Darren Shan, Vampire Blood trilogy-Cirque du Freak, The Vampire's Assistant, and Tunnels of Blood

Its been a long time since I posted anything to this blog, but I swear it’s not because I am lazy. And it’s definitely not because I’ve been playing video games in my spare time. I mean...what spare time?! I don’t have any spare time!? Give me your spare time!

What I have been reading are the first trilogy of books of the Darren Shan Saga: Cirque du Freak, The Vampire's Assistant, and Tunnels of Blood. I was originally interested in them for my younger brother, whom everyone has pinned him down Goosebumps books and nothing else (not that there is anything wrong with Goosebumps, of course). I just thought he might like something different. Not wanting to give him something blindly, I read the book to make sure it was a suitable reading level and foremost, to make sure it wasn’t boring.

Cirque du Freak

So I bought the first one and read it, and I have to say I personally liked it. The first book, Cirque du Freak was engaging and had enough character development to make the reader care. There is the main protagonist, some of his friends (the most important one being his best friend Steve Leonard), his little sister Annie, and Mr. Crepsley, the vampire. I found Mr. Crepsley a little thinly written, but he appears basically at the end of novel anyway. Furthermore, not knowing much about him makes the reader want to read the next book. As the title suggests, the book is about the Cirque du Freak and it is not truly focused on the vampire. There were some terribly dry moments that I thought could have been cut or perhaps better written-the sports scene is the one that most sticks out in my mind on that complaint. One thing that I have noticed was that nearly every chapter ends with a OMG SOMETHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN FML! cliff-hanger, which get tiring. However, I know that perhaps young readers need that hook.

The Vampire’s Assistant

            Out of all three, this one was my favourite in terms of story. Admittedly, I usually find the first of a series the best and go from there. But the first is my second favourite. Weird. Anyway, I actually preferred the day-to-day dynamics of Darren’s new life as the vampire’s assistant. It has even more colourful characters than the first, though some of them are introduced and you don’t really see them again. Between the second and third books I found I really liked Evra Von, the “snake boy.” I liked his back story, his personality, and how the book describes how he looks.   

            Without spoilers, I liked the end of this book best as well. The first ends with (hopefully) a desire to read the next one because they are actually moving on and there should be more to see. This one ends on a more emotionally powerful note than the others, in my opinion. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

Tunnels of Blood

            First off, this was my least favourite book (but I’m not saying that it wasn’t good!) and I’m saying that the title isn’t as great as it could be. I get where the “tunnels” come from, I get the vampire and blood stock words. Could it have been titled something better? Probably.

            That aside, this book introduces the Vampaneze. Sounds a little lame, but it’s a welcome addition at this point. As the reader progresses in the trilogy, vampires suddenly aren’t terribly scary anymore. Darren, a half-vampire, isn’t frightening, Mr. Crepsley arguably isn’t scary by the third book, the other vampire you see in the third book is quite friendly. The series really needed the Vampaneze as the frightening, uncivilized, other. The reader gets to know how normal vampires really aren’t bad at all and eventually accepts them.

            And because I like Evra, I do have to say that he is in this one alongside with Darren and Mr. Crepsley, so the reader gets to see a lot of him. The book gets into a groove within the universe. The concepts of the universe are not new (except the Vampaneze) so there is more action as situations no longer have to be constantly explained.    

Stuff That Irks Me

I am going to try to keep the next part as spoiler free as possible, so I’m going to be vague, but once you read the first book you’ll know what I’m speaking of. A character is introduced in the first novel, whom the reader gets to know, stuff happens, and he threatens to return and haunt Darren. Let’s just say, he hasn’t come back in the first trilogy. It feels like one of those plot points that writers bring up and let die (Heroes season 3, anyone?) and I would say its pretty bad writing. While he could show up in the last of the four trilogy books, couldn’t there have been something to let the reader actually take him seriously? Remember, we’re supposed to be afraid of this person for Darren. And I’m not, because I really forgot about him by the third book.  

The characters (Darren, mostly) flip-flop in their emotional positions. I trust you, never mind I don’t trust you, I trust you again, never mind you’re a vampire and I hate you...it gets repetitive and boring, and after a while I just really didn’t care. I wonder though, is there some theory out that claims that this is necessary for younger readers? The self-loathing is grinding as well, and not in a Louis de Pointe du Lac way. I hate myself, I can’t drink blood, I’m not evil, I want to go back, wah wah wah. Because these books are aimed at a younger audience, I don’t think a proper self-loathing would have held the audience’s attention. His loathing might be valid, but he doesn’t seem to even think about these issues fully. Maybe I’m crazy, but I think I thought about whatever angsty issues I had just a tad more.     

Final Verdict

            The first three are fantastic, even considering the things that irk me. Sometime down the road I’ll try to get around to reading the next trilogy. Great characters, though this trilogy suffers from a high turnover in characters. The ones that stay are interesting. Supposedly my brother likes the first book I gave him, so I hope to speak to him about the books in the near future. I would recommend this to 12-14 year old boys, but in high school I knew an 18-year-old young man reading the series who quite enjoyed them. 

LA Times Article-Librarian Interrogations

Anne Rice shared a link on Facebook and I thought I would share. It is found on the LA Times website here. 

It is about librarians having to defend themselves in a court (which is set up in a basement). What are they defending? Their jobs. They have to be teachers to also be librarians in their state, and they have to have taught in the last 5 years. Clearly, someone doesn't understand the role librarians should be playing, which does include teaching children how to access information. Let us consider how many adults do not know how to access information. If a school librarian is doing their job, there is no need for this-especially to make them defend themselves in front of armed police officers and a judge.

Seriously? I'm glad it's not like that in Canada. I just want to be a librarian, not a full teacher, and I don't want to have to defend myself even more than I already do. 

P-Books vs. E-Books, The Future of Reading, and Reading Literature of Other Cultures

One can argue that I don't know how to look at a calender, and they would be right. For some reason I thought last class (April 7th) was week 13 (the last class) and I read and blogged about the novel Thirsty. So here I'll blog about what I was supposed to blog about on Thursday, and on April 14th, when we actually read the group of novels that includes Thirsty, please go to the previous blog post.

"P-Books vs. E-Books"
I can honestly say that I have very little experience with e-books, and I have no experience with e-readers. The only e-books I can say I have experienced are the ones that you read from your computer. But I do find Digital Rights Managament facinating. The "Sharing" section speaks briefly on this. Some companies limit their e-books to be "lent" only twice, and in some cases, once. The "Secondhand Books" section also touches on this. The author says "Few e-readers support lending or reselling ebooks" which, to me, is unfair. I paid for it, it is now my property. If I want to sell it or give it away, I should be allowed to. However, I do understand the used property market, as I have been following the used videogame issue for a while. When you personally resell something, nothing is sent back to the people who originally made the item. At the same time, they already got their money, and they are not physically making another copy, and they are not losing money. They just are not making any new money from a resale. I know that was a brief run down, but it's the basics.
I'm still not sold on e-books, but I do have to say that the ability to highlight and make notes is pretty intriguing. I have some books from my undergrad that I highlighted in (my undergrad teachers told us it was ok and recommened doing it!) and when I re-read them I cringe. I know that I could always pay the $12 and buy a new copy and support my favoutire authors. Yet at the same time I like looking back at my copy of Harry Potter and the Philsopher's Stone that I read for the first time during a class called "The School Boy" that deals basically with homosexuality and children. My copy of The Golden Compass also has many notes about children and agency that I love reading. So even this e-book highlighting doesn't sell me.

"The Future of Reading"
OMG IT'S JOHN GREEN!!
"Story trumps all. It doesn't matter if you get to see clips of Lauren Conrad at a photo shoot on the screen while reading her new novel, This Book is a Symptom of Publishing Companies' Desperation." If I live to be 100 years old, or if I get amnesia, I hope I will never forget this one quote. I really don't mind if people are reading online, on ebooks, or in print, or messages in the sky. As long as you're reading and you're liking it, I'm happy and I think we're safe from falling into a dystopia (more or less). I like this quote because the story really is what makes something sucessful (though as I write this I am questioning myself...). I actually like the idea of the online medium and the riddles and the need to come together to solve the riddles, but really, haven't we all read a book, watched a movie, or played a video game where the story just wasn't there? Sometimes we finish the thing in question just for the spirit of not leaving things unfinished, even though there's nothing that's holding us to it?

"Reading Literature of Other Cultures"
Along with the article, I will also draw upon the seminar from Thursday. I am someone who enjoys literature from other cultures, as long as it has been translated or written in English because I am sadly uni-lingual. Personally I think it is strange to feel like you have nothing to say about a piece of literature because it is set in a culture that is not your own. As the article suggests, you can imagine yourself there, and you can always go research the culture in question. You can always speak about it in terms of its complete strangeness to you, and compare it to your own culture. As I think back to my elementary public school experience (burr) I can't recall any books that were outside of the Canadian/American culture. I read some books myself, including some of The Royal Diaries series (fictional diaries of real historical royality as children), and a book called Sakuran and some others that I can't recall the titles, but in the classroom I can't recall ever reading something outside of our own setting. In highschool we read The Forbidden City, but that's an American's view, there to explain everything we might find foreign and confusing to us. Maybe I think that we should have more culturally diverse material in the classroom because of my small town's inadequate reading collection, but that's where I stand. Don't make everything the white version of Canada/America. And I certainly don't believe in localizing the material-and this was something brought up in the seminar, wherein an international book will have the culturally specific bits removed and re-localized. Eg, a book that is set in Japan is now set in America when it is translated to English. Why do this? As people who belong to a diverse world, it would probably be beneficial to present children/young people these different cultures without having to mask them with our culture.  

M.T Anderson and the "Vampires, Changelings, and Radical Mutant Teens" article

For this week I read "Thirsty" by M.T. Anderson, and I read the whole thing and was flipping though the last pages and came across the other things the author has published. I didn't even realize that he wrote Burger Wuss, Feed, and the two volume The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. I have to say that I enjoyed the book, but initially I did not buy the Lord of the Vampires, Tch'muchgar, is going to come back and destroy everything. When Chris, the protagonist, describes the rituals that his town did, I just thought that his town was crazy, but then I was supposed to believe in it. Sorry, I just don't. I might just have a problem with naming things that I'm supposed to be scared of. Then he gets the holy plot device and they give it a name and how to "activate it" (Moon Prism Power!!! :p ) and I just find that so corny (out of Sailor Moon, of course).

What I did like about this book is how Chris' life is presented. I genuinely found his struggle to exist in the human world while slowly becoming a vampire intriguing. I know that if I had read this when I was in high school, I probably would have sat back and day dreamed for hours imagining what I would have done in his situation.

As for the article, I have to say that nothing in particular stood out to me. In my last undergraduate year I took a course on vampires in literature, so the article is pretty much a repeat. It did alert me to some interesting book that I want to read though.

(I had a nice long paragraph that was deleted randomly, and no amount of undo/redos will get it back. So I'll try to sum up my brilliance again.)
I particularly liked how the article discussed how young adults may not associate themselves with/as adults; therefore, they may not readily swallow the morality that adults are giving them (especially considering that adults will reinforce that young adults are not yet adults). In the last paragraph it reads that young adults need these types of novels because "the paradoxical questions of emotional and moral struggle as well as the contradictory issues of humanity may be asked and thought about without cynicism or deprecation." Vampire/paranormal fiction has always been one of my favourite types of literature, and the reasons why are always hard to articulate for me. I like the complete differentness of the world being presented; it is unlike what everyone has told you what life will be like.  It gives you different sets of morals. The end of Carrie Jones Need makes you stop and think, wow, seriously, she did that? Anne Rice's Lestat drinks from morally corrupt people, so does that make him, as a vampire, morally acceptable? Though not supernatural, Hannibal Lector eats the "free-range rude" which makes you reconsider him as a moral character (fourth year honours seminar on cannibalism in literature...good times). Something that literature concerned with the supernatural offers is new moral stances in a new world that is available to them.

So my re-typed thoughts about the article are not quite as great as they were originally, so maybe I'll fill in my thoughts some time tomorrow. I swear the moment I fall asleep I'll remember something epic... 

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld reflections

With my seminar for this class tomorrow, and two enormous projects looming over the very near future, I wasn't able to read the entire book. It's a long book! But I'm really enjoying it. Enjoying it to the point that if the ending doesn't randomly suck, I'll probably go and buy the rest of the series and read it over the break between semesters.

I am a huge fan of dystopias. And this one seems to have more to offer than a lot of dystopias that I have read. Yes, they live in a closed society riddled with rules. But this one brings up other issues, like body issues, self-image, identity, and conformity issues. This might shock some of you, but I was called ugly as a kid, but that's nothing unique to me. How many times do you hear girls fighting and the worst thing they can say is "Well, you is UGLY!!!" </bad grammar>. How often do we (especially women) see articles declaring (like it's the first time we've heard it) that women who are pretty get better positions and better paying jobs just because they're pretty?

I like how this novel brings this to the forefront. Everyone gets turned into a pretty. Somewhere it said something on the lines of, there's only new pretty, middle pretty, and old pretty. Then dead pretty. But then there's just ugly, and that's not even really an option. I like how before the second part of the novel, the issue of choice comes up, but for a different circumstance that I wont spoil. But why can't you choose? And I wonder, just what is ugly for them? It's not really illustrated thus far, and beauty is subjective. We know that the main character has frizzy hair and thin lips, but that doesn't necessarily make her ugly, as in, hideous like Quasimodo. I find it's interesting that you cannot choose to not go through with the change. You simply do not get the choice to say "no thanks, I don't need it."

Thus far, I am really enjoying the novel.   

Mackey reading and *Burr* ....Twilight

I really enjoyed Margaret Mackey's "Salience and Fluency: The beginnings of stories” in Literacies across media: Playing the text. It makes me happy that young people, at least the ones in the study, are not partial to any one medium. Why? Well I hope it is because they are concerned with the story aspects of what is being presented to them. Though there were some comments that made me sad inside, such as the one person who didn't like Japanese animation or the one who did not like black and white films (another favourite thing of mine). Yet everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and at least they explained why they disliked some aspects of the mediums.

So before I go on, I would like to point out something I found strange. Cat’s Eye, if it is indeed the one written by Margaret Atwood, isn’t exactly age appropriate material for an 8^th grade student, though if I personally knew the student and I knew they could handle it, and I knew the parent’s would not object to the themes, I would recommend this book. Then again, I read this book in high school and again in university, and a few times on my own since then, and it is one of my favourite books (I have a lot of favourite books, don’t I?) and I know that the story would have appealed to me in the 8^th grade as well.

83 “They showed no signs of having an automatic preference for one medium over another; instead, they judged each text on its merits. Nobody either selected or rejected all the texts in a single medium without qualification.”

“Colin also took fluency into account with some of his decision-making. He rejected the black and white video of the old movie version of The Secret Garden: ‘I don’t really like movies in black and white because it’s kind of hard to decipher one thing from another.’” See, this guy actually has reasons for his dislike. That's more than I can say about A LOT of adults who look at something and just say they don't like it (I recall the first time I was watching A Tale of Two Sisters on television, and I was super into and my mother wanted me to do something upstairs, so I put it on upstairs, and the first thing she says is "turn it off, those Japanese movies are so boring." First of all, it's from South Korea, and it's a psychological horror film that was on for less than three minutes (if that), so it's not like she could judge from that. At least these kids are giving these materials a chance! </rant>  

Another thing is that I see how trying to guess a young person’s reading tastes can be difficult, especially if they cannot clearly articulate what they prefer, such as in the case of Megan on pages 83-4, wherein she does not like the big words in Anne of Green Gables, but she liked how The Golden Compass describes everything. The Golden Compass does get dense in ideas, but she seemed more inclined to keep reading The Golden Compass because the plot is more interesting.

And I appreciate Japanese anime, but I didn’t like the anime adaptations of Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon. While Kaze no Shoujo Emily is the more recent adaptation of the two I’ve seen and remember well enough to judge, the Emily adaptation just deviates too much from the book, though at times the animation if beautiful. 

I think I've wrote so much to avoid blogging about Twilight. So, fine. I'll do it. I don't like the text in print form. I find the non-existant plot boring. Meyer has a way of writing that is boring, yet has a way of hooking you, making you believe that at any moment, something will happen. I could have sworn that something  mildly interesting was about to happen all the time. But nothing ever does. I finished the book and felt like nothing had really happened. A guy stalks you and watches you in your sleep and you're like "Awwww! How cute!" Just to let you know, stalkers are scary. They aren't something that you go  "Awwww! How cute!"  to. The only remotely interesting character, in my opinion, is Alice. Can Alice have her own book, please? But in the end of Twilight it didn't make me want to read the rest of the books. Awesome. That wasn't a complete waste of my time. The movie (thanks youtube!) was an adequate adaptation in my opinion, though it was just as boring. Between the two, I prefer the movie because it ended my pain and boredom much more quickly. I have to say though, I can understand why young people like the book. It's a pretty basic romance (though there is nothing particular to vampires) with an otherwise boring and plain girl who moves and suddenly is so popular that everyone wants to date her. Isn't that a teen-agers dream? That what you once where will not follow you? 

And completely related to this topic is a youtube video from the "How It Should Have Ended" Channel. 

      (Just in case there's something wrong with the video here, it's also here.) 

 "Are you afraid she's going to play baseball better than you?" Yeah, Seriously Edward. 

Alice, I Think

I read Alice, I Think and Why Angels Fly: Humor in YA Fiction by Janet Kleinberg and Lynn Cockett. I think it will be easier if I go into my comments about the article and gradually flow into my reflections about the novel.

The article came into something interesting about when you don’t find certain things funny. "“She was one of a dozen girls he would have liked to know better . . . know bed-der . . . much bed-der . . .” (Mazer 5). Cristina specifically said, “I know the author put that in there to make me laugh, but it didn’t.”"

I understand why the participant didn't think it was funny. I think as a young adult (and still as an adult) you don't want to be seen as a sexual object, and the reality is that our mothers/teachers/caregivers will always tell you that boys only want one thing. You would probably hope that the sentiment isn't true, and it isn't particularly funny to reinforce that idea, especially if you are meant to identify with the character being pictured like that. I haven't read that book, but I can think of Alice, I Think, when Aubrey comes over and she (and her mother and father too) worries that he will take her "into the womanhood tent." And it turns out that Aubrey isn't that kind of guy. Or rather, he can't shut up long enough to think about it. 

Can humour be a genre? I want to say yes, knowing that many people will disagree with me. I know that you can have humour in any genre, in any book. What about a book that is overwhelming humorous, and was written for the humour, and nothing else? If the humour in Alice, I Think was removed to leave just the bear plot, I don't think it would be even vaguely interesting. I can't decide what kind of humour I felt with Alice, I Think, though. Was it superiority, because I find her narcissism and her "I'm a mature intellectual now because I read The Fellowship of the Ring. I am on page 2" and her ego and her fashion sense to be absolutely hilarious? I hope it's not because I think I'm superior. I think I was supposed to find her home life with a hippie mother and father funny, along with the fact that she is home schooled, but I didn't really. I know that is a result of my own personal experience-I know a handful of home schooled kinds and they are fine socially and intellectually. So I don't find those facts to be humorous by itself. I find Alice funny because of her narcissism. She is a cultural critic, has a..."unique" sense of fashion, and at one point is convinced that everyone is stealing from the bookstore. Is she a sociopath like some people say? No. Dexter is a sociopath, if you need a comparison. Sure, the book isn't realistic in some aspects, but it was funny, and I think it was meant for the humour. The mother got into a fight with Linda, and yes, it was weird, but it could happen. I don't think the mother is "crazy" for fighting back. If you came out to three kids terrorizing your daughter in your car (which happened to me when I was younger) and if you, as her mother, tried to stop them, and the psycho one hit you first, and you want to lie on the ground and take it, be my guest. I'll be crazy. But I won't be wearing a muumuu or tie-dye scarfs.