Annie Clements Music

Disgruntled Best-Selling Fiction Reader…

Posted on 06. May, 2010 by annie in Notebook, Uncategorized

I couldn’t sleep last night. I tossed and turned in my bunk until well past 5 a.m. I tried to read myself to sleep with “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” but it only added to my frustrated state. I found that I kept getting angry with the book’s protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist. It was the same type of anger that I experienced while reading the beginnings of “The Lost Symbol” and the Twilight series, both of which I abandoned.

But I had a revelation about each of the protagonists in these novels last night…

If you’re not genuinely kind or don’t have a self-deprecating sense of humor, I don’t want to know you.

They say that life is a series of peering into other’s faces, searching for a reflection of yourself. You tend to resonate with people who are similar to you. And I don’t see a shred of myself in Robert Langdon, Mikael Blomkvist, or Bella Swan. First off, I’d argue that none of them have a sense of humor. On top of that, Blomkvist is just an A-hole. (I may use the term “A-hole” quite a bit in this blog.) For example, in Dragon Tattoo, Blomkvist runs into an old friend. He says things to himself like, “I started wondering why we were ever friends at all” which has no bearing on the plot, it’s just an A-hole type of thing to say. As this friend is recounting a story, Blomkvist interjects with “Get to the point.” What? Really? I don’t know anyone who would say something like that, particularly an old friend.  And if they said that to me, I’d never want to talk to them again. How can I get invested in a book with a protagonist like this???

Here’s the problem…

Authors create super-hero versions of themselves… And they’re all A-holes.

Take Langdon and Blomkvist. Both are “boyishly handsome,” even though they’re both approaching 60. Both have a string of convenient lovers to whom they have no real emotional attachment. They’re both described as having “a way with women.” Blomkvist is in a relationship with a married woman who’s husband allows her to sleep at Blomkvist’s house on the weekends. Uh huh. I don’t think so. And both characters randomly are experienced in what the authors must perceive to be expensive, elite hobbies. Like yachting. Or olympic swimming. Or having been the bass player in a band that actually got some radio play in the 70’s. Gimme a break. I’m so sick of these authors living their dreams through their ridiculous characters. Especially since they all keep turing out to be A-holes.

But what really gets me…

When the hell do these people eat?

If I have to read another line about someone “absentmindedly pushing food around on his/her plate” I’m gonna smack someone with a pie in the face. It seems like all these people do is drink coffee. They’re always too upset to eat, in too much of hurry, or whatever other excuse the author can come up with to keep these characters positively gaunt. Bella Swan, a typical anorexic, is forever concerning herself with the nutritional needs of others and “forgetting” to feed herself. Just another case of an author filling gaping plot holes with the conveniently conjured-up talents of the protagonist. I never had a problem with the vampires. That was perfectly believable to me. What wasn’t believable was that Bella was randomly little miss teen Top Chef, a tidbit that was thrown in along with the equally unbelievable absentee mother whom Bella apparently cooked for from the age of 3.

After having read the contents of this blog, I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion…

I might actually be an A-hole too…

So it looks like I’m having some tolerance issues with people with whom I can’t identify. And that’s an A-hole issue. But at least I can admit that I have a problem, unlike some of these protagonists. I’d like to think that I have a self-deprecating sense of humor and that I’m generally very kind. I just can’t get past the issue of WHY these authors seem to think that people like Blomkvist, Langdon, and Swan are heroes. I think Bella Swan is one of the most boring characters on the planet. I think the author had to make Bella’s super-power the ability to block people from reading her mind because there’s nothing particularly interesting IN her mind to read. Now I would never tell that to her face. But I will write it in a blog, A-hole style. Hmm…