And this bit from the very end hits poignantly on the sentiment that makes me feel sure that, however much publishing and books may change with the advances of technology, they’ll always be needed.

“We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort.
And that is why we write.”

“Narrative is like a back door into a very deep place inside of us, and a place where reason doesn’t necessarily hold sway.”

“When a story gets inside of us, it makes us less crazy.”

He also talks about taste, about surprise, about the structure of telling a story. And about how a story is most satisfying when the audience knows what the bigger, universal “something” of the story is.

Ira Glass at Gel 2007 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Books are so easily shared, yet are so tremendously personal. The person I am, the way I think, the way I approach life, have all been shaped by the books that I have read. I’ve never been able to name “the book that changed my life” because every book has changed my life. The ones that I love are more than just objects on a shelf (or mp3s on my ipod). They hold parts of me inside of them. In their pages, they hold the places, the thoughts, the people, the smells, sounds, emotions that surrounded me as I read. Often rereading can take me back to the time and place of that previous read, can remind me more sharply of particular moments or feelings than anything else can.

And so, sharing books, even sharing thoughts about books, can be a very intimate act, when it comes right down to it. I mentioned in a previous post that I’ve been collecting quotes since I was in high school. In blank books, I write down lines and passages from books or articles or that I just stumble across somewhere. I sometimes think that giving someone those quote books to read would reveal more about me than giving them the journals that I’ve kept in the last 15 years. In them are the ideas that I identified with, agreed with, found funny, found moving, disagreed with but found thought-provoking–and how I’ve grown in my thoughts about everything over the years (even if I am still mostly reading books for the YA audience). I love sharing books with people, I love the sense that I am saying, essentially, “Here is something that got inside my head, and I hope it gets inside yours, too, and let’s talk about it once you read it.”

Everything we read affects our minds somehow, and being able to share something that affects your mind is pretty remarkable. Being able to have a conversation with another person about how that book affected you, what it made you think, is exciting. Maybe the person I share with won’t pick up on the exact same themes or passages that I did, but regardless, we’ll still both have that book, that story, inside of us. This feeling about books may be part of why I have an enormous to-read list. Because every time a friend tells me about a book they’ve loved or found interesting, I want to read it, too, to understand something that’s now a part of that person I care about.

My library doesn’t contains just stories and worlds and beautiful writing. It contains memories, emotions, thoughts. . . . The books that I keep, the ones I’ve connected to and identified with and found valuable enough to cart with me from apartment to apartment, to make sure I have the space for . . . well, I’m attached to them. Lots of times I’ve actually scribbled notes in them and marked the passages I later transcribed in my quote books. They’re little parts of my mind. My numberless dreams.

* Thanks, Angie, who introduced me to this quote. (In fact, is this quote part of the reason we became friends? Apart from our mutual literary crush on George Cooper? (And other mutual literary crushes.))

I did have my concerns about Bella. She so readily gives up herself, her loves, her dreams for Edward. I wanted to reach into the story and shake her, tell her that she had to be her own person, too. But even as I wanted to do that, I also thought it was a very honest representation of first love for a teenager, so I could see girls finding themselves in Bella. And Twilight ends on the ambiguous note of her butting heads with Edward over whether or not he would change her into a vampire. Because of the ambiguity, you could imagine for yourself a future in which Bella would find herself again and not let Edward be so suffocating and bossy, in which they would be true partners.

But then, with New Moon and Eclipse, Bella was put in the middle of a choice between Edward and Jacob, her best friend who nurses a crush for her. I was a little irritated that Jacob and Bella had to cross that line into romantic because I thought it would be more interesting if a friendship was represented as just as powerful as a romantic relationship (because friendships are!). I thought that it might be what spurs Bella to stand up to Edward and come back into herself. She needed her friends and her life, and she wouldn’t give them up for him, and they had to learn how to have both. But it became a choice between two romantic loves instead.

So readers went in to Breaking Dawn expecting Bella to have to make the choice–between Edward and Jacob, between mortal and immortal. They were waiting to see how she would do it, and what the consequences would be for everyone involved, and how she would deal with both the good and the bad fall-out of such a hard choice. Someone was bound to be hurt, and there were sacrifices to be made and dealt with. And then…Bella didn’t have to make the choice. Circumstance neatly made it for her. No one got hurt; everyone got what they wanted; happily ever after. I think that’s what has caused the fan backlash. Yes, we all wanted a happy ending, one with hope, but what does happily ever after mean if it hasn’t been fought for? Happily ever after is only satisfying when there’s been work and even pain involved, when the characters have been active in achieving it, when they’ve had to strive, not when it’s been handed to them. (Um, Bella had her backbone actually broken, and then healed by Edward. Metaphor, anyone?)

Another point to consider is whether Breaking Dawn is still a teen book. I think it may have crossed the line into adult. Sure, sure, Bella is still a teenager, but her concerns are no longer a teen’s concerns. Teens are questing–they’re trying to find their places in the world, and make choices, and are going. In Breaking Dawn, Bella’s found her place, and is settled. So, unfortunately, I think that many teens just couldn’t relate to her as strongly anymore.

In the end, this is Stephenie Meyer’s story, though, and she had to write the one she wanted to write. And now that it’s out in the world, readers can decide for themselves whether or not they want to accept it in the way they’ve accepted the previous three. That’s one of the great things about art–we don’t have to like everything, but there are readers (or listeners or viewers) for everything.

For more, here are some of the eloquent, sometimes snarky, and sometimes very funny articles and blog posts about Breaking Dawn that I’ve enjoyed:

Gail Gauthier’s blog
Washington Post Article
Salon Article
An amazing (but quite long), snarky play-by-play of the BD reading experience

It started off with an amazing visual image of fireflies in Thailand that end up blinking together rather than randomly. Besides “firefly” being one of my favorite words, it also reminded me of the end of Criss Cross, which always warms my heart and makes me feel better about the world.

Someone opened the jar. The lightning bugs knew what to do. They flew out into the night air, every last one. Blinking, “Here I am.”

But besides that, the idea of emergence struck me as one that applied to revising. They talked about how you can’t take one ant out of the ant society and have it work, or how you can’t take one neuron out of the brain and have it contain a whole thought. It’s all in how every ant or every neuron works together. A manuscript is made of individual sentences, but they can’t function alone. A really great revision won’t simply pull out a problem in an individual sentence and fix that, but will see how that sentence fits into the whole, how all of it comes together to form a complex and working story.

There’s a lot about the topic that’s intriguing, but what I’ve taken away is the question of why people can fall for this sort of thing again and again. After conversation with a psychologist Robert Krulwich said:

“People are suckers for stories; we just cannot help ourselves. . . . The thing is we do go in, we all fall into these stories, he says, it’s just the way we are built. For hundreds of thousands of years, our memories, our friendships, our sense of family, our kinship, we build our identities form stories. Stories that we tell, and stories that we hear.”

We seem to be built to believe in things. Because it’s hopeful. Because who wants to go around not believing? Even if it’s believing in small things, not big ones. We’ll fall for things because we learn so much from the stories that saturate our lives, perhaps. Stories show us that there’s always something to believe in.