How does hype affect how you approach a book? The last two books I’ve read have been ridiculously overexposed and analyzed half to death in the last month or so, probably not coincidentally because they were both made into movies that were released in December.<\/p>\n
Just before Christmas, I read most of John Grogan’s Marley and Me<\/em>, the sweet story of one family’s life with the world’s worst dog. My dad gave it to me, after a friend loaned it to him. He has personal experience with the world’s worst dog, which is really a post for another day, but let me say this: at least Marley never ate anybody’s dentures. Twice. <\/p>\n Anyway, the book: I read it, but I didn’t get sucked into it. It took me more than six weeks to get through it, because I kept picking it up and putting it down again. I felt like I had <\/em>to read it, partly because my dad had given it to me and my dad has never recommended a book to me before, but partly because it’s a story about a big yeller dog and my heart has endless space in it for big yeller dogs, especially ones with a mischievous streak.<\/p>\n I laughed out loud a few times, especially in the parts that brought me back to the days of wrangling my own impossibly stubborn golden-shepherd mix pest (who, by the way, turned into the world’s best doggie), but I didn’t cry once. That may have been, though, because I saw where the book was going about two chapters from the end and decided to bail. When you have a 10 year old dog that you love beyond words in your life, you don’t need to read about the demise of other people’s dogs no matter what kind of happy ending they try to wrap it up in. In the end, it was a nice book and I enjoyed the stories, but I really didn’t see why everybody was so gaga over it. It just didn’t catch me, yanno?<\/p>\n By contrast, I have been righteously hooked by Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight <\/em>saga. Oh my good lord, how I am hooked. I can barely stand to take these rare minutes of calm quiet nap time to write this out, when I could be reading to find out what happens next to Bella and Edward and the rest of them. I’m halfway through the third book now, and after racing through the books to this point, I find I’m trying to slow down, knowing there’s only one book after this one and then I’ll be done. Whatever will I do then?<\/p>\n I’d asked for the books for Christmas, after waiting nearly two months to move from 600th to 350th in the public library queue for the first book alone. I wasn’t even sure, to be honest, that I’d like the books, but I’d heard enough from those whose taste I truly admire to think that maybe I’d enjoy them. Besides, even if they were a little too teeny-bopper sacchariney, as I feared they might be, I’ve always been a fan of a good vampire tale. Interview with the Vampire<\/em> and Queen of the Damned<\/em> are still among my favourite books of all time.<\/p>\n Now that I think of it, I think I’ll post my review of the Twilight <\/em>books under a separate post. This one is long enough, methinks! But for now, I’m curious about the “Oprah effect” and how it affects your enjoyment of a book. I think I would have enjoyed Marley and Me<\/em> a little bit more if I’d just stumbled randomly upon it, rather than having it saturated through popular culture. And yet, although the hype about the Twilight <\/em>books is no less ubiquitous, I’m completely and utterly drawn in. I can’t even say that they’re more finely crafted. I expected to enjoy them, but I didn’t expect to want to put my life on hold until I finished them!<\/p>\n What do you think? Do you find that the “Oprah’s Book Club” stamp on a book is the thing that draws you in, or (like me) the thing that makes you say, “No thanks.” Do reviews and the recommendations of friends enhance or take away from your enjoyment of a book?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How does hype affect how you approach a book? The last two books I’ve read have been ridiculously overexposed and analyzed half to death in the last month or so, probably not coincidentally because they were both made into movies that were released in December. Just before Christmas, I read most of John Grogan’s Marley … Continue reading “On bad dogs and vampires: or, how hype influences your reading life”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}