First blood?

The Vampire book failed to keep me interested on a tired Friday evening, so I had to finish it this morning. How is it, one asks in parenthesis, that other people can dispose of books half way through.

Many a time I have finished a book thinking that it was absolute rubbish; a judgment I had formed a great number of pages earlier – but the idea of not finishing it had not entered my mind!

“Twilight” by Stephenie Meyer (The International Number One Best Seller) was just such a book: absolute rubbish but I kept on doggedly reading it.

It started well with a very brief Preface and with some effective scene setting. Indeed the novel worked fairly well right up until the entry of the Vampires. Meyer is obviously trying for a new take on a very old theme and attempting to update the old mythic quality in a literary response to these monsters from the pens of Polidori and Stoker and make them appear more ‘reasonable’ in their modern life.

The novel is set mostly in the north west of the USA in a damp and cloudy part of the country where the vampires (who have adjusted to a diet of animal rather than human blood) are able to live and walk around in generally sunless skies in the company of their normal ‘food.’

Meyer tries too hard to re-work the legends and she seems curiously reluctant to come to terms with the major selling point in the novel, that vampires exist and are an unobtrusive part of society!

The main character is a seventeen year old girl, Bella and her (eventual) vampire boyfriend is too often described as god-like and looking like a model and a Greek statue for him to be taken too seriously. The actual action of the novel is fairly slow until danger in a real form (from other more bloodthirsty vampires) eventually transforms an adolescent coming of age novel into something nearer to an adventure story.

I have the sequel and the sequel to the sequel in my locker in school but I do not think that I shall be rushing to read them. I understand there is also a film. I not going to rush to see that either!

I have also been reading The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, one of the free e-books which I downloaded more for the promise of the title than anything else – and a vague memory of having seen faded volumes of that title in virtually every second-hand shop with a large unsold stock. It turns out mainly to be screed against the German militaristic ambitions of the years leading up to the First World War with much moralistic discussion and a lack of compelling story line.

Such a disappointment for a book that has held a fascination for so long. Perhaps the fact that the film gave a little known actor called Rudolph Valentino to be a Latin lover and dance the tango that ensured its popularity because I don’t think that the author, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, is necessarily a name to conjure with! Though, to be fair, I do think that I have heard of ‘Blood and Sand’ though I don’t know what it is about. Yet.

We appear to have new neighbours; not, unfortunately, the Scumbags (as they are affectionately known by one and all) but on the other side where the solitary Frenchman now has departed and what appears to be a young couple are moving in. Certainly work is being done in the house and garden. Toni has seen a god but I am praying that it belonged to a visitor and not the owners. We have a superfluity of canines in this area all of whom feel the need to defecate on the pavements. And their cretinous owners don’t clear up after them.

I have now taken the final photograph for my entry for the school’s maths photography competition. My final photo was of some cones which I am sure are organized on some mathematical system. When I was young I had the Big Hamlyn Book of Mathematics and so knew all about the Fibonacci Sequence from an indecently young age, and I have spoken about the numbers of plants and seed pods and twigs on trees and leaves with absolute authority by shaking my head sagely and mouthing something about that famous series - though I could rarely see how it applied!

Last year only one teacher entered the teachers' section of the competition, I am determined to make it more of a struggle for the only competitor this year and have encouraged another member of the English department to enter as well. The latter has recently won a competition for his photos and so the end result should be interesting.

Even if I don’t win!