Reading; Twilight
May. 4th, 2009 07:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadydaveSo, during the copious free time that accounts for much of my working day, I stumbled across the following articles on the reading habits of young wimmins, which set me a-ponderin' (and apparently turned me into a grizzled old prospector).
Article the first has some fairly appalling generalizations and stereotypes about pre/adolescent girls (despite being written by a woman), but it does contain a very interesting critical analysis about why Twilight appeals to so many women, both old and young (and all shrill -- I know; I was there). Everyone knows vampires are (not so) secretly about sex, and the Twilight has an actually appealing theme of abstinence (no, seriously), but this article, amidst the gender fail, laid out exactly what its take on it seems to be, and why this is so relevant to teenage girls these days (with their iPods and their Myspaces and their text messaging -- in my day, we had to call our friends on the phone! And there was none of this speed-dialing phonebook entry stuff -- we had to look up the numbers, or memorize them, and dial them by hand! Uphill both ways! In a snowstorm!).
One thing the author is entirely uncritical of, or possibly didn't even register, is Twilight's infamous setting-feminism-back-100-years attitude, which I rather suspect ties in to her gender fail in the article. However, I did find one statement rather interesting:
The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.
Basically, this did not describe my adolescent reading experience AT ALL, but I suspect it does describe a lot of other people's. One of the commenters on article the second stated that "it doesn’t describe teen female mentality - it describes being an introvert." I dunno if introvert is quite the right word, but I agree that it's the category of readers given to personal introspection and tending to express their strong emotions, which of course crosses gender and age lines, and I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that love/romance is as popular with these readers as it is with, you know, pretty much everyone.
Stephanie Meyer, intentionally or no, seems to have produced books that appeal directly to all of these traits, hence their popularity with all sorts of random people in addition to the target of teenage girls, many of whom fall smack dab in this category.
Article the second responds to article the first, as do its commenters, and bring up the very good point that girls are also social readers, and have been for hundreds of years. I suspect this will only be surprising to someone who has never been on the internet or has no idea what the word "fandom" means -- after all, Team Edward/Team Jacob aren't exactly the result of millions of readers sitting in their rooms and quietly squeeing to themselves. Teenage girls are fairly notorious for thoroughly dissecting their every thought and emotion with their friends, and this applies to those about fictional characters presented to your local chapter of the Team Edward fanclub or your flist. But, again, this isn't just limited to teenage girls -- see "the internet" for more examples, or those parts of Academia that deal with the unseemly beast Literature, or any time you've gone "THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVAR" and force everyone you know to read it.
(Mostly unrelated: there are also some good comments about the pernicious rumor that guys don't read -- turns out that many of them just aren't reading fictional novels.)
However, the most important thing about these articles is, of course, how they relate to MY reading habits. :D To aid in the discussion, I've thoughtfully included a list of my formative reading experiences: these are all the books I read obsessively over and over when I was younger, in the approximate year I started reading them (I couldn't really remember some of them, so I took my best guess). The + means I read them for several years after, and the ++ means I still read them (and that you should, too). I started rather young, because in my experience reading levels are something that happens to other people.
Dave's Favorite Books Throughout the Ages: A Comprehensive and Somewhat Embarrassing List
(NB: I was still getting used to the whole reading thing when I was in first grade.)
SECOND GRADE:
+Babysitters' Club -- Ann M. Martin
+Daulaire's Mythology
+The Collective Works of Roald Dahl
THIRD GRADE:
+Little House on the Prairie (series) -- Laura Ingalls Wilder
++The Enchanted Forest Chronicles -- Patricia C. Wrede
Ida Early Comes over the Mountains/Christmas with Ida Early -- Robert Burch
+Caddie Woodlawn -- Carol Ryrie Brink
FOURTH GRADE:
Soup (series) -- Robert Newton Peck
Spooksville -- Christopher Pike
FIFTH GRADE:
+Catherine, Called Birdy -- Karen Cushman
Gemini Game -- Michael Scott
++The Blue Sword -- Robin McKinley
++The Belgariad/The Mallorean -- David Eddings
SIXTH GRADE:
+The Immortals/The Lioness Quartet -- Tamora Pierce
+Redwall (series) -- Brian Jacques
++Sabriel -- Garth Nix
+Hero's Song -- Edith Pattou
SEVENTH GRADE:
+The Elenium -- David Eddings
++Harry Potter -- some British chick
EIGHTH GRADE:
+The Golden Compass -- Philip Pullman
NINTH GRADE:
++Discworld (series) -- Terry Pratchett
ELEVENTH GRADE:
++The Lord of the Rings -- some British dude
CONCLUSIONS:
- This explains a lot (up to and including why I occasionally sound like a grizzled old prospector)
- Why yes, I am a huge dork
- I had fairly gender-balanced reading habits (based on authors and main characters)
- If I was "enter[ing] profoundly into the emotional lives of others", they had better been in the middle of some awesome adventure
Basically, I probably would have finished the Twilight series by 6th grade, and scorned the lack of action and Bella's complete inability to kick ass.
Also, while I've always been a reader, I didn't really become a social reader until I was basically a teenager. However, it's hard to tell if this was because I hit puberty, or because my grade-school friends and I didn't really read the same stuff until Harry Potter came out, and I bonded with my own dorky kind in high school and made them all read Terry Pratchett books. Now, of course, I've graduated with a degree in English, blab at length on LJ and gchat about random things I'm reading, and routinely fling books at people while shouting "READ THIS NOW! BEST BOOK EVAR!" so I think it's safe to say I still tend to read socially.
So, how did the whole reading thing turn out for you guys? Comments? Thoughts? Bueller?
Article the first has some fairly appalling generalizations and stereotypes about pre/adolescent girls (despite being written by a woman), but it does contain a very interesting critical analysis about why Twilight appeals to so many women, both old and young (and all shrill -- I know; I was there). Everyone knows vampires are (not so) secretly about sex, and the Twilight has an actually appealing theme of abstinence (no, seriously), but this article, amidst the gender fail, laid out exactly what its take on it seems to be, and why this is so relevant to teenage girls these days (with their iPods and their Myspaces and their text messaging -- in my day, we had to call our friends on the phone! And there was none of this speed-dialing phonebook entry stuff -- we had to look up the numbers, or memorize them, and dial them by hand! Uphill both ways! In a snowstorm!).
One thing the author is entirely uncritical of, or possibly didn't even register, is Twilight's infamous setting-feminism-back-100-years attitude, which I rather suspect ties in to her gender fail in the article. However, I did find one statement rather interesting:
The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.
Basically, this did not describe my adolescent reading experience AT ALL, but I suspect it does describe a lot of other people's. One of the commenters on article the second stated that "it doesn’t describe teen female mentality - it describes being an introvert." I dunno if introvert is quite the right word, but I agree that it's the category of readers given to personal introspection and tending to express their strong emotions, which of course crosses gender and age lines, and I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that love/romance is as popular with these readers as it is with, you know, pretty much everyone.
Stephanie Meyer, intentionally or no, seems to have produced books that appeal directly to all of these traits, hence their popularity with all sorts of random people in addition to the target of teenage girls, many of whom fall smack dab in this category.
Article the second responds to article the first, as do its commenters, and bring up the very good point that girls are also social readers, and have been for hundreds of years. I suspect this will only be surprising to someone who has never been on the internet or has no idea what the word "fandom" means -- after all, Team Edward/Team Jacob aren't exactly the result of millions of readers sitting in their rooms and quietly squeeing to themselves. Teenage girls are fairly notorious for thoroughly dissecting their every thought and emotion with their friends, and this applies to those about fictional characters presented to your local chapter of the Team Edward fanclub or your flist. But, again, this isn't just limited to teenage girls -- see "the internet" for more examples, or those parts of Academia that deal with the unseemly beast Literature, or any time you've gone "THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVAR" and force everyone you know to read it.
(Mostly unrelated: there are also some good comments about the pernicious rumor that guys don't read -- turns out that many of them just aren't reading fictional novels.)
However, the most important thing about these articles is, of course, how they relate to MY reading habits. :D To aid in the discussion, I've thoughtfully included a list of my formative reading experiences: these are all the books I read obsessively over and over when I was younger, in the approximate year I started reading them (I couldn't really remember some of them, so I took my best guess). The + means I read them for several years after, and the ++ means I still read them (and that you should, too). I started rather young, because in my experience reading levels are something that happens to other people.
Dave's Favorite Books Throughout the Ages: A Comprehensive and Somewhat Embarrassing List
(NB: I was still getting used to the whole reading thing when I was in first grade.)
SECOND GRADE:
+Babysitters' Club -- Ann M. Martin
+Daulaire's Mythology
+The Collective Works of Roald Dahl
THIRD GRADE:
+Little House on the Prairie (series) -- Laura Ingalls Wilder
++The Enchanted Forest Chronicles -- Patricia C. Wrede
Ida Early Comes over the Mountains/Christmas with Ida Early -- Robert Burch
+Caddie Woodlawn -- Carol Ryrie Brink
FOURTH GRADE:
Soup (series) -- Robert Newton Peck
Spooksville -- Christopher Pike
FIFTH GRADE:
+Catherine, Called Birdy -- Karen Cushman
Gemini Game -- Michael Scott
++The Blue Sword -- Robin McKinley
++The Belgariad/The Mallorean -- David Eddings
SIXTH GRADE:
+The Immortals/The Lioness Quartet -- Tamora Pierce
+Redwall (series) -- Brian Jacques
++Sabriel -- Garth Nix
+Hero's Song -- Edith Pattou
SEVENTH GRADE:
+The Elenium -- David Eddings
++Harry Potter -- some British chick
EIGHTH GRADE:
+The Golden Compass -- Philip Pullman
NINTH GRADE:
++Discworld (series) -- Terry Pratchett
ELEVENTH GRADE:
++The Lord of the Rings -- some British dude
CONCLUSIONS:
- This explains a lot (up to and including why I occasionally sound like a grizzled old prospector)
- Why yes, I am a huge dork
- I had fairly gender-balanced reading habits (based on authors and main characters)
- If I was "enter[ing] profoundly into the emotional lives of others", they had better been in the middle of some awesome adventure
Basically, I probably would have finished the Twilight series by 6th grade, and scorned the lack of action and Bella's complete inability to kick ass.
Also, while I've always been a reader, I didn't really become a social reader until I was basically a teenager. However, it's hard to tell if this was because I hit puberty, or because my grade-school friends and I didn't really read the same stuff until Harry Potter came out, and I bonded with my own dorky kind in high school and made them all read Terry Pratchett books. Now, of course, I've graduated with a degree in English, blab at length on LJ and gchat about random things I'm reading, and routinely fling books at people while shouting "READ THIS NOW! BEST BOOK EVAR!" so I think it's safe to say I still tend to read socially.
So, how did the whole reading thing turn out for you guys? Comments? Thoughts? Bueller?
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Date: 2009-05-05 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-05 12:50 pm (UTC)For some reason, I've always preferred watching sci-fi over reading it, so this list doesn't reflect my total geekitude (Empire Strikes Back is literally the first movie I ever remember seeing). I did read 2001 in high school, though, because I was curious about my namesake :D
Maybe it's the outlet for my inner conspiracy nut?
Mine appear to be the outlet for my inner adventurer :D
I'm getting the impression that girl readers with active imaginations tend to glomp on whatever aspect of growing up/life in general (secrets/privacy, adventure/agency, romance/emotional life) most strikes their fancy. Which is not to say they don't read or contemplate the other issues (I certainly read tons and tons of books, and lots of them did address these other aspects) but that they might have an affinity for one in particular, and that's the one they'll prefer in sticking with a genre or re-reading.