Been “Reading”

I’ve mentioned before how much I love my Apple iPod, and it bears repeating. I’m listening to it now, and one of its best applications has been listening to audiobooks. Between my half hour commute and a visit to the gym, I can listen to an hour and a half every weekday. With a baby on board, it’s sometimes the only way I can enjoy books that don’t involve star-bellied sneeches. That’s why over half of the books you see on my Now Reading page are audiobooks (always unabridged; abridged books are for chumps).

Of course, one of the drawbacks of reading is that sometimes you read something that sucks, like (pardon the pun) Anne Rice’s latest vampire book. I made the mistake of listening to Blackwood Farm, partially because it seems to unite the Vampire books (including Lestat, who’s really a pretty cool character) and the Mayfair Witches. I had enjoyed the first two or three vampire chronicle books, back before Rice got so successful that she could swat aside editors like flies. I quit reading around “Pandora” when the books started to look more like novelizations of really, really bad soap operas.

Good grief, but Blackwood Farm has got to be the worst book I’ve read in a long time. It’s terribly boring for a book about vampires and witches, full of weeping and moaning and pining. And while I realize “perverted” is a relative term, this book is just beyond the pale. Sex with ghosts (including the ghost of the main character’s dead brother), incest, a 15-year old sex addict, and a hermaphrodite vampire who turns others by having them drink blood from …well you don’t want to know. Ugh. At least I can happily ignore further contributions to the perverted arts from Rice.

Before that, though, I read the fifth Harry Potter book: Harry Potter and the Rambling Story. Like Rice, I suspect J.K. Rowling’s momentum as a successful writer has wretched her free of editors who could help her focus and polish a bit more. Unlike Rice, though, Rowling can still spin a tale that’s so entertaining and imaginative that I don’t mind flopping around a bit without direction.

In fact, I think Rowling is a genius in many ways, and very much the architect of her own success. It’s been a while since I was a pre-teen, but I can see how she deliberately constructs her books to appeal to them. She has teenage characters in a familiar setting (school), and many of the problems they face are familiar to teens: homework, hormones, malicious or incompetent teachers, tests, bullies, adults who don’t understand them, and the desire to be popular and liked by their peers. There are also, by the way, more positive themes like friendship, loyalty, industry, sportsmanship, and tolerance. Rowling takes all these mundane elements and covers them with a veneer of the fantastical to make them interesting enough to entrance readers with her imagination.

One of the best insights Rowling makes, though, is that there are adults who are incompetent and who do not know what’s best. We as adults know that other adults are sometimes stupid, ignorant, and unfair, but we expect children and teens to never ever think so. I very clearly remember realizing this as a kid when one of my teachers did something spectacularly stupid and ignorant of the facts. Yet I was powerless to do anything about the injustice and felt trapped in the situation and powerless to affect it. This kind of thing happens all the time in the Harry Potter books (especially the fifth one, where it’s a prominent theme), and I think young readers react to it. So do adults who remember.