Books.

Well, I just finished reading "Treasure of the Mayan King", and it's a fun book with three related adventure stories about a treasure collected and hidden by a long-dead Mayan King, King Chac, and the solving of the mystery around them, and so on. I enjoyed the stories, and they make a good light read.

Coincidentally, a long awaited new novel by Neil Gaiman just appeared on my Kindle, so that's what I started reading immediately afterwards. "The Ocean at the End of the Lane". I haven't gotten far enough into it to know exactly where it's going, so I cant' even tell you yet what the book is about. But the writing is the same good quality that I've learned to expect from Gaiman. I will say that he got better with age, and pretty much hit his peak with "American Gods". That book has become one of my all-time favorites. I've talked a lot about his "Sandman" comics, but "American Gods" is simply a whole grade above that in quality. I can't recommend it too much.

 

I finished Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the end of the Lane early this morning, and it was very good. The story is a fantasy, a reminiscence by a man about things that happened to him when he was a child. He returns to visit with some old neighbors of his and memories literally come flooding back to him of his youth. The story involves the man at seven, his family, his neighbors, and particularly the Hempstocks, 3 women, who may be mother, daughter and grandmother, or who may be something entirely different. The 'Ocean' refers to the pond in the Hempstock's back yard. To the seven year old protagonist, it looks like a pond, but his friend, Lettie Hempstock insists that it's an Ocean.

I've seen it described as an adult fairy tale, and that's certainly accurate. And like all fairy tales, it involves both horror and bravery in the face of horror. There are familiar elements in the novel that reminded me of Coraline (although it's considered a young adult book, it's worth reading if you are a fan of Gaiman's writing). And there are things that reminded me of Neverwhere and of Interworld (I do strongly recommend Neverwhere, Interworld though I'd recommend mostly for the young adults that you know).

Anyway, if you like Neil Gaiman, you should definitely want to read this. It may be a bit too scary for younger readers though (then again, a lot of people said that about Coraline).

BTW, I gave this 5 out of 5 stars on Amazon. It is that good.

 

I wanted to post this excerpt from the book -- actually someone else quoted it in a review of the book, but I think it says a whole lot about the quality of Gaiman's writing:

 

That quote is interesting but it massively reminds me of twilight, extremely massively. I'm pretty sure that pretty much that conservation is conversed in reference to a vampire, it just seems like I've seen something pretty dang close to that about twilight, although it's not a point against it. I never did get all the anti-twilight hype though, I read them and they seemed alright they weren't amazingly good but they were alright. Really it's like sometimes people disliked them just because they've been disliked, they were alright fantasy with enough underpinnings and worldbuilding to allow for some more interesting ideas.

 

The main reason people disliked the twilight books is because of the fandom, who loved them exactly because of the least appealing part to the remainder of humanity - the very bland characterization, lack of a solid plot, and far, far too much crap like sparkle sparkle.

 

I've never read the Twilight books, nor have I seen any of the movies. But my niece (soon to be an H.S. Senior) is a fan. I can't say why they are criticised, but it's been my experience that I don't do well reading (most) young adult books. I couldn't get through the first Harry Potter, even the movie put me to sleep. Interworld was readable at least, but I had no desire to read the sequel. The movie of "The Hunger Games", while it didn't put me to sleep, had me thinking how much better it was when it was called "Death Race 2000" -- so much more economical a story, and so much less teen angst. And it was made in a much more pleasant time, before Sylvester Stallone would actually be given speaking roles.

 

People criticise the Twilight books because they romanticise unhealthy, abusive relationships between a century/ies old vampire and a young, vulnerable teenage girl. Similar reasons to the criticisms of 50 Shades of Grey, in that those books romanticise (and erotically charge) a highly abusive relationship between an older man and a young, vulnerable woman, not to mention the disregard James showed for the BDSM community and the dangerous portrayals of BDSM sex she showed.

And I ain't even read 'em.

 

As an author I'm obviously extremely biased in this regard, but when I picked random pages to read in the Twilight series I found the actual -writing- to be cringe-worry. The dialogue, sentence structure, descriptions, pretty much everything I read was pretty awful. I also agree with Loerwyn about the relationships.

To Haldurson and anybody else who wants to give them a try, the only real "young adult" series I found truly enjoyable was the --Dragonback-- series by Timothy Zahn, starting with Dragon and Thief.

((sorry for any misspellings or other problems, using my phone cuz my computer chair is too uncomfortable after a car accident))

 

Yes, I've also heard criticisms levelled at Twilight and its ilk for their writing quality.

As for "real" Young Adult books, there are plenty of great ones. Like adult fiction, it's a sea of shite with islands of excellence. First two Hunger Games books are really good (third is shite), there's any of Malinda Lo's novels, Jim C. Hines is also a really good YA-level author. Oh and I'll fangirl over Alison Croggon's Pellinor books all I want. But you also have YA authors breaking boundaries - both Malinda Lo and Jim C. Hines have non-straight and non-white characters in their books, and do so brilliantly (Malinda Lo is a gay Chinese-American woman, by the way), and then you have authors like Blake Charlton who are writing books despite severe dyslexia and other issues, and Charlton's books are actually about a form of 'magical' dyslexia, i.e. the problems his characters have with magical spells are the same problems dyslexic people have with language.

And I hate people looking down on YA. One of the most famous and loved fantasy novels, The Hobbit, is pretty much for children. So, y'know. It's not who it's written for, it's how it's written. YA's a beautiful style when done right. But it's no different to adult fiction in that regard.

 

I think the whole "quality of writing in 'young adult' books" issue isn't really about the genre itself, but rather about the fact that it is a genre which looks like a good place to start for writers who are fairly new to the whole thing. Most novice writers are young adults, after all, which means that by writing what they would like to read they often end up writing "young adult" books. And when they are merely beginning, they still might not be aware of their personal faults as writers, nor is it likely for them to have a solid style. By the time their style solidifies and they become aware of what to do in order not to write things which are cruddy, they might happen to decide that they prefer to write books belonging to a different genre.

That being said, I do agree that the genre itself has some gems, and I like reading books belonging to it for as long as they are well-written.

And "Twilight"? Those appear to be the first books of that particular author, which sort of fits the point I made a little higher in the text.


PS. The book I am currently trying to write (emphasis on "trying" since I can't spend all my free time on it and also because of some other reasons) is supposed to belong to this genre. If I ever manage to get it finished, which Xyvik made more likely due to him giving me some good advice, you'll be able to decide if it ends up as a more spectacular failure than "Twilight" or not.

 

Ok, I'll give you some points there but some of those points just irritates me for some reason. First off, pretty much my entire knowledge of 50 shades comes from the wiki page as I've never read them, I do however know about Twilight as I did read them. I won't claim to have an opinion on most of the 50 shades stuff as I don't really know and can't form an opinion but 27 and 21 is on the edges but it isn't quite creepy yet, certainly nowhere near as bad I'd predict based off the description of

Now for twilight, not to seem harsh here but your arguments just really, really irk me. First the age gap, it's irrelevant, it's an unageing psuedo-immortal being so it doesn't matter, no complained about The Doctor or Liara T'Soni or any other character from anything with a similar or larger age gap, it's because that doesn't define the character. If there was some 150-year old that has been 20 for the past 130 but has thier experience as a core blatant building block with things like fighting in wars and being essentially a product of an semi-alien culture then you can make a good argument against it, when it's a slightly depressed overly religious teenager with larges amounts of teen angst and impulsiveness that just happens to have lived for over a century but still has the ability to blend in with modern culture to the degree where they just seem slightly old-fashioned the age argument is a hell of a lot harder to make because the age is effectively just a number tacked on for lore reasons and doesn't actually matter. When you add in the ability to bestow that upon them even the life expectancy argument goes out the window as well as it too becomes a non-argument what with the ageing one with the unageing psuedo-immortality.

I have no idea at all where you got the BDSM sex idea from as the absolute closest they get is about one scene in the final book where it's shown that she had some bruises from trying to have sex with him, him being a guy that can stop a van with no effort and leave a dent in the van, also vampire sex can actually destroy beds by accident as stated in other parts. It's to be expected that there'd be some kind of damage and bruising is actually fairly light all things considered, though the reason it happened at all was due to her pushing for sex before turning due to overly romantic ideals. He was against it because he knew he wouldn't be able to completely avoid hurting her, which doesn't lend much credence to the idea other than he let his wife convince to do something stupid that he knew he probably shouldn't do which isn't really a sign of an unhealthy, abusive relationship.

Of course most of what would be the abusive, unhealthy relationship would have to be books 2 and 3, he abandons her out of angst, religious beliefs and a horribly misguided attempt to protect her, she gets depressed ad anti-social because of her obsession with him and becomes an adrenaline junkie in an attempt to hallucinate him reprimanding her for it. Yeah, it's not good for anyone there won't even try countering it's an unhealthy with traces of abuse on all sides but it wasn't that massively horrible and it at least showed her driving her depression to somewhat productive avenues like calculas and school than something overly negative like drugs or self-harm.

Quickly for the writing issue and young adult thing as this seems to have blown massively out of control for me but I didn't find it that bad and unless given evidence otherwise I'd just say it's a major writing style clash, I've had them with stuff that were supposed to be good but that I couldn't force myself to read when I tried as I just couldn't deal with it. As for YA novels I vote Discworld as they're all pretty good on that half, also Molly Moon was alright but seems to have deteriorated a little bit in some of the newer books due to over escalation and insane power levels. Yes though this certainly seemed to get a bit out of control but I just dislike arguments that aren't at least based off research of the subject matter and that's what these felt like to me, stating a common argument because a friend knew someone who said it and not reasoning based off first hand experience or research. Forcing myself to stop now though because this really did end up too big.

 

Before you start criticising people for being of the opinion that "something is blah blah something", please check if there wasn't a "people say" before the "something is blah blah something" part.
Because if there was, then your irritation would amount to nothing more than a tantrum of someone who had a momentary bout of inability to understand what they read.

That is a problem which can appear when you only quote a part of someone's sentence and leave out a part which changes the meaning. Althea admitted she did not read the books, and she wrote that "people criticise". At no point in her post was there anything about what she thinks about it. And yet you jumped on it, maybe not to violently but still, as if it was something she was thinking when there is no proof of it being the cause.


I do understand your point. I really do. I haven't read "Twilight" but I know it panders to people of a given demographic and while I will say that it isn't likely to be perfect due to it being the first few books from this particular author (hence the "the writing style still not solid" thing), the fact that it is a well-known and accepted book means that "masses" like it and thus it's not "complete garbage". Which is already something for a work that is being sold, regardless of how it sounds.
But in the future, before you jump on someone, make a quote out of the entire sentence you are taking instead of merely a part of it, and take care to look for words which might indicate it to be not the poster's opinion but someone else's instead.
Because jumping on someone for a quote they, well, quoted, as if it was them who originally said it, only makes you look stupid (or tired, you can choose).

 

I actually prefer some young adult stories usually. My beef with Twilight was that I just paged through the first book, and the writing may have improved after that. I'm also not a fan of the subject matter, so maybe I was biased from the start. I don't hate on anybody who likes them, I'm a big believer in "to each their own."

 

Except YA is probably *harder* to write because you have to make sure you can get the readers to identify with it, and keep it at a level that is understood by the average reader. On top of that, YA is often seen as a very progressive style, so you have to - if you're tackling issues - make sure that you're actually doing what you want and not contributing to the problem.

The Doctor is an adult. Liara was an adult. THEY ARE ALL ADULTS. Bella was not. And there are laws about minors and adults in our world. If Bella is under 18 and Shinyboy is considerably over that (say, 7 years plus) then it is essentially child abuse, even if she is a teenager. But there's also the fact he's at least five times her age WHICH IS JUST ICKY.

I was talking about 50 Shades.

Yeah that's really good and positive shit for girls to be reading and wanting to have for themselves. Every girl needs to be told how it's right for her to tear herself to pieces over some guy she obsesses over, rather than to stand on her own two feet.

Discworld isn't a YA series. It has four YA novels and a children's book, but it is not a YA series.

 

((I would like to apologize for my comments about the writing of Twilight. After all, my first novel [Treasure of the Mayan King] has many sentences and paragraphs that I would like to change now that I've improved in my craft. We've all got to start somewhere, after all. I do, however, stand by my assertion that the subject matter is very much not something I like.))

So! Anybody but me like X-Wing: Wraith Squadron?

 

And now it appears I have made myself into a fool due to Althea's wording and Xavion's quoting.
~sigh~
Sorry about that, Xavion. I really love it when the words are vague enough that one can't attribute words to the one who said them.

Which actually explains the problem present in the genre as a whole. If most people trying to write books of it are beginning authors and many of them still lack the ability to stop themselves from "contributing to the problem", then it explains why the level of quality of writing in the genre jumps so wildly.

After you get to a certain age, a few years this way or that way don't particularly matter. Especially when one's body stopped aging completely, which complicates the line further. Sure, it might be "icky" for some, but for as long as it is their personal choice which they are considered to be capable of making, you can't really do anything about it since it's their choice.
I'm not particularly fond of the whole thing, but that is only because "vampires", the way they are shown in Twilight (and in some other works, as well), are something the idea of which I don't like (completely stopped aging with no "real" drawbacks is a fairly ridiculous idea to me); that, and I tend not to read books centred around romance.

If you want to go the route of "child abuse", then it has to amount to statutory rape which would require her to be below the age of consent. And I am fairly certain she is above it, which means that "unfortunate choice of partner" is an acceptable way to comment on it but "child abuse" isn't. If she is above the age of consent and agreed to a situation which could result in her getting somewhat worn-out and battered due to not wanting to wait, then you might also call her "impatient" or "a masochist" as well, but again, it is not "child abuse".

Depends on the person. Some people, not just girls, want to be the side of the relationship that is being lead rather than the leading one or one of the two walking hand in hand. And it is merely their choice.
I do agree it isn't very healthy to tear oneself to pieces for whatever reason, but people can act irrationally from time to time. Whether this is because of poor writing or because of any other reason in "Twilight", I don't know and I can't say (though I do acknowledge most people who criticise it tend to say it is the first one), but I think that if you find the whole thing it is easier to simply say "I don't like 'Twilight', the are a few things in it which I find uncomfortable" rather than comment on the details which are not equally squicky for every reader when you had not read the book(s) in question.

 

Except there's probably as many debut YA authors as there are debut adult authors, perhaps fewer. But even proficient, successful adult authors might not 'get' how to write YA. It is NO different from adult fiction in any of these regards.

*A certain age* being the key point. That age, in society, is probably closer to 30 than anything.

She's still a minor, as she's under 18. If it doesn't fall under the banner of child abuse, it's still an adult coercing a minor into sex. That is still not legal. It's also about the 'power' - he is older, stronger, etc. Bella becomes dependent on him and follows him around, no? He holds power over her that he shouldn't, irrespective of whether he's glittery or not.

But we need to discuss the problems Twilight has. We need to make sure impressionable youngsters aren't taken in by its romanticism of unhealthy relationships, because they might not necessarily know better. And if you look at the fandom, it's pretty clear that it's made a lasting impression... and it's not a good one. Same with 50 Shades. It's not about the quality of the writing nor the subject matter, it's about the messages - both visible and hidden - the ones that portray unhealthy and dangerous relationships as desirable.

 

I'm going to stay out of the argument regarding YA books. I'm not sure how much of an anomaly I was, but I was reading so-called adult books at a very young age. I read very few if any 'YA' books. I was an early reader and my Grandfather taught me, and gave me tons of books. I got hooked on adult science fiction at some point along the way. I don't think it did me any harm, although that doesn't mean that I understood everything I read the way I would have had I actually been an adult. But there's nothing wrong with that, and a few of the books I did revisit when I was older. I did get chased out of the adult section of my local library once, and that ended with my mom balling out the librarian. After that, no one ever bothered me again. I think when I was very young, my parents tried to keep on top of everything I was reading to make sure it was 'safe' or whatever. But at some point they just gave up on that. I thin once, they wouldn't let me read a Mad Magazine because it featured a satire of "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (a '60s movie about wife-swapping). But that's about it. And even that, they finally relented and gave it to me (based on when the movie came out, I had to have been 9 or 10 lol).

But when I recommend some of the books that I read as a child or teenager to my niece and nephew, my brother gives me a hard time saying that those books won't interest them. I've recommended the Ring trilogy, The Once and Future King, Dune, etc. Either they were too difficult for them to read (according to my brother) or they would not appeal to them. Ah well... As I said, maybe I'm an anomaly.

Personally, I feel there's absolutely nothing wrong with reading a book and not completely understanding all of it. The fact that it's maybe 'just out of reach' that identifies it as something containing knowledge and concepts that you don't already know. So you ask questions, start discussions, look up what other people say about it, and maybe you learn something new. If you don't stretch yourself, you don't grow.

/edit I just remembered something my sister-in-law told me about my niece. When I recommended some book or another to my niece who I had just heard was reading either Harry Potter or Twilight, my sister-in-law said that 'Oh, she's only reading that because that's what her friends are reading'. In other words, claiming that she won't be interested in reading anything that's not currently popular.

 

Just to point it out, 18 years is not the universal age of consent. Some places have it closer to 15 or even less. Many places have more complex laws regarding the other side(s) of the equation too.

But this is a subject that irritates people to no end. Let us allow it to die. There be books avast to parlay about!

 

Alright time to reply again. First off the YA stuff, I read it because that's what was in the school library and it was good stuff like Maximum Ride, Percy Jackson, Molly Moon, HP and the like, at the same time I read stuff that would probably be considered more adult like David Gemmell, Raymond E. Feist, and Terry Pratchett so I'm not entirely sure on where the distinction between the two lies. I just try and imagine a kind of sliding maturity scale and it seems to work, target audience is also a decent part I reckon.

Stop reading here if you don't care about Twilight arguments.

So wouldn't 100+ be long past that? but seriously he's eternally 17 so that's a major plus in his favor. He is essentially a teenager, he acts a bit old fashioned and has an unusually big backstory but he is essentially a teenager that has a 3 digit age, no worse than a 100 year old elf or alien that has longevity and that is the effective teenager phase. It's even stated in the books that the reason why there are no young children as vampires is because they can't mentally mature, he is basically stuck as a teenager for all eternity.

She's both 18 and married to him which both invalidate the all illegal sex with minor thing, that and you'd probably have trouble getting legal evidence he's old enough for her age to matter anyway even if she was 17. I'm also not sure how you got coercing her to have sex out of her pushing for it and him resisting and trying to avoid because he didn't want to harm her. While Bella does follow him around it's mainly because she's a slightly obsessive girlfriend initially and later by the fact that they're married and there is about 2 dozen people she can socialize with without risking killing them by accident and the majority of those are physically repulsed by her presence. She is also the dues ex for the series with her minor telepathy immunity turning into a super mass immunity power that allows them to turn an pretty much certain defeat at the hands of the vampire mafia/government into an easy win for them by neutralising pretty much every single trump card they have by herself so she's definitely not completely helpless. I'll ask for clarification though on what you mean by "power over her that he shouldn't" as I didn't notice anything more than a mildly obsessive personality for her inducing most of his power over her.

I might write more later but for now I have stuff to do and this is enough.