Confession: Up until the
local squall surrounding the release of the fourth book in
Stephenie Meyer’s
Twilight series—
Breaking Dawn—reached its full young-adult-fiction fervor earlier this month, I had never heard of the books or Meyer. I guess when it comes to books you have to buy in the “Teen” section of the bookstore (which I did), I have my pop culture head in the sand.
But I love another allegedly-young-adult-but-appeals-to-all-ages series,
Harry Potter, inordinately. So when my brother’s girlfriend (after ecstatically recounting the
Breaking Dawn midnight release party she attended)
offered to lend me the first two Meyer books,
Twilight and
New Moon, I thought, “Sure, why not? Easy, mindless books about vampire love to read by the pool.”
I began
Twilight on a Saturday afternoon. When I realized two hours later it was time to tear myself away in order to get ready and go out to eat with friends, I had another thought:
I’m going to ditch these bozos and keep reading! But I didn’t, because I love those bozos. So I snuck in as much reading as I could—whilst drying my hair, whilst walking around the house from room to room, whilst driving to meet them (ONLY at the stop lights, I swear). That night, when I returned, I read until 5 a.m. I tried to sleep, but honestly, my adrenaline—pumped up by the storyline—kept me awake another thirty minutes.
I finished
Twilight when I awoke the next morning. Four days and 2,560 pages later I had raced through the series. Little sleeping, little interacting, one self-abashed trip to that aforementioned Teen section to get the last two books,
Eclipse and
Breaking Dawn.
Obsessed. Obsessed!
But why?
In short (without revealing too many spoilers), Meyer’s series revolves around a seventeen-year-old girl, Bella Swan, who moves to
Forks, Washington to live with her dad. There at the high school she meets and falls in love with Edward Cullen, a literally cold, hard teen “god” who she later figures out is a vampire. But he’s not just any vampire! He and the Cullens, his “family”—though not related by blood—are related by their choice to be “vegetarian” vampires … aka, no humans, but mountain lions and bears are totally acceptable. Obviously, their love is fraught with blood-sucking obstacles and—oh yeah—werewolves. Well, not REAL werewolves; more like Native American shape shifters who just happened to have chosen to be wolves …
Did I lose you yet?
Yeah, I thought so. My fiancé wondered if he would like the books. I’m thinking probably not—they’re a bit too girly. Bella spends much of her time swooning over Edward and repeatedly describing him as “godlike,” “an Adonis,” “hard as marble,” and his eyes as “pools of gold/honey/topaz.”
And there are obviously other messages in the book that I deplore. Mainly, the fact that Bella’s life revolves around Edward. As one of my esteemed colleagues (and fellow
Twilight fanatic) put it, “
Girl needs to get a hobby.” In her defense, I would say that one of a vampire’s attributes is the ability to suck victims in with his or her unbelievable good looks and velvety voice in order to, in turn, suck blood. So maybe her casting off her friends and family and succumbing to her adolescent raging hormones is just a byproduct of that?
And yet … obsessed! While Meyer is not nearly as good a writer as, say, J.K. Rowling, she builds her characters well. Both her dialogue and the pace at which the storyline moves are I-can’t-put-this-book-down-until-“The End” compelling. Plus, she presents vampires in a hither-to (at least in my reading) unprecedented way—
no eating humans, no turning into bats, no fangs, no burning up in the sun, no stakes through the heart, no garlic and crucifixes—which makes their actions all the more unpredictable.
The one upside to the
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie getting moved to July 2009 was that the
Twilight movie, starring
Harry Potter’s
Robert Pattinson and
Into the Wild’s
Kristen Stewart as Edward and Bella (above right), was bumped up from a December to November 21 release. Yeah, I’m stoked.
Have you read the Twilight series? Did you love it, too? Are you slightly ashamed of loving it, as I am? What did you like or dislike about the books? Are you going to be in line to watch the movie at midnight, as I am? Any other I’m-too-old-to-be-reading-this books you would recommend? Now I’ll be moving on to something much more serious and intellectual, I’m sure …