This may be a bit tough: can you give some insight, or at least your opinion, on why the huge popularity of this series ?
I know nothing of the books other than that my friend’s daughter was obsessed by them. I never read any of the Harry Potter books, but have been told by a number of sources about how creative and well written they are.
Were you Team Edward or Team Jacob?
What? Why are you all looking at me like that? What did I say?
I hesitate to ask this, I’m afraid of the answer, but - is the commentary in dangermom’s link reasonably accurate (in a snarky way)? Holy crap, that wasn’t what I thought this stuff was.
And Bella’s “weakness” is really also a strength, especially after she gets all vamped. (Not only are there vampires, some have superpowers!)
She’s a total Mary Sue character. Way more so than Auel’s Ayla, and that’s saying something.
And bucketbuck, the baby has help. It’s beyond obnoxious.
“Auel’s Ayla” is quite the tonguetwister. Say it 10 times fast!
cormac262, that’s a good question. I think that a lot of the popularity of the series comes from the fact that tweener girls often have low self esteem. They associate with Bella because she doesn’t think there is anything special about her. But, everybody else thinks she’s remarkably special. Couple that with the fact that the super perfect man has been waiting 100 years for you and has never looked at another woman because they just aren’t enough and you have a teen fantasy. Add in the chasteness of the relationship (due to the strength difference between humans and vampires) and you have everything that a tweener girl could ever want without anything to be afraid of.
Sr Siete, until the last book, when it becomes moot, I was Team Jacob. Jacob was protective without being controlling. He helped Bella grow instead of overwhelming her with his perfectness. He wasn’t all emo about his problems, and seemed less self-centered than Edward. This might be an unusual observation, but I found Edward to be extremely self-centered. Even while he was taking care of Bella, it really struck me that he was doing it all for his internal sense of rightness rather than out of actual care for her.
Charley, the link is a very snarky summary that is nonetheless totally accurate for the fourth book. The others are different, though. In the end, there is really nothing challenging about the roles of the characters. Good vampires are perfect and wonderful and teh only downside of being one was not being able to spawn. But, look! Bella was able to spawn! Everything sure did come out perfectly for her in the end.
Snickers, I looked at the outside help the baby got as an emergency c-section done by an amateur. I wouldn’t say that her weakness was really a strength…I think her weakness was her general lack of personality and character, but you must have another weakness in mind. Was it her shielding? I wouldn’t consider that to be a weakness. What did interest me was that it was originally the shielding and her smell that made Edward interested in her. Once she became a vampire, she lost her yummy smell, and she eventually was able to drop the shield so Edward could read her mind. Now that she’s not inscrutable, maybe a vampire divorce in in the offing.
Did you have any trouble keeping the minor characters straight? Admittedly I spent only an afternoon and half an evening skimming the first three books (and IMO that was more than they deserve), but whether vampires, werewolves or humans, they’re only a personality-free blur in my mind.
Do vampire victims enjoy the blood extraction? I get the impression that its a lot like sex, except less “icky”.
I guess that is part of the appeal of dating a vampire.
visflan, there was no need. If it was a boy, he was jealous that Bella was dating Edward. If it was a girl, she was jealous because the boy she liked liked Bella. Easy!
ralph124c, I don’t think being bitten is pleasurable in this series. The mythos is such that if the vampire bites you but doesn’t kill you, you turn into a vampire. The stories about people who got turned didn’t sound like they liked it, and the vampire venom is extremely painful. Our main vampires don’t drink human blood, so there wasn’t really any focus on that end of things.
…and the ones that do, don’t leave the people alive to report on whether it feels good.
P.S. Mithril, you might want to give this a gander. It could have saved you some time. And it’s a far more enjoyable read. 
Not divorce. He’s old school Mormon. He’ll just have another perfect mate. One that he can’t get pregnant with the sperm he still had from before he turned for a certain reason I’ll let others ask you about.
Those last two links are a good example of why I decided to read the books myself. I think people are somewhat bitter that Stephanie Meyer made about a bajillion dollars on these books, but favorite authors still have day jobs. I think that Pat Conroy’s books, for example, should make Harry Potter money, but they don’t.
The Twilight books are, writing-wise, appropriate for the target audience. They aren’t an adult story, they aren’t even really a vampire story. It’s a love triangle, one corner of which happens to be a “vegetarian” vampire. I wonder if you compare Edward’s perfectness to any other young adult targeted romantic lead, if it would be very different.
When a book becomes such a phenomenon, people outside of the target audience want to read it. I think that is where all the anti-Twilight stuff came in. It was trite, but it is Young Adult lit. Compare it to the Sweet Valley High books, and I don’t think you will see too much of a difference in quality (do they still print those?). Meyer’s vampires sparkle and that’s silly. I can understand that. But I have a few ideas about what is terribly silly about Anne Rice’s vampires as well.
This sounds like I am really defending the books, and I’m not. I think they are probably very, very average for young adult literature. The problem people are having, I think, is that they are not used to YA and can’t recalibrate their inner critic.
My next fluff books are going to be the Sookie Stackhouse novels, so that should be interesting to compare. I’m not sure which came first. I have seen the first two seasons of True Blood and can see a lot of similarities between the two series.
The first Sookie Stackhouse novel was published in 2001, so it precedes Twilight. I’ve no idea if it’s a side effect of the Twilight craze or the appeal of the HBO series, maybe both, but the first Southern Vampire books have been published in Swedish and Finnish only this year. I’ve had it happen with George RR Martin’s vampire novel Fevre Dream as well. The fact that I’d have to order it over the Internet if I wanted to look closer at it put me off for years, but then this spring, I was browsing bookshop shelves in Turku to get something to tide me over a train journey. Voila, there was a shiny new edition of Fevre Dream, just waiting for me to pick it up. So what I feel about Stephenie Meyer is equal parts reluctant gratitude and embarrassment squick.
Finally, if you haven’t yet read Sunshine by Robin McKinley, I heartily recommend it.
I was under the impression that most people had a problem with them not because of the writing style itself, but the message being given. For bad writing, you take Eragon or something like that.
Also, we need to get some questions back:
How much of the series were you able to predict? Did you expect Nessie, for example, or how she would connect with Jacob?
Do you think it makes sense that Bella skipped part of the vampire lore and became such a powerful vamp overnight?
I had been spoiled already about Nessie and Jacob, so I can’t answer that. But, I think that I would have put it together. There was a great deal of foreshadowing, especially when Bella was horrified about the werewolf that imprinted on the two year old. I do expect there to be a series about the adventures of a werewolf and a half-vampire within a few years, though.
No, it doesn’t make sense that Bella skipped the hard parts of becoming a vampire, for a few reasons. Everybody kept saying what amazing self control she had, blah, blah, blah. But she had never shown that at all as a human. She was a total Mary Sue until she became a vampire, then she became the most amazing of them all. It was an unbelievable transition, even when you have already suspended disbelief about vampires and werewolves.