Tue, Dec. 28th, 2010, 10:17 am

I'm reading "Reasoning with Vampires" and trying to work my way through the archive out of sheer determination because reading the blog along with "Mark Reads Twilight" is sort of like reading Twilight, but not so painful. As I've stated before, I tried reading the first book and got to baseball then decided that was enough. This is one of my least favorite line in Twilight because I am a petty, petty thing:

I kept my eyes down on the reading list the teacher had given me. It was fairly basic: Brontë, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Faulkner. I already read everything.

My beloved Brontë sisters are dragged into this mess for the first time. In later books, Meyer does quote Wuthering Heights (does Bella indicate it is a quote or is it cited in footnotes?), so I guess it's poor Emily, but she doesn't say which sister is on the reading list. I doubt it's Anne. Everyone forgets Anne. Why couldn't Meyer just make Jane Austen roll in her grave some more like everyone else? (Sorry, Jane.)

Are we supposed to take at face value that Bella reads for enjoyment or did she already read this for school? I don't like the latter implication since it implies that kids ~*in the big city*~ are ahead in school as compared to ~*small town folk*~. This is also reflected in the scene in the biology room where Edward and Bella have already done the experiment before. In the very least, it's another example of Bella being self-absorbed and it's easy to get the impression that she feels superior to others in multiple ways, including because she comes from *Pheonix, AZ* and Forks bores her. I take this as she read it for school because Bella is never shown reading anything aside from vampire research *on the internet* and working on an essay for school (on whether or not Shakespeare exhibits sexism in "Romeo and Juliet" or something like that). Those are the only things that I know of. If she is shown reading anything in later books, let me know.

GRRRRRRRRRRRR
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Tue, Dec. 28th, 2010 06:39 pm (UTC)
tetradecimal

Comic just because

Are we supposed to take at face value that Bella reads for enjoyment
Apparently not Anne Brontë.
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Tue, Dec. 28th, 2010 06:46 pm (UTC)
[info]tehrin

Someone did a fan animation of that comic and other Hark! A Vagrant strips.

Thankfully!
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Tue, Dec. 28th, 2010 07:20 pm (UTC)
[info]esclaramonde

I think it's meant to reinforce both her inherent smartliness and the way city schools are apparently ahead of rural ones. Which might have been true years ago, but with the extent that high schoolers get tested these days? Everyone in the state is going to have gone at essentially the same pace. Washington as a whole would have to be behind Arizona. I think it would have been better to have something like Forks doing Earth Science and then Bio, while Phoenix did Bio and then Earth Science - it would have gotten the point across that she was in a ~difficult situation~ without the unfortunate implications.
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Tue, Dec. 28th, 2010 11:04 pm (UTC)
tetradecimal

It probably would have reinforced her smartliness better if it had mentioned some specifics about the authors instead of presenting a list anyone could have pulled off Google and then going OH YEAH. THOSE GUYS. I READ THEM.
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Wed, Dec. 29th, 2010 03:41 am (UTC)
[info]tehrin

Does she ever have trouble with a subject ever? I think she doesn't like math.
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Wed, Dec. 29th, 2010 04:12 am (UTC)
[info]tehrin

Not counting P.E., that is.
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Wed, Dec. 29th, 2010 01:48 am (UTC)
[info]sandglass

I think there was some implication that she enjoyed reading classic literature--or maybe I'm choosing to remember that way so she has at least one hobby outside of swooning over Ed. Plus, actually enjoying classical literature is something a lot of people take pride in (to which I go: whut? it's not hard to enjoy something awesome!), so it's an extra awesome hobby.

Anyway, the "blaaah I read this already" note is so flat, considering how much redundancy there is in (American) education.
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Wed, Dec. 29th, 2010 03:39 am (UTC)
[info]tehrin

I do read a lot of classic literature, mostly 19th c. and a lot of the authors I enjoy I discovered out of high school on my own. Which is another reason that it bugs me so much. She says she's read them all, but we never see her enjoying a book . We see her angst while listening to Linkin Park, but we never see her reading for enjoyment. She goes to a book store once and its to research Edward vampires.

I disbelieve that any high school student would read (all of) Chaucer on their own, but that is just my own recollection of high school (we covered Chaucer in 11th grade). Also, what [info]puipui said down thread.
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Wed, Dec. 29th, 2010 04:53 am (UTC)
[info]sandglass

I'm kinda guessing she meant the specific novels/plays/whatnot, because jeez how many times have I had Romeo and Juliet assigned (almost as many times as I've complained about it!), but it sounds way more impressive to say you've already read Shakespeare, and I doubt Meyer put that much thought into it. Or maybe she figured you read two Shakespearian plays, a handful of the short stories from the Canterbury Tales, and you know all you need to.
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Sat, Jan. 1st, 2011 02:13 am (UTC)
[info]tehrin

She could at least show Bella reading books which were written by authors not on the class reading list.
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Wed, Dec. 29th, 2010 02:00 am (UTC)
[info]puipui

Somehow, that like never fails to make me want to kick that stupid bint in the shins. Shakespeare? Really? You've read all of Shakespeare? Everything? All the plays, all the sonnets, even Titus Andronicus, you have read all of those, Little Miss High School Girl? Really? High schools in Phoenix issue the fucking Riverside Shakespeare as a textbook to all their high school classes, do they? And you read all of it, along with all of Brontë, all of Chaucer, all of Faulkner, all of those things are things that you have read, are they? And there's just nothing else that you could ever possibly get out of those, nothing else that you could possibly see on a second read that you didn't get the first time around? You know everything there is to know about all of them, do you? Bullshit.

God, what an obnoxious, stuck-up little twit. I couldn't even make it through the first chapter, I hated her so much. I couldn't stand one more page with her, every page was freaking agony. STOP CALLING YOUR DAD BY HIS FIRST NAME YOU UNGRATEFUL WHINY TOERAG! Rawwr!
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Wed, Dec. 29th, 2010 02:01 am (UTC)
[info]puipui

Somehow, that like never fails to make me want to kick that stupid bint in the shins.

*that line. GOD I CAN'T EVEN TYPE ANYMORE I WANT TO SMACK HER SO MUCH. Rawwr again!
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Wed, Dec. 29th, 2010 03:41 am (UTC)
[info]tehrin

STOP CALLING YOUR DAD BY HIS FIRST NAME YOU UNGRATEFUL WHINY TOERAG!

THIS. She doesn't act like he's her father at all.
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Wed, Dec. 29th, 2010 06:21 am (UTC)
[info]puipui

He just seems like a really nice guy who's maybe not all that used to being around his kid all that much but he's trying really hard, and he really just wants what's best for her and wants her to be happy and wants her to love him, but she's just so whiny and ungrateful and self-centered and GRAAWR! GRAAAAAWR! And it wouldn't be so bad if it were presented as that sort of typical teenage bullshit stage where you take your parents for granted, and the reader is supposed to recognize it for what it is and realize that she's in the wrong, but it's not, it's presented as if she's totally in the right and super-ultra perfect and everyone should love her and GRAAAAAAAAAAWR! *headdesk*

(And also, just now, while typing that first sentence, Charlie suddenly reminded me of my own father, which is possibly why it really really bothers me that she treats him like shit. It's pretty rare that I ever want to punch a fictional character in the face; the only ones I can think of offhand are that inbred cracker bastard who shoots the main character at the end of the original Night of the Living Dead, and Bella Swan.)
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Thu, Dec. 30th, 2010 04:50 am (UTC)
[info]khym_chanur

STOP CALLING YOUR DAD BY HIS FIRST NAME YOU UNGRATEFUL WHINY TOERAG! Rawwr!

When I was around four years old, I realized that my mother's name wasn't "Mom", and decided that the proper thing to was to call her by her first name. The only thing that got me to stop was her refusing to acknowledge me if I used her first name.
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