I also haven't been reading as much as I usually do during the pandemic. I have read a few things since the last time I updated, though, and there's very little else going on in lockdown (even though we're not officially in lockdown anymore; I'm just still staying home as a high risk person), so let's talk about the things I've read since the last time I talked about the things I've read, shall we?
I've always liked Dominick Dunne's books, so I read Robert Hofler's Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne thinking, "Oh, this will tell me more about his life while he was writing various things, and will offer insight," and it kind of did. It also told me, repeatedly, that Dominick Dunne had gay sex. A lot of gay sex. All the time. So much gay sex that Hofler seemed compelled to include as much of it as he could, even in places where including it was odd. You'd just be reading about him moving to a new city and buying a new apartment, and then all of a sudden it's like, "Dunne got a vintage designer living room set for the space at a Sotheby's auction, and then later wrote in his diary about doing lines of coke off of a male hooker's back before getting railed on the ottoman. He had lunch with Faye Dunaway the next day, and only ordered a salad." I know Dunne was gay, and I know that repressing that shaped his life and the way he wrote about some people, but wow, there was a lot of sex in this biography. As I said to a friend while reading it, "This biography of Dominick Dunne reads like a book by Dominick Dunne," and maybe that was the point.
I was picking over my "unread books" shelf and thought, "I've had this copy of Peter Straub's In The Night Room for a while. Maybe I should read it." As it turns out, based on the receipt I found tucked in the front cover, "for a while" means I bought this book 14 years ago in 2006, when I still lived in Albany. Talk about the world being very different... Anyway, I got kind of bored reading this. There are Peter Straub books that I like and immediately get into reading, and there are Peter Straub books that feel like I was assigned them for a class I don't want to be in, and this was definitely the second kind. Even the twist, which I should have found interesting, just landed kind of flat.
On the other hand, maybe I couldn't get through that book because I knew that Stephenie Meyer's Midnight Sun was waiting patiently for me on the coffee table, and I couldn't wait to throw myself back into the world of vampire insanity. Let me tell you: everything you hated while you were hate-reading the entire Twilight saga (except "Good and Evil", which we are apparently all politely ignoring based on the back of the book:
) is still here for you to hate, but also... THERE'S EVEN MORE! I'm going to just split this out into some highlights:
1) There's still no reason why Edward and Bella fall in love. If you remember reading the original and thinking, "Why does she just suddenly love him?", then wait until you read this story from Edward's point of view and find out that he doesn't know either. They just meet in biology class and they're in love, and that's it.
2) Edward really hates Mike and Jessica. Like, a lot. He hates them so much that his mental monologue sounds like Joe thinking about Peach Salinger on You. I don't remember if he ever mentioned to Bella in the original series how much venomous bile (not to be confused with the venom that constantly floods his mouth around Bella because they're in love) he has for those two, but he hates them to a level that even I, a person who checks my high school yearbooks to see if someone has a black X over their face before I accept friend requests, was amused and concerned. 95% of this book is really about how Edward, a 100 year old man deeply in love with a literal child, needs pyschological help way more than he needs a girlfriend.
3) Bella smells so good, intoxicatingly good, to Edward, but he never tells us exactly what that smell is like even though he mentions it on every page, sometimes multiple times on the same page. Since he's a vampire and he's smelling her blood, is it food based? Like she smells like maple syrup? Merlot? Buttercream (my all time favorite discontinued Yankee Candle scent)? We'll never know. We'll just know she smells. Also, because he's smelling her blood and is suddenly in love with her, all I can think about every time he says it is Margaret White ranting to Carrie about, "First comes the blood, then the boys, comin' for that smell! To find out what that smell is!" and I doubt that's the feeling Meyer was going for.
4) The cover design is terrible. I get the whole pomegranate metaphor (if I didn't, Edward spells it out in literal terms in the story, because that's the reading level these books are designed for), but it's visually unattractive. The front of the book is not appealing. In short, this already deeply flawed "romance" is not improved by knowing what Edward was thinking the whole time.
I wanted a palate cleanser from garbage, so after the Twilight book I read Mitch Landrieu's In The Shadow of Statues, which seemed especially fitting in light of recent events. Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans and lieutenant governor of Louisianna, talks about his lifelong journey toward understanding racism and his part in it, culminating in his long and ultimately successful battle to remove Confederate monuments from the streets of New Orleans. He also talks a lot about Hurrican Katrina and the aftermath, which opens a discussion about racism and classism in politics, and how the two are almost always linked. This was an interesting read.
I wrapped up my recent reading with Maria Sherman's Larger Than Life, a fun history of boy bands from the 1950s up until now, which my friend Kristin sent me. A breezy, entertaining read, there actually is a lot of history of the music business in here, some fashion and marketing critique, and an interesting discussion about how product consumed mostly by young women is viewed by society. I liked this a lot, too.
Now I'm halfway through a Stephen King book, because my friend Jackie went on a Stephen King kick, so I guess I'll be writing about that eventually.
