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Yesterday, I had some good things to say about “Twilight” in that it didn’t have the heroine automatically having sex with her boyfriend.

But I’m not yet ready to go on a Stephanie Meyer love fest for one reason:

SPOILER ALERT

The fourth book in the series, Breaking Dawn.

Bella and Edward get married, Bella becomes pregnant, and she has a psychic bond with her baby. And then Jacob imprints on the baby (!?). And then Bella becomes a vampire and loses her humanity.

I’m not alone in my feelings. If you want to see some bottled vitriol, go over to Amazon and read some of the reviews. First three books: great. Fourth book? { shudder } That’s a quote.

So, we know that the series devolves into a glorification of teenaged motherhood with a perfect baby, and an adult werewolf who falls head-over-heels in love with the baby. Uh, no… and eww, gross.

Dear God. I thought the only people who pushed the idea of teenaged marriage and pregnancy as being perfectly wonderful, and grown men claiming women as babies, lived in countries where women don’t have any rights at all. Why is this in our bookstores as entertainment?

The book: Faefever. (The title will not make any sense until the end of the book.)

The author: Karen Marie Moning.

Third in the series, this book is really good. I have read the other two, and now I’m tapping my fingers impatiently to find out when the fourth book in the series comes out. I will be there!

Honestly, I don’t usually get sucked into a series, but this one is good. At 3am, I had to talk myself into going to sleep instead of staying up all night and finishing the book. You will not see the ending coming. If you try to guess right now what the ending will be, you will be wrong.

I highly recommend starting with the first book in the series, but you’ll be glad you did.

For fun: Go to Karen Moning’s website at http://www.karenmoning.com/

There, you will find:

1. A podcast of Darkfever, the first book. It looks like the entire book is there, so this is a good place to start.

2. An excerpt of Bloodfever, the second book.

3. The first three chapters of Faefever.

4. A game based on the series: http://www.macvshades.com/game/game.html If there’s a second level, I never got there, but I did try it.

5. A picture of the author in a really silly hat on her blog that makes perfect sense once you’ve read Faefever. Can you believe that hat could save a life? It does.

C’mon. How often do I recommend books on this blog? Almost never. You’ll enjoy this reading.

P.S. Someone on Karen Moning’s blog suggested that the main character was raped during the course of the story. No. It isn’t true. I know that because I’ve read the series. I will never recommend books with rape scenes. I will never write books with rape scenes. It’s a shame this topic came up because I’d hate the word to be associated with this wonderful series. These books are just great entertainment.

Michael Crichton has died unexpectedly of cancer at the age of 66.

Born in Chicago, Crichton had sold more than 150 million books. He also produced the TV show “ER”.

Jurassic Park remains one of the most extraordinary books ever written–and one I have read several times. Crichton’s ability to take a simple scientific idea and spin it not only into a fictional story, but into such an entertaining and accessible story is a serious accomplishment.

Crichton went to Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, which gave him the medical and science background that was the basis of his cautionary-tale type of story-telling, and while not everyone agrees with all of his beliefs (for example, his criticism of global warming), no once can deny that he made an extraordinary contribution to fiction.

Most people do not know that he also wrote under the names John Lange (from 1966-1972), and he won the 1969 Edgar Award for Best Novel for A Case of Need, which he wrote under the name Jeffery Hudson.

He raised the bar on science-based fiction, and added something to each of our lives. What could be a better legacy than that?

Stumble It!

Congratulations to Aravind Adiga who has won the 2008 Booker Prize for his novel The White Tiger. It is the story about a young man in India who is born into poverty and climbs his way out by various amoral and endearing means. (I have not yet read the novel, so I cannot comment on the storyline.)

While I am glad to see his success, books like this make my job in writing groups harder. You see, Mr. Adiga is the fourth novelist who has seen his debut novel win the Booker Prize. While I spend a great deal of time trying to encourage unpublished novelists, I also spend an incredible amount of time editing unpublished work that would be better off if the authors did things like… oh, let’s suggest that maybe authors should read books in their spare time, study grammar a little, and–please, oh please–work harder to create a narrative structure that isn’t self-indulgent.

Sorry. Was that my outside voice?

Previous winners of the Booker Prize include stories that you have certainly heard of, such as The Remains of the Day, and The English Patient.  Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt won, which was a very good novel that was made extraordinary by the letters in the middle of the book. And if I ran across writing of this caliber in writing groups, I would weep with joy. However, I don’t. I don’t find writing of this caliber in writing groups. I do find an inordinate number of characters who wallow in their misery, which is supposed to make the stories “deep”. I find plots that meander. I find descriptions that are meant to be poetic that destroy the flow of the story. Yikes.

So, congratulations to Mr. Adiga. But, note to aspiring authors: your vision will only work and take you to his level if you work on your craft a lot more than you (or anyone) will ever actually want to.

One other note: If you’re American, or anything other than a member of the Commonwealth or Ireland, forget about winning the Booker Prize. You can’t. This is very much a case of “Rule Brittania”.