Kudos to MTV for all of their coverage of the Twilight movie thus far, and for posting the very first official promo video from Summit. This is by far the best thing I’ve ever seen.

 

If I’d never heard of Twilight I think I would want to see the movie based on that video. There’s fighting and evil and love and superhuman strength and blood and more love and baseball. Basically everything you need for a good story.

So, I saw The Virgin Suicides pretty nearly when it first came out. I hated it.

Flash foreward a few years, I see the book at Half Price Books. I purchase it for a few reasons. 1, everyone I’ve ever know that has read it has loved it. 2, the book generally is better than the movie. 3, I was 15 or so when I saw the movie…maybe the brilliance just went over my head or something. 4, Jeffrey Eugenides did go on to win a Pulitzer. And 5, it was on clearance for one dollar.

I have to tell you, I’m bored to tears. I was hanging in there until around the 5th page of drivel about Trip Fontaine.
I want to keep reading because I just keep thinking it has to get better. Surely, something will happen soon. But I don’t have precious pleasure reading time to waste on stupid books. So I need some advice. Continue reading, or toss it? Surely some random person who has read this book will happen upon this page, and when you do, Random Stranger….please weigh in on my dilemma.

Yesterday I was able to look at pictures of the Twilight movie set. (Lexicon.)

I’ve now officially seen Bella’s truck, Charlie’s police cruiser, Carlisle’s Mercedes, Emmet’s Jeep, Edward’s Volvo (I peed a little), Forks High, and the baseball diamond. I’m so excited. It’s just as exciting as if they were actual characters just cast. I’m particularly excited about the baseball diamond because to me it looks perfectly as I imagined it.

Then today I did something I almost never do. I was on such a high from the pictures yesterday that when I saw a clip of the filming, I couldn’t resist clicking on it. It’s a kind of far away angle, but it’s of the scene directly after the crash. So I’ve now officially seen Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen. (Holy smokes.) But it raised one question, which I’ll cut in case someone doesn’t want to know anything that might be spoilery.

Okay, in this clip, after the accident, Edward runs away. Now he looks mighty fine doing it, hopping up on the truck and all, but this is not how it happened. I tried to dismiss this and not be too picky, but it’s just that the fact that he stays with Bella after the accident is a very big deal. Well, not that in itself, but one of the main reasons he begins to trust her is that she keeps her promise to not tell anyone that he went all Superman on her. (Or Spiderman I guess, which at this point was her theory.) If in the movie he runs away before the crowd gathers, and no one sees him there, as it looks in this clip…well, that’s not going to work. If no one asks Bella how the heck he got there so fast, she has no promise to keep to him, and thus he, no reason to trust her. And if they cut the entire scene of her making this promise I may be angry. I’m not worried yet, I’m just…curious.

This just may be the greatest thing I’ve seen in a while. Top 10 books (via Facebook stats) for each of over 1,000 universities, correlated with that university’s average SAT scores (via Collegeboard), weighted by number of undergraduates at that university. Brilliant.

I went to a lecture with Jeannette Walls tonight. She was so hilarious and insightful. She took questions at the end, which was great. She was also very genuine and kind enough to stay two hours after the lecture to make sure every single person got their book signed.

I also got some videos that were pretty funny, but those will have to wait for another day.

Today (well, yesterday now, technically) Stephenie Meyer announced that Summit has officially signed director Catherine Hardwicke and writer Melissa Rosenberg for the Twilight movie. I have nothing to say about either of those two women except that Catherine Hardwicke wrote Thirteen, which I loved. However, Melissa Rosenberg wrote for the O.C. And we all know how I feel about The O.C. I’m excited, if a little apprehensive.

Class has started, and thus the ritual internet searching form of procrastinating.

 Which brings me to the good news. There is going to be a City of Ember movie! Yay!

Bill Murray has been cast as the mayor of Ember, and Tim Robbins has been cast as…well, it doesn’t say, but I like him. Lina and Doon are actors I don’t recognize, Saoirse Ronan and Harry Treadaway. But Saoirse Ronan was also recently cast as Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones, so I doubly hope she’s good.

I’m very excited.

I’ve spent the past two weeks as a hermit, reading vampire novels. I finally picked up Twilight, and much to my delight there is a sequal, called New Moon. So I’ve not spoken with anyone, basically, since two weeks ago when I bought Twilight and last night when I finished New Moon. I love when I do that.

What made me mention it here, though, is that I’ve also been listening to a lot of Jack’s Mannequin for the past couple weeks, particularly Bruised. And when all you do is read a book and its sequal and listen to the same song over and over again for two whole weeks you can’t help but connect the two, so I’ve been thinking of Bruised as the sort of theme song for the two main characters in the books. (I do that frequently, actually. I haven’t decided if that’s odd or not.) But it couldn’t fit more perfectly, particularly for book two. *coughs*Chapter 3*coughs*

So on to the interesting part. Well, interesting to me, anyway. Here I am, walking around like a zombie doing nothing but think of Bella and Edward and their Jack’s Mannequin anthem. And I stumbled upon the author’s myspace page tonight, and what’s the song she has on her page? Yes, folks, it’s Bruised, by Jack’s Mannequin.

Love it.

Hours pass and she still counts the minutes that I am not there. I swear I didn’t mean for it to feel like this, like every inch of me is bruised! Bruised!

And every word of every song that ever made me wanna stay is what’s playing through the in-flight radio!

10 days until book 3.

I’ve decided I’m going to spend the entire day at Starbucks tomorrow, curled up with a good book. I’m rather looking forward to it. I have not decided what I will be reading yet.

I started Wicked a couple days ago. It seems interesting so far. I think I will like the way he writes. The first sentence of the prologue is really great.

A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the wind’s forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent wheeling away by the turbulant air.

I don’t know why, I just like that. She balanced on the wind’s forward edge.

I’ve been browsing around WordPress, and I stumbled across a few blogs about children’s books. You know how that excites me. One had separate lists of the most poetic, memorable, and funny passages in children’s literature, as submitted by the blog’s readers. It was really great.  One I especially liked, submitted in the most poetic category, was this one:

Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?…As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you, like a pressed flower… both strange and familiar.

It’s from a book called Inkspell, by Cornelia Funke. It’s currently checked out from our library.

Others I enjoyed and perhaps will check out their sources-

In the end, I’m just a girl on a sleeping bag in the middle of nowhere, at the starting line of every mistake she’ll ever make. -The Geography of Girlhood by Kirsten Smith

When the cool autumn winds would come puff-puffing through the clouds, and the hold-on-tight leaves would finally let go and float-flutter to the ground, we’d go out into the eye-blinking blue air with Mama leading in a leaf kicking

leg lifting

hand-clapping

hello autumn ballet.                                                                                                      -My Mama had a Dancing Heart by Libby Gray

…but when a house is empty, then it’s the house’s turn. It holds all the emptiness and all the fullness of all the years it has known, the footprints of all the people who have ever walked its rooms gather themselves. The air is expectant, waiting. Hushed. Hush. Listen to the house. What is it telling you?  – All Rivers Flow to the Sea by Alison McGhee

I got the Buffy comic today. I’ve decided I’m not good at reading comic books. I have a bad habit of skimming when I read.  Usually if I see dialogue coming up I’ll skip to it, or if there’s a particularly long-winded passage of description I’ll skim over it. It’s not that I’m not interested, it’s just usually that I’m a little overly-excited. I’ve become quite skilled at doing this with books and still keeping track of what’s going on. This is a major problem with comic books because I tend to skip over boxes with no dialogue. And then I’m all distraught thinking “How did they get in there?!” and I look back and there’s a whole box devoted to her kicking in the door that I skipped over without even realizing it because there was no text. I need more practice.

I did really like the Buffy comic, though.  I’m sufficiently hooked on the story, and the cover art is particularly awesome. It made me giddy like a schoolgirl and I love things that do that. I told everyone I thought would care Happy Buffy day. Okay, and a few people who I knew wouldn’t. Because I wanted to. So there.