Cricket Readers Recommend
Twilight
by Stephanie MeyerIts awesome! It might be a little mature, but still!
submitted by Michelle O., age 9
(May 11, 2009 - 8:53 pm)
(May 11, 2009 - 8:53 pm)
Its awesome! It might be a little mature, but still!
Yeah, me neither, 'cuz Kathy'n'I are gonna wear our anti-twilight, Team Bram t-shirts and such to the theaters. I hope it's as awful as the first one, which was great to make fun of... XD
"Your eyes... they're [insert colour here]. They were [insert colour here] yesterday."
"...It must be the florescent lighting."
*smirk* I lol'd there. The lighting was incredibly bad... The whole movie, really.
(October 2, 2009 - 3:39 pm)
I disgree with you people i think the twilight is awesome its really fun to open up your imagination. But its great who knows your reading level might go up to level Z !!! that will be awesome wow your a good reader.
(October 12, 2009 - 8:17 pm)
Twilight might be a little imature for you but the book does have good words that might improve your reading. But I am shocked a 9-year-old read the whole Twilght series. That's awesome. No other 9-year-old could do that. But make sure next time your mom/dad checks the book rating and sees if it's all right for age. But Good Reading!!!
(October 19, 2009 - 8:16 pm)
Re: good words: A very tiny selection of Smeyer's frequent word misuse: claustrophobic, excessive, verbose, chagrin, smolder, curtly, and neophyte, to name just a few. Many of those "good words" of which you speak are purple prose.
I did not like these books, but please do not take offense at my opinion; you have every right to yours.
(October 20, 2009 - 5:22 pm)
I am chagrinned by smeyer's horribly violent misuse of her thesaurus.
...
Actually no, I am deeply frightened by it. Deeply.
Ahhhhh, Danny Elfman!
...
Hem. Anyway. Back to Twilight.
@Anamika (cool name): The trouble with the "good words" in Twilight (and don't get me wrong, they are good words) is that they are, more often than not, used incorrectly and/or excessively (glares at the word "chagrin").
As for the vampires, Otto Chriek is more a vampire than Ed will ever be, and he's the Head Iconographer for the Ankh-Morpork Times, and every time he takes a picture the flash causes him to disintegrate into ash (he solves this problem by wearing a vial of blood which breaks and resurrects him immediately whenever this happens). Furthermore he's a Black Ribboner, meaning he's sworn off blood (as most Ankh-Morpork vampires have), and unlike Ed he isn't self-important about it.
Furthermore (for the record) Vetinari is a better ruler than the whole of the Volturi combined. Then again, of course, Vetinari is basically a better (in the sense of effectiveness, anyway) ruler/tyrant/dictator/thing than just about any other leader in fiction. Or history. Plus he's funny.
And Mrs. Cake (also for the record) is far scarier (if you're a priest) than any of the Twilight cast could ever be.
/Discworld obsession again
(October 21, 2009 - 10:43 pm)
Personally I was considerably *chagrinned* when in NM Bella stated that she now "needed him [Edward] even worse." She needed him even *worse*. Really. Did she.
On the topic of better-than-twilight vampires, I'm afraid that all I can do (having read little other vampire fiction) is sing the praises of Dracula and Lucy and Stoker vampirism in general. Why did I like them? Several reasons. One, they had fangs. Two, they drank blood. The "vampires who don't drink blood" thingy may've been original at one point but (judging by the little vampire fiction I /have/ read) is now horribly overused and overrated. In my mind, vampires drink human blood-- they are not eco-friendly and loving towards humanity and full of guilt that they try to appease by hunting animals.
Other day I was at Barnes and Noble and since I'd already read everything worth reading in the children's section I decided to look in YA. And it was *literally* nothing but Twilight and Twilight ripoffs. Again, I was chagrinned.
(October 22, 2009 - 5:55 pm)
Of course, the lovely thing about Black Ribboners in Discworld is that they've sworn off blood not because of any moral issues (for the most part, anyway), but because that's the only way they can be legally hired in Ankh-Morpork. That and if they accidentally get hit with too much light (or in Otto's case take a picture), the only way anyone'll help them resurrect is if they've got a Black Ribbon card... mmmyep...
Re: YA section: Yes. That is why I shun the YA books and just head straight to the normal fiction sections. That's where my current obsession (Discworld) is anyway.
(October 27, 2009 - 10:05 pm)
Yes, because everyone has been raving about it so much I'm going to get Discworld from the library (after I finish Catcher in the Rye ((blek. horrid so far)) and A Picture of Dorian Gray ((very excellent)) ), but I'm not exactly sure what order the books go in or how many there are or anything like that...
Yes, but you're sixteen, so you're allowed to read adult fiction without your mother giving you the evil eye if you try. I'm only eleven, and my mom gets suspicious if I even have a book with an actual photograph of a person's face on the front as opposed to an illustration. Why? I don't know. /whining
So I'm just working my way through my dad's bookshelf of college reading assignments while I a) try to find out the deal with Discworld and b)wait for some other things to come in at the library...
(October 28, 2009 - 4:23 pm)
The Discworld series starts officially with Color of Magic, but I'd recommend starting with Equal Rites or Mort (the third and fourth books, respectively). Equal Rites is about the first female wizard and Mort is about Death taking on an apprentice.
The deal with Discworld, as you put it, is (for me) mainly the way Pratchett handles... well, everything really. He uses magic as a metaphor (of a sort) for nuclear power, he treats cliched magical races (i.e., vampires, dwarves, trolls) in interesting and (so far as I can tell) extremely unique ways, Lord Vetinari (Patrician of Ankh-Morpork) is a Lawful Neutral tyrant who has absolutely no interest in ruling the world but would like to get the city in order thanks very much, and of course the Sto Helit family, and the witches in Lancre (particularly Granny Weatherwax) who forever changed the way I look at Shakespeare, and the way he treats Death, of course (with the exception of CoM, Death is a Lawful Neutral to Lawful Good sort who speaks in all caps, likes humans, named his horse Binky and has a granddaughter named Susan (who is awesome)). And of course there's all the parodied cliches and tropes and lampshades Pratchett hangs every which way. And some of the characters can pronounce punctuation (Captian Carrot comes to mind, he can pronounce asterisks (as in, "D*mn")), and when he writes accents he does them properly, and of course there's the whole "inn-sewer-ants" thing from CoM and The Light Fantastic (and other words besides insurance in other books, too). Yes. /rambling.
Yes. That was a really long runon sentence and I apologize.
(October 29, 2009 - 5:42 pm)
It's okay... I feel very enlightened. Thank you for the summary.
So would Death's granddaughter Susan be Susan Sto Helit, who you mentioned on the quotes thread? (The quotes threads... which in and of themselves gave me a vivid mental picture of Death...)
I will now go and request those from the library website...
(October 30, 2009 - 2:51 pm)
Yes, Death's granddaughter Susan is the Susan I quoted on the other thread. Mort, her father, was Death's apprentice and her mother Ysabell was Death's adopted daughter.
(October 31, 2009 - 4:01 pm)
Death, actually, sounds like a very nice guy by the way you describe him.
(November 1, 2009 - 7:50 am)
Like I said, he's Lawful Neutral at the worst, and most times he's Lawful Good. He *likes* humans.
And he's so sweet sometimes, you just want to hug him. I mean, when he tries to be nice in a human way he always botches it horribly (i.e, Susan's Hogswatch card that was supposed to have snow on it but the snow melted, or the diamond for Miss Flitworth "TO BE FRIENDS WITH"), but that's because he takes everything dead literally and has no sense of metaphor or figurative speech. The point is, he tries and he cares in some way (and the bit at the very end of Reaper Man, when he takes Miss Flitworth's soul to where her long-dead and beloved fiance's soul was trapped so they could be happy together in the afterlife after having begged the Death of Universes, Azrael, for permission to do so, is truly awwwwww inducing).
Point is, he's not actually scary at all. It's the Auditors of Reality who loathe everything that lives and would destroy life in the multiverse if they had a chance that are really scary. Death doesn't like them much...
(November 4, 2009 - 7:03 pm)
Judging by his name, I would assume he's sort of like, the guy who *thinks*... does what exactly? ...Is in charge of the dead?*
Is Lawful Neutral/Good/etc. something that Pratchett invented, or a general term?
*Or would that be Azrael? And I seem to recall someone mentioning a Death of Rats...
(November 5, 2009 - 5:57 pm)
Azrael = the Death of Universes.
The Death of the Discworld doesn't actually control the dead. His job is to separate souls from their bodies after the bodies die, so that the souls can go to whatever afterlife they were expecting when they died. He doesn't actually kill and he doesn't "take care of" the souls of the dead. He just cuts them free with his scythe and lets them go about their business.
This is an extremely important job, as evidenced first in Mort and then in Reaper Man. In Mort, Mort botches a job and doesn't cut the soul from the dead body, leaving a huge disconnect between actual history and the current reality, so reality has to heal itself. In Reaper Man, everything is out of whack because nothing's dying and there's an excess of life force around, so when Windle Poons tries to die (he's a wizards, and wizards know exactly when they're going to die- it's sort of a contract with Death), he just ends up stuck there so he decides to become a zombie for a while. It makes more sense in context, really.
Also in Reaper Man, each species starts to develop it's own individual Death (i.e., the Death of Rats, the Death of Mayflies). After Death beats the Auditors and their New Death, he sort of sucks all the other Deaths back into himself, but the Death of Rats holds onto a beam and stays its own entity. When Death finds him later, he decides to let the Death of Rats stay a separate entity. Does that make sense?
(November 6, 2009 - 5:28 pm)