Sunday

I finished a vampire book Sunday -- a best-selling, young adult teenage vampire romance book, the third in the series. A member of my family discovered the first book in the series while perusing through a book order flyer from her school. Middle school. I wonder how this vampire romance novel got into the book order targeted to middle school students. Parents would trust the book order would have books that are not about teenage issues like driving, sneaking out, and lying to parents. I worried a little about the content, but the story really did, for the most part, pull me in. Of course, reading in itself will generally be a benefit to the reader, in terms of getting interested in reading, turning the words into the world of imagination in one's head, and helping the reader evolve into a better writer. The book, in addition to being a decent story, contains such parent-cringing content as dishonesty to parents, vampire sleepovers (boy with girl and unbeknown to dad), sneaking out, and other rampant risk-taking behavior (gasp!). I was surprised to learn that the author is a member of a church that I consider to have strict religious beliefs. Once I started reading it, I had a little bit of a concern about how the vampire the main character fell in love with seemed to be a tiny bit controlling and had anger issues. One of the more disturbing things that bothered me the most about the book was that there were a lot of typos in it. More typos than one would expect to find in a best seller. I read the credits in the end and the author gives much thanks to the friends or associates of hers who have tirelessly edited for readability. I guess I would call that another bad influence. You're supposed to learn about how to write by reading; not make it OK to publish a series of best-selling novels that have grammatical mistakes in them. Why aren't I an editor? I write this as if my writing is error-free.
The events portrayed in the series are not anymore wayward than the events portrayed in many movies middle schoolers watch, but the difference with a book is that the reader tends to get more emotionally involved with the characters. OK, I did get emotionally involved. When I finish a good book, I feel like I am saying goodbye to friends. I don't know if that's weird or not. When I was nine and I read Bambi, I cried when Bambi's mom died. My mom was in the car with me and she laughed and was genuinely amused when she discovered me leaning up against the window with tears streaming down my face and the only explanation was that the book had a sad ending. Obviously she hadn't read this one. It wasn't just some short version of Bambi that Disney published; it was a big, thick book with a long, involved story that went into a lot of detail about Bambi's life, in first person. I guess it made me sad because it was the first time I'd ever faced someone's mother actually dying -- knowing what it feels like and knowing that it's an inevitability that your mom is going to die someday, if she hasn't died already. It's tragic. The other time I cried when I read a book was when I finished Flowers for Algernon and Charly went back to being mentally challenged, after the smartness wore off. It wasn't especially sad that the high IQ wore off, it was just told in a heartbreaking way. And Siddhartha. So sad.