Put Your Spooky On!

Here we go again.  It's that time when we feel festive, put up decorations, and don we now our gay apparel.  Yay for the most wonderful time of the year--Halloween!  (What did you think I was talking about?)

Both kids AND adults are excited about stringing the faux spider webs and choosing costumes.  What is it about dressing up in a kooky costume and acting weird that does it for so many people?  It's the candy!  I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, trick-or-treating was a chance to sample different kinds of candy to find out which ones were the good ones to buy.  My father, of course, was only too happy to assist me in this all important task.

Well, maybe Halloween isn't just about the candy.  Maybe it's about all those creepy books and movies that give you goosebumps (not necessarily the kind by R. L. Stine).  Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is my all time favorite Halloween story.  With a Headless Horseman and a great chase in an eerie town, it keeps your eyes glued to the page and your heart racing.  Then there's The Others, the movie with Nicole Kidman, that keeps you sitting at the edge of your seat with each twist and turn of the plot.  What you think is real isn't, and what you think isn't real...is!  Whoa!

Or is Halloween mainly about the parties, like the one the library's having next week on Thursday, October 29 at 6 p.m.?  Maybe it's a Not-So-Scary Halloween Party for the smaller kids, but that doesn't mean the bigger kids and the kidults can't have fun as well.  There are crafts and candy and storytime and candy and games and candy.  Did I mention there's candy?  We'll also have fruit and juice because we gotta have some healthy things, too, you know.

Perhaps all the bubble, bubble, toil and trouble of Halloween boils down to simple, old fashioned fun.  No matter our age, we just want to have a good time.  So put on your costume, get your treats, and forego the tricks.  Read some good books, watch some good movies, and have fun at the Halloween party.  Put your spooky on!

Wishing you a ghoulish Halloween from the perch.

Goonight, Twilight

I'll start by saying that I'm a perch librarian who actually likes Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and the succeeding books in the series (it was difficult keeping my suspension of disbelief while reading Breaking Dawn with its excessive supernatural elements, but that's another story).  Sure, the writing style is mediocre.  True, you could argue (as many already have) that the relationship between the book's two lovers is unhealthy in its obsessiveness.  Putting those elements aside, though, what attracts so many to Twilight is its focus on the purity of first love and the journey through it.

I realize that nowadays when a book or a movie is so successful and so well loved, it's quite natural for publishers and studios to develop a sequel.  Sometimes this can be a good idea, but more often than not, the author or director is just trying to milk more out of a dry cow.  That's what Meyer, unfortunately, seems to be doing with her latest venture.

To do something special for the 10th anniversary of the publication of her book, Meyer has "reimagined" Twilight by telling the story of a teenaged boy who falls in love with a vampire girl in a book entitled Life and Death.  It's a gender-bender, but the story is really the same as the original Twilight, even down to the same sentences at times.  You have to wonder whether Meyer just used the "Find" and "Replace" features on her word processor to do a quick "rewrite."

After reading the first chapter of Life and Death, I have no desire to read more.  It's too weird to have Beau, the male "Bella," think about how he would have to share one bathroom in the Forks house with Charlie (Charlie and Renee are about the only characters to stay the same) and how Renee resisted him trying to organize her things in the Phoenix house bathroom.  Come on now--would a teenaged boy seriously think about organizing his mother's toiletries or caring that he shared a bathroom?  Not likely, if you ask me.

I suppose the die hard Twilight fans will flock to Life and Death like flies to excrement, and I'm sure Meyer will make millions off this book as she did from her others.  In my opinion, I think she would have done a better job completing Midnight Sun, the Twilight story retold from Edward's perspective (Meyer stopped work on that novel after half of it was leaked on the Internet).  In that unfinished book, she not only gave readers a better understanding of Edward, but also enriched the story in a tasteful, interesting way.  Life and Death, sadly, comes across as poorly thought out fan fiction, confirming my belief that sequels aren't always a good idea.  A dry cow should be left alone.

My very humble 2 cents from the perch.