a song, a tetralogy, a franchise

There is a recent addition to my immense obsession with the Twilight saga. It is a song from the upcoming New Moon soundtrack. The soundtrack is getting quite a bit of buzz for being an interesting, albeit moody, companion to the film and novel. The song is called "Meet Me On The Equinox" and is by Death Cab for Cutie. I am not particularly fond of the video, but the song is pretty fantastic with emotive lyrics and a haunting refrain: "Everything ends."

Death Cab For Cutie |MTV Music

In case you were curious about the other things I love about the Twilight saga, here is a short list:

1) Kristen Stewart because she is fierce

2) The theological questions the books raise regarding right and wrong, heaven and hell, souls, humanity, monsters, commitment, the erotics of abstinence, and choice

3) Stephanie Meyer's stay-at-home-mom-turned-novelist success story

4) How fricking big and pretty the books are

5) The mania over the novels!

For me, it is very exciting to have so many people, particularly young people, excited about a book. People cannot get enough of these books - they cannot get enough of reading! This sort of fever for books is something I relate to and cherish.

Certainly, most writers do not write novels so that there is someday a lunchbox or a clothing line inspired by their characters. However, there is something terribly exciting about people being so obsessed with a story. People are crazy about a world that someone dreamed up and brought to life.

While a multi-million dollar franchise is not necessarily a part of my ambitions as a writer, I would love to make readers feel as much as Stephanie Meyer does. I cry, I laugh, I blush, I worry, I gasp each time I read one of her books. If I could do that to a reader, I would feel like I accomplished something - like I got through, like I communicated, like I said something.

Don't you worry about the haters, Stephanie! Twilight and all the subsequent novels are wonderful.

With the opening of New Moon just a few weeks away, I am relishing all the Twilight mania while it lasts. After all, pop culture phenomenon or not, this craze will pass. As Death Cab says:

Everything, everything ends.

The above picture is my own. I crushed and preserved rose petals in a copy of Eclipse. It is a custom I learned from my mother. 

the nook

A few days ago, I received an email about the nook, a new e-reader from Barnes & Noble. For the past 48 hours, I have been googling images of the nook, reading articles about it, imagining the way all of my favorite books will look displayed on the touchscreen, comparing it to the kindle, and fantasizing about how sleek and heavy it would feel in my hands.

I am in like.

Don't get me wrong. When it comes to books, I am usually a purist. I like the distinct characters of real books. I love the way each book is different in terms of size, cover art, age, wear, etc. I love the way books are physically altered by belonging to someone. I dog-ear pages, underline, crush books to my chest, sleep with them under my pillow. The nook is so fancy and expensive, I would be afraid to live with it the way I live with my other books.

Nonetheless, the nook has captured my interest. I am sure their stellar marketing has had a role in my obsession. I have spent a very long time at bn.com, watching a video about the nook, reading a checklist of its features, and taking the 360 tour of the device. That will do it.

Moreover, as a book lover, I am attracted to anything that is related to literature and reading. This is why I buy so many bags and T-shirts at The Strand - because they are "book-related" purchases.

This being said, the nook would be a very impractical purchase for me. First of all, it is $259. I could do a lot of things with that much money, including buy several books. Furthermore, there is nothing I can do with a nook that I cannot do with a real book. Nook has long battery life so that you can read for days! With Nook, you can lend books to your friends! With Nook, you can bookmark pages and even highlight text! All of these snazzy electronic features offer me nothing that I cannot enjoy with the sorts of books I already know and love.

I wonder if the nook will do to reading and booksellers what iPods did to music and the music industry. With the boom of iTunes and the death of music stores, I now experience music differently. I used to understand music in terms of albums: the CDs I carried around in my bag, the release dates I eagerly awaited, the jackets and liner notes I pored over and memorized. Now I have so much music at my fingertips all at once that I don't have the same full sense of artists - the development of their work from album to album. I play a few tracks, skip a few. The acquisition of music has been stripped of its formality, its ritual. I don't love music any less - it's just different.

I doubt that the nook will have a comparable impact on the bookselling and publishing world. I am biased; I do not believe anything can change the centrality of books (the kind with two covers and pages in between) to our culture.

Books (of the non-electronic variety) are not going anywhere without a fight. After all, books have an extraordinary knack for perseverance. In Book V of The Prelude, William Wordsworth muses about the fragility of books. He wonders wonders why precious ideas and stories are stored in such perishable vessels. He writes, "Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad/ Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail?"

I do not mean to suggest Wordsworth would be a fan of the more durable nook, but I do wonder:

Isn't the perishable nature of books part of what makes them so wonderful? They are just sheets of paper stuck together, yet they endure all sorts of accidents, travels, and lengths of time. They get dusty, tear, come apart at the binding, are taped back together, survive spillages and falls.

That's a lot to compete with, nook.

Still, it is very pretty.

julie & julia... delicious & delicious!

I've just finished reading Julie & Julia, and it's a really charming book. The memoir begins with author, Julie Powell, deciding that she is fed up with the mundane grind of her life as a secretary pushing thirty and living in Queens. To fight her feelings of ordinariness and waste, Julie decides to do something daring and unique: 1) cook her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and 2) chronicle her (mis)adventures in a blog.

Julie’s life (in an out of the kitchen) is a string of mini-disasters. She treats each kitchen mishap (food mill won’t work, lobster won’t die, not enough butter in the fridge) as a matter of grave importance. The upshot of this melodrama is a very funny series of events, narrated in Julie’s quirky, charming voice. The other characters are relatable and likable folks, particularly Julie’s husband, Eric, who is an unfailingly supportive partner-in-crime/cheerleader during the Julie/Julia project.

In moments, Julie’s observations about city life teeter on the irritating ramblings of a classist white girl. As a native New Yorker (daughter of immigrants, raised in Brooklyn), I was deeply unsympathetic to her gripes about living in an outer-borough and trying to communicate with non-English speakers. Such experiences are the stuff true city life is made of, and are not half as lamentable as Julie would have us believe.

Despite these moments, Julie & Julia is a pleasure to read. Powell's prose is easy to navigate and full of the rich, personal details that make so many of us turn to the voyeuristic blogosphere. And then, there are the recipes! The dishes are totally intriguing – more impressive than delicious, full of obscure, high-end ingredients, entirely too much butter, and strange animal parts.

(Plus, as Julie herself points out, there is a deep sensuality to the sort of cooking she engages in page after page. Each recipe is truly a labor of love, requiring more than a little bit of physical exertion, decadent ingredients, strange scents, heat, and time.)

It was indulgent and gripping to read about Julie’s experiments, and as she mastered the art of French cooking, so did I (in theory). I too learned how to make the perfect crepe, flip over omelets, and kill a crustacean several different ways. As a reader, I found myself celebrating each of Julie’s successful dishes and cringing at the violence and high-fat content called for in certain recipes – I shared in her kitchen defeats and victories.

This book entered my life at a very opportune time. My kitchen is not yet in cooking condition (an exterminator has been called), and my dinners have been last night’s Papa Johns, or Key Food natural peanut butter spread over an apple, or Farina microwaved with soy milk, salad out of a bag, or cheese --- just cheese. Thanks to Ms. Powell’s diaries I have been able to enjoy my fill of everything from artichokes to lamb to pink potato salad (which, interestingly enough, ain’t just a French thing – Dominicans eat it too).

But beyond the secondhand indulgence of each culinary catastrophe or triumph, I loved watching Julie fashion a new identity for herself over the course of the book. As Julie achieves something great and on her own terms, I felt pride for her and re-encouraged about the possibilities for greatness in my own life.

The true gift of this book is its message that we are all made extraordinary by the things that we decide to do. The projects that we undertake – whether social, professional, or domestic – give our lives meaning and define who we are.

Bon Appétit, indeed!