Like most of the world I have noticed the hugeness that is Twilight. Kids are reading it, watching the movie, wearing “Every girl needs a vampire” t-shirts, the whole sha-bang. The books themselves I have heard are basically the “new Harry Potter”. I very very much enjoyed the Potter books, and I am currently out of something to read and basically thought “what the hell, I’ll bite”. So I wanna know, are these books worth reading?
To give a little info on me…I am a 23 year old male, avid reader, not so much the fantasy/sci-fi genre, but again…LOVED Harry Potter.
Are they well written? Are they “cool”? Are they just a good time waster and that’s it? Just seeing if anyone has any info.
Meyer has the bad habit of using unnecessary dialogue tags–i.e., someone tells an obvious lie and then Meyer follows up the dialogue with “I lied.” This happens frequently.
Twilight is extremely easy reading–light entertainment. You could toss off a hundred pages in a very short amount of time. They play into girls’ fantasies of being with a bad boy. He’s dangerous and therefore attractive.
The first three are fairly trashy wish fulfillment fiction for young women. The fourth is terrible; I couldn’t finish it. Skip it. It’s like Ms. Meyer finally decided she wanted to write a Harry-Potter style storyline but failed utterly.
If I had bothered to remember more about these books, I could go on and on about how they’re subtly anti-feminist, but all in all, they’re the fantasies of a Mormon housewife put on paper. As Edward Cullen himself (or, of course, Robert Pattinson) said:
Well, it’s really girly*, besides being pretty mediocre (says this Mormon housewife ;)). So how high is your tolerance for that sort of thing? I’m a librarian and read this sort of thing to keep up with the world, but I didn’t bother to read past the first book. Meh.
*My husband read The Host in hopes that he would like the concept; he kept commenting, “It’s so girly! They’re always talking about their feeeelings!”
I read the first book in a single sitting at the library, just because I was curious. It was trashy and nowhere near as good as Harry Potter (in my absolutely correct opinion) but somewhat entertaining and I could see why 14-year-old girls liked it. The fourth book was sitting next to it on the shelf, so I picked it up and skimmed it for bit afterward. Holy SHIT does it go crazy off the rails. It read like bizarre fanfic.
I recommend that you don’t read the books. While what Kyla says of the fourth book may be true, the whole series stinks of bad romance fanfiction, the fourth book just happens to read like bizarre fanfiction of bad fanfiction.
I read cracked.com’s abridged script of the movie, which follows the first book mostly. It’s the funniest thing I ever read and sadly, it was confirmed that the movie mostly follows the book.
She speaks the truth. Better than I could have done. DO NOT READ BOOK 4!! And only read 1-3 if you’re bored or really curious.
I can barely defend the fact that I’ve read most of the series; I was on a week-long school break where I wanted to lie in bed and read something brainless but fun. I was hoping for half the joy I got from Harry Potter, but I ended up with something so bad I was constantly running to the living room to laugh about new “plot developments” with my husband. It was an OK way to kill a week, I guess, and at least I’m not curious any more…
Do you like potato chips? 'Cause they’re kind of like that. Like cheap, off-brand potato chips that aren’t done well and are full of fat and don’t leave you satisfied yet you keep shoving them into your mouth.
I’ve read all four books multiple times. I’m as ashamed as I’d be if I sat down and ate an entire bag of potato chips. They’re a quick read, the plot wavers in and out and sometimes disappears entirely, and if you can handle pages upon pages of Bella falling down a lot and rhapsodizing on Edward’s perfect face and agonizing that she’s not good enough for him, while he clenches his jaw in angst and tries not to eat her, you might be entertained.
Edward disappears for most of the second book, leaving Bella an emotional zombie with self-destructive tendencies. And then the werewolves show up. Now she not only falls down, she jumps off and runs into.
Book three starts off with a good old-fashioned multi-species love triangle, and then the good vampires (eventually) team up with the werewolves to defeat the bad vampires, while still fighting over Bella. Who falls down, tries to throw down, and breaks things.
Book four veers right off the tracks into WTF?? land. But at least Bella stops falling down.
I wonder, though…would you (meaning y’all) say that the Twilight series is more goofy, less goofy, or as goofy as a Sweet Valley High book? I’d say less goofy, for the simple fact that Twilight at least has some violence and bloodshed going for it. Sweet Valley had, what, snarky cheerleaders?
This is the only book I know of that I am sorry I read. It’s that bad. (As to why I read it… Let’s not go into it.)
The movie’s actually a little better. (The scriptwriter took some awful awful dialogue and really wooden characters and sort of punched them up. And Kristen Stewart managed to actually breathe some life into Bella (the protagonist). The guy who plays the vampire is fairly interesting to watch as well. I can never tell whether the actor is bemused by the stupidity of his role, or whether the character is bemused by the stupidity of everyone around him. I suspect the actor simply used the former to portray the latter. ) Really really bad special effects though. And some devestatingly silly editing problems. (In one scene, from one camera angle the two characters are about six inches away while from another they are about three or four feet away–and they keep switching back and forth between these angles as though to make absolutely sure everyone in the audience has caught the mistake.)
I’d watch the movie and waste a slightly entertaining two hours rather than reading the book and waste a completely boring and stupidmaking 12 hours. (Or so, I guess.)
I found the books poorly written but entertaining. They look massive, with about 600 pages each, but they’re a quick read, so you’re not giving up much time to them. My 20-year-old daughter and her girl friends loved them, but I’m not sure how much a guy would appreciate them.
When there’s this much hype about something, I want to pick it up and find out what all the fuss is about. However, my teenage daughter took this particular bullet for me. She says they’re stupid and poorly written. And the vampires sparkle. That took all the temptation out of it for me.
If I want to read stupid, poorly written crap for teenage girls, I might still have some V.C. Andrews lying around…
I’ll freely admit, I’m a sap. I enjoyed the series (even the forth), but it really is a teenage girl’s fantasy of having the perfect boyfriend. I actually didn’t like the movie as much as the books, which seems to make me an outlier–like that’s a new one for me. My husband seemed to enjoy the film–he said it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either.
I will admit that I’m hoping the movie gets Rifftraxed. I want to watch it if that happens. (But then I am perfectly happy to watch MST films without the commentary, I really like bad movies.)
I am a fan of vampire-trash, and I couldn’t get through the first book. I got about two thirds of the way, and that is only because I was trapped on a bumpy flight and needed to distract myself. At a certain point, I decided that my time was better spent contemplating a firey death than reading anymore.
I read the first one, because a friend (who is, perhaps significantly, 10 years younger than I) likes them. While I was reading, my reaction was kind of meh - the “plot” of the first two thirds or more of a fairly massive book is solely about whether Edward likes Bella, and their hangups and reticence and misunderstandings. It’s like a stretched-out version of Valley of the Horses, but without the entertaining sex scenes. There is a certain power to the URST, but that’s about it.
But the more I think back on the book, the more I hate it. It’s a romantic fantasy about how a bipolar stalker who wants to kill you is the bestest boyfriend imaginable! I would say that Bella sublimates herself to Edward in a distinctly icky way, except Bella has no “self” to start with.
On another wavelength, it is a Mormon metaphor: premarital sex=death. Bella is practically irresistible, and too quick to “give it up” i.e. risk Edward killing her and/or become a vampire herself. So it’s up to the more evolved male to exercise extreme restraint and save her from corruption. Which to me comes of as twisted control games, but Meyer seems to see it as noble.
Oh and as for “are they cool?” The romantic hero is shown to be ultra cool and mysterious because of his cool car: a Volvo. A Volvo.
I must admit, I was curious. Then I clicked on Airk’s link and read this:
I don’t want to acknowledge the existence of Twilight anymore. Anne Rice’s vampires may have been angsty guilt-ridden Catholics, but they didn’t sparkle.