Another Admission...heh

Over my Christmas vacation, I took the opportunity to do some pleasure reading. In the week I had off, I read Stephenie Meyer's enormously popular Twilight series. Age-wise, I outpace the target demographic for these books by up to 20 years, but I, er, really liked them. I mean, I REALLY liked them. As is probably pretty clear to y'all by now, I'm KIND of a romantic. Lil bit. A well written love story is among my favorite things - it's the literary equivalent of a warm blanket on a cold day. I'm not particularly snobby about who writes the love story - some of my favorites are by Jane Austen, some technically fall into the romance category. As long as the story is well written and the characters are engaging and developed, I'm hooked. And Stephenie Meyer writes well, and her characters are so vividly imagined that it drew me in from page 1.

Once I tore threw that entire four book series in a matter of days, I decided to tackle her new novel, The Host. It's a very different book from the vampire series, but it shares a sensibility, in that the characters are people you want to root for, and the world she creates is so vividly imagined and told. I admire this quality - her imagination is a remarkable thing. It would be such a fun and satisfying thing, I think, to create an entire world in a novel, and then to create from thin air all the details of that world and its inhabitants. I started reading Meyer's work because I was kind of curious about what the fuss was all about. Suffice to say, I get it now. I don't say that in an effort to get people to read the books, because literature is so entirely subjective that there is never any guarantee that what appeals to me will appeal to other people, but when I find an author whose work I really enjoy, I am kind of compulsive in my need to share that with other people. Maybe it's the writer in me, that I understand the craving for people to read and enjoy what you're putting out there, but whatever it is, it's my instinct. And this lady is a good storyteller whose books I've thoroughly enjoyed.