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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no subject
Date: 2009-05-05 02:34 pm (UTC)Read the first three-fifths of the Belgariad and stalled over International Tour (The Second). I don't remember why.
I love them both dearly, but the Mallorean is basically a remix of the Belgariad. David Eddings is very much a fan of the phrase "winning formula".
Yay, Circle of Magic! I preferred her other books, but I enjoyed those too.
"+The Golden Compass -- Philip Pullman" You read the rest, right?
Yeeeeaaaaaaaahhhh. The first one was definitely my favorite, but I liked the second one as well, in a "middle-part-of-the-trilogy" kind of way. (I read a bunch of his other books, too.) I eagerly awaited the third one, and when it came out in 9th grade, I read it immediately and was really dissatisfied. And then, after I thought about it for a while, I came to the conclusion that I kind of wanted to set Philip Pullman on fire. (Mentioning "The Amber Spyglass" is definitely one of my berserk buttons. Just ask poor Natasha, she had to live with me for two years :D)
I think part of it's the stigma that we shouldn't read socially that we don't. Then the Internet happened and we can be part of internet fandoms without specifically revealing who we are and that we are complete dorks.
Yeah, I definitely agree. There were a bunch of guys in my class who I knew enjoyed reading (we had SSR, and it was pretty easy to tell who didn't mind, and who wanted to stab themselves with their pencils), but it wasn't something that they ever talked about. My brother, too -- he'll devour certain books, but if he does discuss them, it's only with me and my sister. (If that -- last summer, he tried to sneakily read the Temeraire books without letting me know, because he didn't want to deal with my gloating. Even more hilariously, I hadn't even been trying to get him to read them -- I made my sister do it, and she gave them to him :D)
(Aside: you should totally read the Temeraire books! They are excellent.)
I read in class constantly; I was a fast test taker and it was the one thing we were allowed to do for pleasure if we finished a test early. As I liked reading in class a lot, this encouraged me to become even faster, and by college I was used to the envious stares boring holes in my backside as I turned in the first final about fifty minutes into the three hour period.
Heh, this is exactly what happened to me, too.
The concept that 'boys don't read' is bullshit. Even the concept that 'boys don't read fiction' is bullshit, but you can find exceptions to that (I find every exception I have ever met boring).
Yeah, I agree. Someone in the second article pointed out that there's a lot of "underground" reading, like comic books or book series with little-to-no educational content, like Goosebumps, which will at least give you an appreciation of certain kinds of stories, even if you don't move on to anything "good".
My favorite anecdote about this is the most-loved book in my sister's 7th and 8th grade English classroom in Brooklyn -- the space-dinosaur manga version of MacBeth. I for one am greatly in favor of spreading space-dinosaur Shakespeare among the youth of today :D
I'm not sure I'd buy that boys are not social readers at all, but the idea that girls are more social readers is probably true.
HP is a really good example of this -- tons of readers in both genders, but guys are definitely outnumbered in fandom, even though they do form a significant proportion of it. I think that everyone will become a social reader if they love a book enough, but women are more inclined to do it for books they feel less passionately about as well.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-05 02:46 pm (UTC)...Temeraire...?
Who the hell pays attention to 'educational content'? I just like a good story... which often has messages and themes. You know. Good writing.
I for one am greatly in favor of spreading space-dinosaur Shakespeare among the youth of today As am I.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-05 03:08 pm (UTC)I was more annoyed at first because he left a couple of plot threads dangling, and because Iorek Byrnison got to do nothing cool, and because I kind of hated Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter and looked askance at their heroic and redemptive sacrifice, and because I thought the end was the most outrageous diabolus ex machina to have ever diabolus ex machina'd... Basically, I was really disappointed, and then realizing later that I had kinda been personally insulted was pretty much the icing on the FAIL cake.
Temeraire, Book 1: His Majesty's Dragon (http://www.amazon.com/His-Majestys-Dragon-Temeraire-Book/dp/0345481283/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241535842&sr=1-1). It's the Napoleonic war on AU Earth with DRAGONS! AND it's really well written.
AUs with dragons are almost as awesome as space-dinosaur Shakespeare.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-05 03:12 pm (UTC)as for Temeraire... I will read it mostly due to the opening sentences of the Post review.
Is there anything more to say about dragons? Stalwart presences in myth and fantasy, they've hoarded gold, incinerated villages, been slain by countless heroes and (sing it with me) "frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee."
no subject
Date: 2009-05-05 03:30 pm (UTC)Hee, Puff the Magic Dragon. Yay Temeraire! I eagerly await your opinion :D