the dialogue with an irritated tone and you can imagine the other characters making faces like, “Oh, not again!” And it’s so naturally implied! Maybe I’m simply an imaginative reader. Maybe I naturally thicken characters who on the page are simple structures of basic traits. But I think I can credit Diana with a lot more than that. She develops a richness in her simply-yet-complexly plotted children’s (and young adults’) books that is undeniable. And that’s why I love them.

I just finished Breaking Dawn. Gasp. I’m still on hold for it from the library… which I should go cancel. My friend lent me her friend’s copy — haha — and so I devoured that between last night and this morning (while managing, might I add, to get a full night’s sleep). I’ve got an awful lot to say on it but in the interests of spoilers, I won’t say it all here.

I suppose I liked it. Some parts of it I somewhat hated. Some I said “Finally!” about. Overall, I think I am “bleh” about it.

Actually I think I would have preferred Books 2 and 3 to be a heck of a lot shorter and sweeter and this book to be tidier, and then just, you know, have that. Or, well, maybe Book 1 shorter, too. I think they’re just awfully long and filled with lots of stuff that doesn’t need to be there. Efficiency of language and all of that. It would have been an excellent trilogy. If the POV had been different I would have liked it more, too. I grew to dislike the first person the longer the series went on as Meyer seemed to have more and more trouble keeping a rein on her writing style to keep it within the bounds of the perspective she chose… I mean, she even switches perspectives (at the end of 3 and a part of 4) and that’s  just… not… well, I just didn’t like it. Write it in third person if you can’t contain it in one, I think. I’ve read some really, really successful first persons that play up on the inherent tunnel-vision-ness of the first person POV by which Meyer kept seeming stifled. Or be more consistent in the POV switches. I’ve read successful chapter-switching first person POV novels, and those are great if a bit complicated when done well. Oh, well.

I’m going to go spoiler lite and speak in (annoying) generalities for the rest of this, but as a general warning, stop reading if you don’t want any surprises spoiled.

I liked Bella’s character a heck of a lot more in Book 4. But that’s also because she changed significantly (which I incidentally didn’t like; if Bella in Book 4 was the only Bella, it would have been great. But I’ll get into that later.) The change wasn’t a gradual thing, like it should have been. I didn’t like the sudden, sharp shift in personality. It made sense given what happened — I doubt Meyer could have done it differently and had it still be convincing without reworking some of the plot or timeline, at least — but I didn’t like how weak Bella’s personality was all along, leading to this. Book 2 Bella is a miserable nuisance. Book 3 is all… oy. Better but still not ideal. She’s more authentically teenagerish in Book 3, though. I get that she’s not a modern heroine, she’s a throwback to the nineteenth century’s gothic heroine period (has Meyer read any of those early nineteenth century gothic novels? Did she expect any of her teenaged readers to have read them?) and maybe a bit of Austen. (The man-must-save-me-from-my-circumstances Austen, not the strong-willed, self-determined woman Austen; I don’t believe Bella had Elizabeth’s Bennett’s fire. Maybe something of Anne Elliot’s moping. Actually, some of that, yes, I see that. But probably only because I’m throwing Anne onto a Book 2/3 Bella and seeing if it might stick. It might.) Anyway.

The whole plot of Book 4 was sort of, well, unsurprising. I guessed every leg of it a few hundred pages before it occurred, and when it did, I was still shocked that I was right, because when I’d made those predictions to myself, I said, “Wouldn’t that be hilariously ironic? Because that would make this book long! And look how long it is!” And it happened. And I was… bitter? Annoyed that I figured it all out? For one of the predictions I actually thought to myself, “Too bad it’s going to turn out in Way A, because Way B would totally make things crazy! If that were to happen, then this and this and this could happen… But Way A is totally going to happen so there’s no use in further speculation.” And guess what. Way B happened. My speculation was correct. I was shocked because I had never thought Meyer would… do that. I do personally love figuring out the plot of books but… but… there were no surprises. None. Even the swooping-in-at-the-last-minute moment at the end was unsurprising. I was sort of “Sigh.” I suppose not every author can pull a fast one on me. I love it when they do, though.

But really, was I expecting this book to be amazing? No. I was expecting it to be just on the wrong side of tolerable. I am surprised that it was better than tolerable. Enjoyable, diverting. Fun. Was it because Meyer finally embraced more fantasy than she had ever used? Probably. She took risks and ran with them, trusting we’d follow. I think in doing so she lost some readers, those who followed her books for the love story and not the fantasy. (Though if they survived the werewolf revelation, I am surprised to think that they wouldn’t be able to survive anything. Vampires are one thing; shape-shifting can be something else entirely, but what came in Book 4 is no more shocking, really, than anything else — fantasy-wise. It was shocking for other reasons, which I can get into at another time.) And I was surprised too that I was in the vampire camp so firmly from Book 1. I am so often in the werewolf/shifter camp that I was surprised when Book 3 came down to it, forcing me to ally with Edward or Jacob, that I was unhesitatingly Edward.

And so anti-Bella. Really, I was fed up with her by the end of Book 3. The choice, ugh. Maybe I was more irritated with the marketing? Maybe. I am glad she was redeemed in part in Book 4 but in doing so she really wasn’t Bella. I mean, I can’t name it precisely. I think I felt condescension toward Bella in Books 2 and 3. The vast majority of my female friends and acquaintances are stronger women, plain and simple, than Bella was. I’m talking strength of character, of purpose, of will. You can’t feel so “meh” about a character for so long and then immediately cheer with her and enjoy her without stopping and thinking, “Wait. This is not the same character.” The changes she went through were abrupt and rough and told to me (ugh, telling versus showing) and I don’t think Meyer convinced me of why Bella changed except for the excuse of the new balances of power. She spends so much time on really strange moments and details but not enough time, space on the page, on this change of Bella’s that is so unbelievably crucial to the plot. I mean, if my life with the man of my dreams shifted that abruptly for the same reason tomorrow, my personality would not change that much in a few days and I can say that with absolute certainty. I know my loyalties and heart would change and grow appropriately, but I would not suddenly become a different person. Change takes time that Meyers did not make me feel I was living through with Bella emotionally. Additionally Meyer made it seem like Bella’s character jumped from 18 to 35, from self-conscious to ferociously self-assured, and I’m supposed to believe that easily, just like that. I don’t think so. She changed Bella too falsely, too rapidly, given what had transpired so recently in book time, in Books 2 and 3. If the change had been gradual, from the start of the series to the end of it, I would have bought it. But Bella was so eighteen years old in Book 3. Devil’s Advocate: I realize the events of the first half of Breaking Dawn were so earth-shattering, so life-altering that Bella really does have to change. But Meyer failed to convince me of the emotion, of the grounded-in-reality-truth of that change from Character A to Character B.

Other writers have done it and blown me away. To use a few fantasy examples from other authors whose books could be classified as “coming of age” or “young adult”: Robin McKinley’s Deerskin does it shockingly well. Heart-breakingly well. Lissar changes completely while retaining her sense of self and I believe every moment of it because of how grounded in raw emotion and power her experiences are. McKinley’s Aerin in The Hero and the Crown has a similar forged-in-the-fires-of-hell life-changing experience, and she changes because of it, too. I mean, hell, one of the best character changes ever has to be Frodo’s in The Lord of the Rings. Harrowing experiences over approximately the same time frame as Bella’s (actually Bella’s is more, I believe) and he is irrevocably altered in a gut-wrenching, proud, and really profound way. (Robin Hobb’s Malta in her Liveship Traders Trilogy is another character who changes sharply and realistically, as is Fitz in the Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies, though his change is over the course of years.) Bella’s change didn’t hit me like that at all. It didn’t feel real.

Getting more and more spoiler-ific here, I thought the events and moments in the series were certainly enough to have moved Bella to discover that sort of power of character on her own but Meyer made Bella’s humanity such a handicap, made being a vampire so perfect and desirable, it’s so hard to compare it. I don’t know how I feel about humanity being a handicap. How being painted as utterly frail and breakable and not… well, in any other way, is any way… relatable? I mean, we are breakable, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen humans painted that way in a fantasy series with supernatural characters. Humans are so much more than that. But then again, her vampires are so human — she doesn’t make them very different — I suppose I can see why she would malign humanity so much when her vampires are that unrealistically cool. In a way, that’s one thing I profoundly do not enjoy about the series. Bella cannot embrace herself as who she is, she has to become someone else — something not entirely human — to finally love herself. I don’t know how that settles with me. The analogy is imperfect, of course, to real life — as all fantasy should be imperfect, not one for one, analogies to real life — but even so. It’s discomfiting.

I sit uneasy with a message that in order to be able to love and be proud of yourself have to both find someone else to complete you and to fundamentally change (in essence, your genetics) in the process.

But of course, cynics will say that about any kind of all-consuming love, or that lots of life-changing events seriously alter the people they happen to. I’ve been asked to my face why I need Bryan to love, cherish, and marry me, when I have to sacrifice my single, individual self to become the us that comprises us? And it is a sacrifice to become an us. You are no longer your own entity in a couple. You are who you become together. You can change and grow and become wiser together. But… I’m also still irrevocably myself. Bumbling faults and all. Gah. It’s such a web of tangled thoughts, that. I could discuss that for a long time.

There are a lot of aspects of the book I’d want to discuss more but in the interests of remaining vague, I won’t. You can talk to me about it, if you like.

I suppose that’s how I think of the Twilight Saga. It’s good, it’s fun; it has its moments of utterly asinine melodrama that make me want to cry with frustration, and it has its moments of beautiful, really adorable romance. It also is pretty good with action and politics; its characters are varied, intriguing, and engrossing. I was without a doubt constantly engaged with the book. Will I buy the series and read it again and again like I do many others? No. It just wasn’t worth it. But I am glad I have read it.