For my Bookish PoolGirls

I've had jobs before where, when there's downtime, the lowly staff entertains themselves by watching music videos on YouTube, planning and detonating corn bombs (only fellow detasselers should understand that), or what have you (I once carved the JFK assassination into a pumpkin for a Halloween contest at work, just saying). Wanna know what bookish types do when it's slow at bookish jobs? Try looking through the hilarious lists on GoodReads (it's like Facebook for book nerds). Compiled by pool girl Laura, who loves to quote Spring Breakdown to me all the live long day, below are some of the best GoodReads user-created book lists.

First we have "Hottest Guy on a Cover." That one is pretty obvious. Most of the books look like romance novels and, surprisingly, there are lots of books about the Beatles. What I don't get about this list though, is why you can't see almost all of these hot cover dudes' faces. I suppose these could also be contenders for "Dude, Where's My Forehead?"

Next we have lists made by horny women. There's "Characters You Most Want to Sleep With," which obviously has Twilight's Edward Cullen in the top spot. Now, I'd bang R-Patz every which way, but the character Edward Cullen? I'm outing myself as a nerd here just by admitting I've read the atrocious Twilight series, but really Goodreads ladies? You'd like to bang a dead dude who is 100 years older than you, has killed people and probably wants to kill you, is rock hard like a statue (and not just downstairs!), and is given to stalkerish behavior like watching girls sleep, telling them who they can and cannot hang out with, and verbally belittling their intelligence and decision making skills as well as being prone to bouts of uncontrollable rage? Nice pick. Unfortunately, most of the "horney lady" lists are about paranormal romance (see JR Ward and Charlaine Harris) or teen romance (see Shiver). What are red blooded, adult, intelligent, independent women reading? My guess is they're not on Goodreads because they're too busy reading the PoolBoy blog!

Finally, we have an assortment of lists about gay male characters. There are a ton of these. From "Best Gay Furry Lovers" and "Worst Gay Book Covers" to "Best Gay Cinderfellas," Goodreads is innundated with lists about gay men. Where are all the lists about books full of straight male characters? There are some (yes but they're all about Edward Cullen!) but nothing like the number of lists about hot gay characters. Just like in the search for porn for women, straight ladies always seem to get the shaft (haha!).

There are some lists to make your downtime at work fly by. Check them out and get reading!

Vampires give me a Boner

If you've been reading the PoolBoy blog at all you are probably aware that I'll use any excuse to post pics of R-Patz. NPR recently offered me another opportunity when they wrote this Bloody Book List. And it's not just a vampire reading list (though there is a pretty good one at the end), but an article about how one can know what's happening at a certain point in history by checking out the vampire lit of the time. Don't believe me?

Take Bram Stoker's Dracula.

"It was written at the end of the 19th century, at a time when England had some of the largest ports in the world," says Benita Blessing, who teaches modern European history at Ohio University. "Here you have a ship arriving from Eastern Europe, bearing soil from another country, and a plague-like person who is going to bring death and destruction. The concerns at that time were foreign illnesses, unwanted immigrants. What Dracula is about is the fear of what we might today call globalization."

That's just the first example. The article discusses Anne Rice's vamp novels, Whitley Strieber's The Hunger, and the current wave of blood sucking books like Mormon Meyer's Twilight series and Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels

So what does the recent infatuation with deadly immortals tell us about the national subconscious today? Well, in both Twilight and the Sookie Stackhouse series the main vampire characters try to deny their animal instincts and be more moral, in an attempt to be more human. Vampires, even Sookie's Bill Compton, are predators, but then again, so are humans. Dracula wasn't concerned about mainstreaming or following a set of moral rules. So why does Edward Cullen care about weather he drinks the blood of an animal or a human?

Apparently it's because humans are killing the Earth and we feel really bad about it. According to Whitley Strieber:

"Our prey is our planet," he says. Today's fear is not the Cold War or AIDS, it's the fate of the Earth: "We sense that there is something wrong with the environment, that the planet itself may not be able to sustain us very long, and so we are beginning to romance death once again."

I buy it. It seems that vampires, who usually represent fear of death, appear in literature to reflect what the major fear of the time is, from immigration, to disease, to the uncertainty at the end of the Cold War, to pollution. If you are into vampires or how literature reflects culture and what's happening in the world, this article is a must read.

I'll leave you with a little Eric from True Blood to get you through the day.



Have a good Tuesday, biznatches.