Category: Reading

SuperBookworms and Reading Challenges

I wrote about my discovery of SuperBookworms at the end of 2007.  I was in awe of Eva who read over 200 books that year.  Well, this year she’s read over 400!  And she’s not just reading little escapist genre novels, but mostly a diet of big meaty literary books, and she follows up her reading by writing long elegant and educational reviews.  If you love to read you will find Eva’s blog a total inspiration.  Eva is part of an Internet sub-culture of online bookworm bloggers.  These people love books and reading, and they inspire each other to read more by proposing reading challenges.  A reading challenge works to get people to read a certain type of book, or a certain number of books.  Here are some examples of 2010 reading challenges:

There’s even a blog about reading challenges, A Novel Challenge.  Each of these sites will set up the rules for the challenge, and many of them will ask you to register – all this means is your name (real or imaginary) and blog URL gets added to a public list of people joining the challenge.  That way other people can go check what you’re reading.  You can link to your blog’s home page, or to a page created just for the challenge.  Most sites that host a challenge also create a challenge logo with link that you can place on your blog to help advertize the challenge.  Some challenges get 100-200 readers.

If you love discussing books, a reading challenge is merely an informal online book club.  There’s no real obligation.  It’s a great way to find new books and meet likeminded bookworms.  And some of these bookworms are super bookworms, which I’ve define as bookworms who read over a hundred books a year.  I’ve never found anyone who has read as much as Eva read this year, but it’s not uncommon to find readers who read 100-200 books a year, and pretty easy to find a handful of readers who read more than 200 books in a year.  I once read 478 books in 18 months, but I was a college dropout at the time, avoiding work, and they were mostly little science fiction paperbacks. 

I’m lucky to finish 40-50 books a year.  I aim for 52 a year, or one book a week, but in recent years I haven’t even made that goal.  I don’t think my mind could handle 400+ books like Eva reads – that’s just too much for me to think about.  Eva has health problems and reading is a relief for her, but her mind is far sharper than mine, and can digest and process vast quantities of words.  I can’t, even though I wish I could.  I mentally move like a sloth compared to Eva’s hummingbird speed thinking.  I would love to read and review more books but there are physical limits for everyone, and I’ve long discovered my limits.

Because of my reading limitations, I’ve decided to improve my bookworm life from another angle of attack.  I want to read fewer books, but find intensely great books to read.  I have three reading goals for 2010.  First I want to read 10-12 books published in 2010, and hopeful find books that will be on the best of the year lists at the end of 2010.  Second, I want to read another 10-12 classics that are memorable across the ages.  Finally, I want to read 10-12 books off my bookshelf – I have hundreds of unread books that I couldn’t wait to read them when I bought them, but have been neglected ever since.

I was very disappointed in my 2009 year of reading. I want to make 2010 a standout year.  Since 2002, I felt I’ve been going through a reading renaissance, but things got stale last year.  This past decade was the most exciting time for reading since I became a bookworm in my youth.  Reading excitement fell off after my early college years, and it wasn’t until I discovered audiobooks in 2002 that reading got exciting again like it had been in my teen years.  I don’t want to lose that thrill, but I think it will take concentrated work.

What’s really sad is I have so many great books on my bookshelves going unread.  I took five minutes and grabbed all the books that made my heart ache that I didn’t read this year.  I should give these top considerations for 2010.  I could have grabbed ten times more.  I’ve got to stop buying books if I can’t find the time to read them.  Here is my personal reading challenge – finish 10 of these books before I write my reading roundup one year from now:

  1. The Book Nobody Read: In Pursuit of the Revolutions of Nicholas Copernicus – Owen Gingerich
  2. The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism – Ross King
  3. H. G.: The History of Mr. Wells – Michael Foot
  4. The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World – Jenny Uglow
  5. A Long Fatal Love Chase – Louisa May Alcott
  6. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature – Steven Pinker
  7. Emotional Intelligence:  Why it Can Matter More than IQ – Daniel Goleman
  8. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Society – Jared Diamond
  9. Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe – Simon Singh
  10. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
  11. Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions – Lisa Randall
  12. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature – Erich Auerbach
  13. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe – Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee
  14. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science – Richard Holmes
  15. Stories of your Life and Others – Ted Chiang
  16. The Axemaker’s Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture – James Burke and Robert Ornstein
  17. Body and Soul: The Making of American Modernism: Art, Music and Literature in the Jazz Age 1919-1926 – Robert M. Crunden

If I finish any of these books, I’ll write a review and make a link of the title.  Just creating this personal challenge makes me feel excited about 2010.

JWH – 1/1/10

2009 Year in Reading

Reviewing the books I read in 2009 is very psychologically revealing, and disappointing in many ways.  I had a richer reading year in 2008.

Favorite Fiction:

  1. The Naked Sun – Isaac Asimov
  2. The Time Machine – H. G. Wells
  3. Orphans in the Sky – Robert A. Heinlein
  4. Dracula – Bram Stoker

Favorite Non-Fiction:

  1. The First Three Minutes – Stephen Weinberg
  2. Why Women Have Sex – Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss
  3. The Evolution of God – Robert Wright
  4. The Beatles – Bob Spitz

The Whole List:

  1. Farnham’s Freehold – Robert A. Heinlein (3rd time)
  2. Hyperion – Dan Simmons (2nd time)
  3. From Here to Eternity – Modern Scholar audiobook about science fiction
  4. Bellwether – Connie Willis (2nd time)
  5. The Green Hills of Earth – Robert A. Heinlein (2nd time)
  6. The Naked Sun – Isaac Asimov (2nd time)
  7. Roadmarks – Roger Zelazny
  8. More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon (2nd time)
  9. The Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri
  10. The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
  11. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – Michael Chabon
  12. The Byrds (4th edition) – Johnny Rogan
  13. The Canon – Natalie Angier
  14. Dune – Frank Herbert (2nd time)
  15. Bet Me – Jennifer Cruise
  16. Variable Star – Robert A. Heinlein (2nd time)
  17. To Your Scattered Bodies Go – Philip Jose Farmer (2nd time)
  18. The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut (2nd time)
  19. The Time Machine – H. G. Wells (3rd time)
  20. The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells (2nd time)
  21. The Fall of Hyperion – Dan Simmons
  22. The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time – Will Durant
  23. Persuasion – Jane Austin
  24. Mayflower – Nathaniel Philbrick
  25. The First Three Minutes – Stephen Weinberg
  26. Dracula – Bram Stoker
  27. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
  28. The Very First Light – John C. Mather & John Boslough
  29. The Beatles – Bob Spitz (abridged audio)
  30. The Year’s Ten Top Tales of SF – ed. Allan Kaster
  31. Replay – Ken Grimwood (3rd time)
  32. The Evolution of God – Robert Wright
  33. The Black Swan – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  34. Ringworld – Larry Niven (2nd time)
  35. Magnificent Desolation – Buzz Aldrin
  36. The Good Solder – Ford Maddox Ford
  37. Orphans of the Sky – Robert A. Heinlein (3rd time)
  38. The Man Who Was Thursday – G. K. Chesterton
  39. Flood – Stephen Baxter
  40. Why Women Have Sex – Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss

It’s pretty obvious this year I’m reliving my reading past.  I’m in two online book clubs devoted to classic science fiction and that’s dominating my selection of books.  My favorite science fiction book of the year in terms of pure entertainment was The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov.  Dune was very impressive, a true masterpiece, but I didn’t connect with it emotionally.  On the other hand I was dazzled by the imaginative speculation in Orphans of the Sky.  Most of the other SF books were page turning fun, but ultimately not that innovative. 

Overall, my reevaluation of classic science fiction has been disappointing.  Even on the online book clubs, enthusiasm for old SF books isn’t that high, we mostly love this stuff for nostalgic reasons.  I grew up thinking science fiction was genius thinking, but it’s not. Science fiction is fun, full of wild ideas, but ultimately, it’s superficial philosophically and contains very little scientific insights.  Few science fiction stories are as brilliant as The Time Machine, most are closer to The War of the Worlds.  The absolute best science fiction, like Orphans of the Sky and Dune, stand out for imagining unique concepts, while other great science fiction novels are merely good examples of story telling. 

Two science books, The First Three Minutes and The Very First Light, and are about the discovery of the cosmic background radiation and were my most mind expanding reads this year in terms of understanding reality.  The Canon was a great overview of science history, with an abundant of fascinating details.  I highly recommend it to people wanting a quick study of science.

In terms of religious philosophy and history, The Evolution of God was quite educational and rewarding.  Again expanding my knowledge of reality significantly.  I’ve been slowly reading the Bible and The Evolution of God makes a great supplement.

The two music biographies, The Byrds and The Beatles, were fantastic reads and terrific strolls down memory lane.  I could only get the abridged version of The Beatles on audio, but I have bought the fat hardback and I’m looking forward to reading it.  However, reading these two books only reinforces my looking backwards towards the 1960s.

The lesson I’m learning from writing this post is I need to make 2010 the year of living in the present.  I’ve already started that by playing contemporary music on Lala.com.  Musically, the huge gravity well of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s holds me inside an event horizon and I have struggle to see the light of modern music. 

The past is obviously a black hole pulling me into it – and I realize I need to fight its powerful pull.  I desperately need to blast out of the orbit of looking backwards if I want to keep my mind expanding.  I will never be young again, and I worry that nostalgia is a kind of premature burial.  I do believe I stay current with computers and the Internet, at least more so than my age group peers.  I’m also in touch with the current pop culture of movies and television.  And I watch a lot of news and documentary shows, and I consume vast quantities of wordage from the Internet.

I find my reading year more exciting and fulfilling when I read new novels and books.  The only 2009 books I read in 2009 were The Evolution of God, Why Women Have Sex and Magnificent Desolation.  I’d like to read at least 12-15 2010 books in 2010.

JWH – 12/31/9

Readability

Most people hate reading on a computer screen, but many of those people also spend hours reading online, so what’s the solution?  Try Readability.  I was reading an interview with John Joseph Adams, an editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a guy who has to do A LOT of reading, and he mentioned he liked to read submissions on his Mac with a utility called Tofu.  I immediately jumped over to the Tofu site to discover there wasn’t a Windows version.  Bummer!  I even jumped over to the Apple Store to price a Mac, but quickly abandoned that bright idea when I was slapped hard by sticker shock.  Necessity being the mother of Googling, I made several attempts to find the right search phrase until I found Readability.  [Note to Tofu people – naming your product with the same name as common food is a poor marketing decision.]

I have no idea how Readability works, but it’s magic.  Go to their site, play around with the controls to find a reading style you like, and then right-click the Readability button and select add to Favorites.  (I’m using IE, so it will be slightly different for other browsers.)  Then go to a web page you want to read that’s not very eye friendly readable, select Readability from your Favorites, and Presto-Chango the page is Harry Potterly reformatted for easy reading.

Readability doesn’t work with every web page, nor does it retain all the page features you may want to see – it will filter out videos, but it gets the feature photos while somehow filtering out the ad graphics.  So if you visit a web page that looks like a hood of a racing car covered with ads, this little gem of a utility will clean up your view.

Readability works best on pages with long articles and not pages with lots of reading snippets.  Readability makes most web pages into large print book reading.  Most web designers must be 19 year old kids with better than 20-20 vision who work on giant Macintosh monitors who never imagine people will come to their web pages wanting to read that bland annoying text stuff that clutters up their beautiful graphical layouts.

Often when reading web essays with tiny text, where the layout locks out my browser’s ability to enlarge the font, I’ll cut and paste the text into Word just so I could read it.  Readability automatically does that now.  Readability is like having a Kindle for blog pages where you can easily set up your default reading style so everything you buy to read is formatted for your personal reading pleasure.

Web browser programmers should program this concept into every browser, rather than replying on the Text size feature, which is often disappointing to use.

Very cool.  So cool I added Readability to my Favorites Bar in IE.  Now when I’m on a web page which I want to spend some time reading, I click the Readability button and Shazam, the page becomes easy to read.  Unfortunately, Readability doesn’t work like Tofu with computer documents, so I still want to find an app for Windows that does that.  If you know of one, let me know.

JWH – 12/5/9

Ringworld in Oz

When I was a dumbass kid of 10 I acquired a reading addiction by discovering the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.  When I was a dumbass kid of nineteen, I dropped out of college for the first time and bought the fourteen Oz books and reread them.  At nineteen I felt like a grownup and wondered if rereading my favorite kid’s books would tell me something about how I was programmed.  Between 10 and 19 I read whole libraries of science fiction books, and rereading the Oz books taught me that science fiction was often just Oz books for adults. 

It was around this time, 1970, that I read Ringworld by Larry Niven for the first time.  Now, almost forty years later, I’ve come back to Ringworld again, like my return to Oz.  The whole time while listening to Ringworld on my Zune I kept thinking that Larry Niven had practically copied the structure and sense of wonder of an Oz book.  Now, this can be seen as both praise or a curse.  Oz books are like giving rug rats wordy psychedelics – the stories are so goddamn vivid that they put their tiny tyke imaginations into an overdrive that no Ritalin could ever break.  I also think these books produce unrealistic expectations about reality.  Yeah, I know, I sound a Puritan.

Our society underestimates the power of children’s minds.  From an early age we have a desperate need to make sense of reality, and almost any input can be shaped into a belief system.  I loved being a kid shooting up stories, but now that I’m older and examining some of my most ancient subroutines from my mental programming code, I have to wonder about the dangers of children’s books.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to campaign against giving kids fantastic fiction, but I want to explore the idea of fantastic fiction on evolving minds.  

I once read a shocking article in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction about how libraries banned the Oz books.  I’d love to find that article again, because librarians believed the Oz books gave children unrealistic ideas about life.  At that time, I felt their protests were complete bullshit.  Banning the Oz books didn’t work, because writers like Robert A. Heinlein, who also grew up reading Oz books, went on to write even more books that gave kids unrealistic expectations about life.  Fantasy and science fiction have become universal fictional addictions in our modern society.  Does anyone worry about that?

Rereading Ringworld, I noticed it had the same structure as an Oz book.  Oz books would introduce a handful of weird characters, quickly get them on a quest, and along their journey these characters would experience mind-blowing sights and meet far-out magical creatures.  Then when enough pages were filled to equal a book, the story would be wrapped up.  Oz books had little character development, and practically no rising plot action, definitely no climax or falling action, and very minimal resolution. 

The Ringworld of Niven’s novel is his Oz, a magical place equal in scope to the Land of Oz.  Like Oz, Niven barely scratched the surface of the Ringworld, leaving room for endless sequels.  Nessus, the Pierson’s Puppeteer and the Kzinti, Speaker to Animals, are as colorful as any magical Oz character created by L. Frank Baum.  Children reading the Oz books starting with the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in the year 1900, through Glinda of Oz in 1920, wanted to believe that Oz existed.  I know in 1962 when I discovered the books I somehow wanted Oz to exist.  I knew it didn’t, but wished it did.  If I had found these books sooner, when I was seven or eight, I might not have been able to tell Oz from reality.

By age eleven I switched from fantasy books to science fiction, and even though I knew science fiction was also make-believe, I developed a life-long belief system based on science fictional ideas.  Rereading Ringworld only reminded me that believing in science fiction is no different from a kid of ten believing in the Land of Oz.  All fiction is fantasy.  Even realistic books like those by Edith Wharton or James Joyce, still only produce fantasies of life in 19th century New York, or early 20th century Ireland, no more real than Oz or Ringworld.

Like I said, I have no intention of giving up fiction, it’s the vice that defines me, and an army of deprogrammers could never make a dent in my delusional addiction.  When I’m alert and concentrating, I can face reality directly.  I know my life would be more real if I spent my time hiking in the mountains, woodworking, or studying astronomy – or just washing dishes and changing the cat box.  I’ve always felt sorry for Christians who hated this world and dreamed of Heaven, but is dreaming of Paradise any different from dreaming of Oz or Ringworld? 

I guess those librarians who wanted to ban Oz books were right.  I can see I used fiction as a drug to avoid life and living in reality.  I understand that, and accept it, but it doesn’t invalidate that I love fiction more than reality.

If I had never gotten hooked on fiction would I have been a better person?  Would I have been disciplined and realistic?  Would I have been hard working and productive?  Gee, I don’t know, maybe if I was lucky.  There are billions of people living with their faces shoved into reality that have no happiness or escape, so I can’t complain about my fiction habit, because my life could suck and I might never have discovered the magic of make believe.

All I know at the moment, is tonight I want to read my paperback copy of Cosmic Engineers by Clifford Simak or go watch Heroes or Firefly on DVD and eat Phish Food ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s and Fresh Market chocolate chip cookies.  I could do something real, I just choose not to.

JWH – 10/27/09

This essay was written fueled by playing “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show thirty or forty times.  Music, the other addiction.  Be sure and read “The Man Who Made Oz” over at Slate.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Dracula by Bram Stoker amazed me by how thoroughly Christian it portrays it’s 19th century worldview.  Published in 1897, this late Victorian novel doesn’t proselytize, but accepts Christianity like the rising of the Son.  Dracula is about a creature of the darkness invading the world of the light.  More than that, Dracula is about a royal citizen from the land of superstition making a beachhead on the Mecca of Modernity, London.   Dracula is about evil attacking the divine, which is very strange when when you compare this most famous of all vampires to contemporary vamps of the big and little screen. 

Dracula presents a scared world, whereas True Blood and Twilight represent secular vampirism.  How did our pop culture go from women pleading for their hearts to be staked,  their heads to be cut off, and their mouths crammed with garlic, if they were kissed by the vampire, to our modern times where virginal tweens willing dream of letting blood sucking monsters pop their cherry, but only if he’s really really really cute, dresses fabulously, and loves to cuddle.  Talk about living in Bizarro World.

Now, let me set up my definition of evil and divine.  Evil has become a debased word in our language.  For example, we might hear a kid whine, “That’s just evil,” when told he must turn off the TV and do his homework.  Most grownups would use Hitler as their prime example of real evil, but even for that example I will disagree.  I see the word evil coming with a more precise definition.  To be upfront, I’m an atheist, so any discussion of religion by me is from an outside observer.

My definition of evil, is any action that’s under the influence of Satan, whereas the divine, is any action inspired by God.  Modern grammarians will knock my prescriptive definition over more mundane descriptive grammar.  Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a novel with easy metaphors.  Light shines from God, dark is Satan blocking the light.  Vampires are agents of evil, stealing souls from the forces of goodness.

I plead with my readers to read the history of vampires at Wikipedia.  I was totally shocked by examples of vampirism showing up in all the cultures of history.  Superstition has dominated thinking for most of homo sapiens time roaming this Earth.  Vampires and similar scary ghoulish characters are deeply rooted in all our folklore, and its very shocking how crazed our ancestors became over common fears. 

Count Dracula is just the most famous vampire in Western pop culture, where Bram Stoker hit a vein of subconscious literary gold.  Dracula is not the first novel about vampires, but Bram Stoker has invented such a successful fictional character, Count Dracula, whose fame is on the order of Sherlock Holmes (1887) and Tarzan (1912), the true eminent Victorians.  Stoker may have used Vlad the Impaler as inspiration for his character Count Dracula, but he is mostly a fantastic fictional invention.

I’ve always avoided reading Dracula because I expected it to be as hokey as the Béla Lugosi films, so I was greatly surprised by how literate and well-written this epistolary novel is compared to all the cheesy films it has inspired.  By using letters, telegrams, diaries, phonograph cylinders, newspaper clippings, etc., Stoker gives an immediacy to his story that the standard third person narrative would have lacked, and was still too confining to express in the standard first person tale.  The novel is full of rich details, especially about living and travel in Europe in the late 1800s.  The story progresses slowly, relying on a slow buildup of horror, with little direct stage time for Count Dracula himself.  This works very effectively to showcase life in 1897, when news traveled very slowly, and generally came by word of mouth or newspapers.

I claim Dracula is a Christian novel because its worldly philosophy is based on the British viewpoint at the peak of its empire, with it’s stout, stiff-upper lip embrace of Jesus, scientific progress and world conquest.  Abraham Van Helsing, a Dutchman, is the real hero of this novel, but he’s not the action hero of the Hugh Jackman film Van Helsing.  He’s an older doctor and lawyer, wise man of science, and early X-Files philosopher, who is deeply religious and accepting of the Christian faith.  Makes no bones about it, Count Dracula is an invader of England and the divinely backed civilization of Christ.

Dracula is an intimate novel, with Van Helsing, the prototype for Rupert Giles I’m sure, as Watcher, leading his merry band of vampire slayers, who must keep their war secret because they know few people can accept the truth about the undead, and nothing they can ever say will be believed, and all their actions will be considered law breaking and criminal.

Out on the border between darkness and light, Count Dracula lives in remote Transylvania, where the medieval mind still dominates the peasant population.  The story begins with Jonathan Harker’s long trip to Dracula’s castle, that chronicles moving backwards in time as he leaves the civilization of the west, heading east, via devolving forms of transportation.  The descriptions of his travels are rich with details, making me think Stoker had made the trip himself.

The story involves two women, Mina and Lucy, and five men, Harker, Seward, Morris, Holmwood and Van Helsing, and takes a leisurely time to unfold.  Each get to tell their story in first person through the trick of the epistolary novel.  This could be confusing with so many characters, but I listened to a version of the novel narrated by John Lee, which was fantastic in its presentation, making quite clear the identity of each narrator.  This novel is well worth the trouble of listening to slowly, in a good audio book edition. 

I especially loved the character of Quincey Morris, a laconic Texan that greatly reminded me of another American cowboy, Lee Scoresby, also inhabiting a British fantasy novel, set in the 19th century, The Golden Compass, and played by Sam Elliot in the film, who has lassoed and hogtied many a laconic Texan role, even to the point of satire, as in The Big Lebowski.  Quincey Morris is a young Lee Scoresby in Dracula, and one of Lucy’s three suitors.

Psychiatry even plays a roll in Dracula, with John Seward, a head of an insane asylum that contains yet another fascinating character in the novel, R. M. Reinfield, whose mind swings between vivid sanity and raving madness.  It’s a shame his story couldn’t have been in on the round-robin of first person narratives.  Reinfield’s madness and Mina’s hypnosis induced telepathy, is used by Stoker in a creative way to drive the plot forward, beyond the standard letter and diary knowledge.  For its time, Dracula is a very creative novel, that remains fresh and powerful in its narrative techniques.

Dracula represents an entire spectrum of communication, from God’s divine will, to the woo-woo world of ESP and the scientific telegraph, to shadowy unconscious minds sending up clues to the conscious minds of our heroes to decipher, while Satan commands his legions of undead with his will of evil whispering out of the darkness.  And here is where we define evil, where dark and light fight for the soul of humans, by claiming evil is the force that chaos uses to conquer order, and the divine is that force that civilizes.  This definition should work for my spiritual friends, as well as me and my secular unbelieving pals.

Dracula is an agent of the devil, so, why do our modern vampire scribes like Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer secularize the vampire, exorcising its true evil nature?  Women often lust for the bad boys of society, and these women writers are making alpha vamps the sexiest of the stereotype.  Why is that?  Maybe women no longer want cavemen, Conan the Barbarian types, but prefer the better dressed, well-mannered vampire, with his suave sophisticated ways.  Or, is the enticing appeal of vampires, their power to give everlasting youth, something all women would sell their souls to get?  But something weird is happening.  Women have switched from wanting Van Helsing and Quincey Morris as males to swoon over, to wanting their fictional dream dates to be Edward Cullen and Bill Compton.

Sookie Stackhouse and her lady friends of Bon Temps, Louisiana, would be considered vamp tramps in Bram Stoker’s time.  If you want to know the philosophical difference from 1897 and 2009, read Dracula and then watch True Blood on HBO.  If we could send Victorian readers a television set and DVR loaded HBO’s True Blood and Deadwood and ShowTime’s Dexter, they would all believe that Van Helsing lost the battle in Dracula, and Count Dracula succeeded in his invasion of the British Isles and eventually conquered the Western world.

And don’t you find it rather ironic that an atheist is pointing out that popular modern entertainment represents the success of 19th century evil over the providence of the divine?  In the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mysteries, the Christians are seen as the bad guys, and portrayed as buffoons impassioned by gun love, but ignored sexually and made cuckolds by lusty wives tempted by bad boys.

I love watching True Blood and Dexter, but then I’m an unbeliever.  It’s what my conservative friends expect of a yellow-dog, scum sucking, NY Times reading, liberal.   What I’m wondering is why all those hordes of Twilight fans, those young girls and their clean-cut moms, women who wouldn’t unzip their jeans for nice boys, and bitch at any bad boy they met, have fallen madly in love with the pretty vampire.  When I grew up, the only good vampire was a staked vampire.  I was taught it was perfectly ethical, even heroic, to kill vamps and Nazis, neither of which had souls.  Now Spike, the Vampire, will go to the ends of the Earth to find a soul and gain the love of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer.  We certainly live in topsy-turvy times.

But let’s get serious here.  What is really happening?  Are secular vampires really a product of liberal thought, where every frail human action must be forgiven and understood?  Charlaine Harris presents her vampires seeking civil rights, and compares them to gays coming out of the closet.  But is this going too far, isn’t civilizing vampires wrong?  Isn’t it unjust to compare civil rights and gays to savage killers?   Why does popular culture now romance the evil?  Dexter wins sympathetic feelings for serial killers, so should we expect a lovable but loopy child molester in some future premium channel drama that will warm our hearts?  If we could see ourselves from some outside pop culture viewpoint, would we look like skinheads embracing a warm and fuzzy Hitler?

Or is it just good clean fun, like when we let our tykes play with Grand Theft Auto.  Personally, I wonder if it is wrong, either ethically, or morally, to have the entertainment appetite of a Roman at the Coliseum.  Or can I justify my entertainment tastes by rationalizing that it explores the edges of social reality?  Dracula is good clean fiction, but what has Bram Stoker planted in Victorian times, that has flowered in our modern world, causing us to love the vampire?  Actually, I don’t love the vampire, and still want to see them dusted, so maybe I just jealous of Bill, Edward and Eric. 

This leads to the next level of psychology of vampire stories, the one below good and evil.  Something is happening here, and I don’t know what it is, but I’m thinking it has to do with the changing roles of women in society.  Bram Stoker started it by giving Mina and Lucy, equal time with men, and equal bravery, showing that Count Dracula only converts women to his way of life.  Why are the leading writers of modern vampire stories, Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer, all women?  What would Sigmund Freud make of all of this?

Does the acceptance of vampires merely model the acceptance of male psychology by women?  Vampires are violent killers, but so are men.  Vampires enslave the souls of women, but so do men.  And if biting throats are equated with sexual intercourse, vampires and men both seek to penetrate the female body.  Maybe Harris and Meyers just want tame the savage beast, dress him in romantic garb, polish his behavior and put his lustful appetite on a diet.  If this is true, then the trend of accepting modern vampires is merely women recognizing how far they have to go to get guys to dress GQ and stop our killing ways.

Up till now vampire stories have always been Christian stories because the standard issued weapons to fight vampires were the cross, host and holy water.  Vampire fiction in recent centuries are metaphors for the Catholic Church supplanting the ancient religions and superstitions.  Charlaine Harris’ vampire world has regressed to a pre-Christian pagan worldview in direct conflict with Christians.  Does that mean she’s a witch?  But then her vamps only fight Protestants. 

Contemporary revamp vamps represent a loss of Vatican power.  Is it any wonder Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris stories are set in Louisana, a former Catholic stronghold?  But as the power of God grows fainter, so does the power of Satan.  Vampire Edward is downright prissy compared to Count Dracula.  If this trend continues, the bottle blood drinking vamps of today will be supplanted by even wimpier vamps in the future.  Without God there is no Evil, leaving a reality of random dangers fought by the force of evolution to produce order.  Vampires are supernatural creatures, and if our secular world erases all belief in the supernatural, what happens to vampires?

In other words, atheism kills vampires just like Holy Water.

JWH – 7/20/9