A Multitude of Faults in Alaska

Lately a lot of people I know have told me that I have to read The Fault in our Stars, including people that I don't usually talk books with. In fact, it's mostly been people that I've never talked books with. The last time that happened was a few years back, when Twilight came out - which I never got around to reading because I was a fresher in undergrad. This time things are a little different.

I read Looking for Alaska when I was in high school, and I remember being squicked out by the dynamic of the oral sex scene between Lara and Miles, followed closely by being irritated by the male character's lack of reciprocity and the female character's lack of dimensionality. There were other things that bothered me about the book, including the incident with the stolen Breathalyzer and why that was important or proved anything, but it was a first book. With A Multitude of Katherines I realised that the main character was reducing all of his girlfriends to equations, threw the book across the room, and decided to never read John Green again, because there were too many good books out there for me to waste my time on ones that were so half-baked.

And the years rolled on, and YA boomed while I had my back turned, and now everyone I know insists that he has produced a masterpiece, and I'm a bit sceptical as to whether the author who squicked out pre-ideals 16 year old me is capable of producing a masterpiece. But then, in the past ten years I managed to gain the education and vocabulary to explain what about his debut novel bothered me, so it is not inconceivable that he has also improved with time. So at first I thought that I'd go back and re-read all of Green's books, just so I could explain coherently why I don't like his work when people gush at me about the latest instalment. 

But then I had an idea.

My first degree is in analysing books, essentially. And it's been a long time since I've had the chance to compare or contrast two texts. And it's been a long time since I've had the chance to read some Young Adult fiction. And the overlap between people who I've heard mock Twilight and the people who are telling me to read Stars now is substantial. 

So, as soon as I can hunt up used copies of both of them, I think I'm going to do a comparative reading of The Fault in our Stars and Twilight, concentrating on the things in Green's early work that bothered me when I was younger. Off the top of my head (and ten years on) that would include the complexity and agency of female characters, the consistency of tone, the logic of the plot and the world, and the overall shape and pacing of the novel.

And since there's no where else for me to put it, whatever I come up with will probably wind up showing up here.

Upgrade, brain fluff, and proselytizers

At my last supervision, Henry said: "Screw it, stop worrying and just hand it all in." And so I have handed in my documents for the upgrade, all seventy pages of them, and it suddenly feels like I'm on holiday. They probably could have stood a bit more revision, but I have gotten to the 'just don't care' point.

And now there is nothing standing between me and drafting the novel. Which is not going as well as it could be. At least there's death. And sensuality. In fact, so far the thing consists of nothing but death and sex interspersed with Bible quotes, which as a book also has a good amount of death and sex in it.

Which brings me around to Jehovah's Witnesses, and things I haven't said.

A lovely pair of older women came around last week while I was revising and asked me if I thought the dead could live again, and since religious groups are Pertinent To My Interests, we wound up chatting happily on the doorstep for quite a while. I truly enjoyed hearing about their experiences with the church, and how it could improve my life, but when they told me that the Bible contains the blueprint for having a happy family, I bit my tongue.

There is one thing about the PhD novel that is completely autobiographical: I learned to read at my parents kitchen table with a large print NIV bible. We went through the whole thing several times, one Old Testament chapter, one New Testament chapter, a Psalm, and a Proverb every day - we may have skipped the prophets a bit. The book is many things, but full of happy families is not one of them. It could justifiably be called a compendium of models of screwed up families. Absalom and Tamar. David and Bathsheba. Lot and his daughters. The best Happy Family principle in the whole book may be, "do not divorce your betrothed for being knocked up by the Divine," and even that required angelic intervention to bring about. 

So now I'm hoping that they'll come back, so that I can ask them how exactly their logic runs. Or I may just write my own list of Bible-based principles for a happy family. The first one would probably be, "If you capture a woman in battle, let her mourn for her dead countrymen for a month before taking her as your concubine; there's nothing worse than when your girl starts crying every time you kiss her."

There is one definite plus to the novel - it's given me reason to look up lots of questionable things. Like when the words 'condom' and 'cocksucker' came into common usage, the etomology of slang terms for homosexuality (thank you, OED), when the Pill became widley available, and what a 20 year old female student of journalism might have used to research marital relations in preparation for her wedding in 1973 when her mother wasn't on speaking terms with her because of said wedding. Heaven help anyone that glances at my browser history.