Days 8 & 9

Day 8: Most Underrated Book

Twilight/Stephenie Meyer

Ha! Didn't expect that, did you? :) Here's the thing–I weary of the venom directed at Meyer that, at least in part, is surely created by her huge sales and commercial success. It's reminiscent the literary attacks on Dan Brown after The Da Vinci Code, but with the growing popularity of Young Adult literature, Meyer seems the perfect whipping girl. And it can be hard to separate an honest reaction to the individual books from the social media firestorms that now surround the juggernaut that has become the Twilight business franchise.

I loved Twilight. I read it in less than 48 hours. I was in my later 30s at the time, and I was amazed at how Meyer transported me to 17 again. Whatever my opinions of her literary decisions as the series progressed, or the relative value of her writing, you can't take that experience away from me. I read for lots of reasons. One of them is to have an emotional experience, and Twilight gave me that.

Thank you for those 48 hours, Stephenie Meyer.



Day 9: Book I Thought I Wouldn't Like But Did

Profiles in Courage/John F. Kennedy Jr.

Written when John Kennedy was the junior senator from Massachusetts, Profiles is a collection of essays about political courage in American history. The virtue of the book is that the courage is not about the moral rightness of any given stand, but that each man took a position of conscience and defended it even when failure–both immediate and long-lasting–was inevitable. I found each essay thrilling, and the sum total reinforced my respect for those who will not routinely sacrifice their conscience for expediency.