Apparently those who drink blood from large predators every few weeks and go hungry the rest of the time. (No, it wasn’t my first guess either.)

I don’t think much has changed since you were a teenager (I only graduated from *that* club fairly recently, myself, though I’m already grateful to get over some things from THE TEENS). I’ll be willing to admit that teenagers do change between generations in that the media and culture change, so much of what we may believe changes, but much also stays the same. Human nature and potential does not, hence one can read Homer and still identify with the characters.

I shall look forward to your blogging New Moon…I doubt it will spoil the books for me, since I normally only worry about that if there’s a twisty-turny original plot which is vital to the enjoyment, which I don’t think is the point of these novels.

I just finished New Moon (long plane rides and too many hotel stays), so I have to get blogging again, now that the airline found all of our bags. Oy!

I mean, Anne Frank’s diary, for starters. Yes, she’s a teenage girl. Yes, we get angst about love. We get lots of writing about her situation and the war, but her life and even her diary isn’t purely obsessed with either love or her everyday situation, but finds so much more to think about. And this is a diary written by an actual teenager. You’d think a book that is basically a tell-all diary confessional when all’s said and done (if it charts her every thought, it might as well be) written by an adult would be able to have some level of nuance and variation.

I have to wonder: are teenaged girls obsessed with love, or are we bringing them up to believe that they’re supposed to be obsessed with love. It’s not that I don’t believe thinking about various things, even very repetitively, is a part of life and especially a part of growing up. It is, and a person’s inner thoughts realistically portrayed are bound to be petty, insecure, cruel, obsessive etc up to a point.

In today’s media, with so many messages telling girls that they should aspire to be nothing more than fixated on pleasing their man (thanks, Cosmo!) and that girls just naturally have different brains that make them illogical and boy/pink/pony obsessed, and with the huge problem we have with intimate partner violence, we need to counter this message. I feel a book where a teenage girl’s thoughts are limited to obsessing about her boyfriend, thinking she will DIE without him, and her whole world existing around him isn’t a good thing.

It shows an aspect of ourselves, teenaged or adult (insecure, codependent, etc )that in a way is not unrealistic, but it doesn’t rise above that to show us why this is, or that people can be more than their limitations or more than society expects them to me. I don’t have an issue with the themes beong portrayed, but it’s the idealisation, the uncritical way in which we’re all encouraged to take on a fantasy without examining the dangerous messages within that’s worrying.

Well, until I find the time to read the books (and get them from a library somewhere), reading your posts will be a perfect way to remember why I HAVE to read the books, and why I have to be grateful for less problematic reading material…