After months of prodding by my cousins, I finally got around to reading the much-hyped Twilight (partially in preparation for the movie coming out in November). The short story is: I quite liked it.
Which isn’t to say that I’d recommend it, however. Not to everybody, at least. I think a lot of people, like, oh… guys, will think it’s utterly silly and ridiculous. In a lot of ways, it is. It’s sort of… literary candy. There’s nothing especially fancy or beneficial about it, but it’s enjoyable, and a little addictive. If I had to describe Twilight in one word, it would be this: indulgent.
Twilight, if you haven’t heard, is the love story of a human girl and a vampire boy. The girl, Bella, is immediately drawn to him for fairly obvious reasons: he’s incredibly good-looking and rather mysterious. The vampire, Edward, has rather different reasons for being drawn to Bella. Reasons that we don’t really get explained until quite a way into the book, and which aren’t really done justice until the WIP sequel, called Midnight Sun, which is actually just Twilight from Edward’s POV. (Unfortunately, the first twelve chapters of that booked got leaked online, which means that the author is feeling disinclined to finish the book. Unfortunate, that is, because it’s actually quite a bit better and more interesting than Twilight, in my opinion. She’s put the leaked chapters up on her website so they’re available to read, but I do hope one day she finishes it.)
(From here on there’ll be massive spoilers, so if you haven’t read it and don’t want to be spoiled, you might want to stop reading.)
Now, I had planned to write a nice, coherent, thought-out review, but I’m apparently too lazy/busy for that, so in the interest of getting a blog out (since it’s been so long), I’m just going to copy/paste some of the thoughts I had while reading it, which were originally in e-mails to the aforementioned cousins.
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Sept. 8 –
So, I finally started reading Twilight last night (or rather, this morning). I’ve only read the first chapter so far. It seems interesting. I’m certainly curious why Edward is giving her death glares. So, um, are we supposed to like Bella? Because she kinda seems like a whiny little bitch. She spends the better part of the first chapter not just complaining about life in general, but complaining about the type of weather and landscape I most enjoy as if she’s in the seventh circle of hell. Not to mention ragging on what she thinks of as a tiny school which is larger than the one I went to. Um, so yeah, she’s really not endearing herself to me. Okay, I get that they have to establish that the sun doesn’t show itself, thus explaining how vampries can be out during the day (and Iike how it’s said they’ve come from Alaska; I’ve been saying for years that it makes more sense for vampires to live in Alaska than it does for them to live in LA), but do they have to do it in such an irritating way? Do teenagers like this so much because they can relate to her whiny-bitchiness?
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Sept. 10 –
Okay, so I’m through chapter five now (I think) and I have to admit, it’s a little addictive. And I think I’ve figured out what it is the teenagers see. I remember quite well being a teenage girl and having an all-consuming crush on a guy (or close enough) who you know is far too cool/hot/whatever to be interested. Except in Bella’s case, for some reason I haven’t yet gotten to, he is. It’s sort of…fantasy fulfillment. Like the kind of stuff you might have day-dreamed about in class while sitting near said guy. Yeah, I can totally see the appeal of that for teens. And I have to admit Edward’s growing on me. He’s rather snarky, and I loves me some snark. Still, the story does often read like a bad Legolas/OFC fanfic. It’s sort of like literary Nutella. I know it’s not all that fancy, and I know it’s not terribly beneficial to me, but I just can’t stop eating it.
At this point, I have to say, Edward is growing on me. I like when he laughs at her discomfort. He’s had a few nice lines, like (paraphrasing): “I can’t help it if you’re exceptionally unobservant,” and, “Maybe I’m not a superhero. Maybe I’m a villain.”
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Sept. 11 –
So, I read another chapter of Twilight, the one where they go to the beach and meet Jacob. So, is he like a werewolf? No, don’t tell me. Supposedly his ancestors are but I doubt he’d be telling people about it if he was one. Or not. Logic isn’t exactly the driving force in this story. (And I love how she didn’t even twitch at the mention of werewolves. Or maybe she just didn’t follow through with the idea that if the vampires of the story are real, so are the werewolves.)
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(It was in here somewhere that I went ahead and read the chapters of Midnight Sun that were posted online–a far, far more interesting read.)
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Sept. 14 –
I’m now up to the point right after Edward takes her out to the secluded little meadow and shows her his sparkles. That’s still so freaking hysterical; I love it. Of course, I couldn’t help myself and so I’ve spent the past, oh, ten hours or so reading the part online of his POV. I have to say, I think I like reading Edward’s POV better. Even from reading Twilight, Edward strikes me as pretty hilarious. There was nothing terribly surprising to me about his motives behind his actions/reactions. At least his sudden obsession makes more sense and is less pathetic than hers. I think one of the main reasons I like reading his side better is just that, aside from liking him better than Bella, I like the people he’s around a lot more, too. Oh, Charlie and Angela are pretty cool, they seem like decent people at least, but I have to say that Edward’s family is much more interesting. I’m especially fond so far of Alice and Carlisle, but they’re all pretty interesting and fun to read (except perhaps Rose, who’s kind of a, well, bitch). But I think the main thing is that, while reading Bella’s POV seems a bit ridiculous and overly melodramatic and silly quite frequently, I’m actually not getting that same feeling from reading Edward’s POV. I can take that version more seriously. That may be partly because I can accept such outrageous behavior from a vampire a little easier than I can from a teenage girl. Although, to be fair, I’ve always had a fondness for characters who are/were dark/evil, but are now good, or trying to be, and just might, given the right circumstances, snap and kill someone.
I do find it funny, though, that Meyer seems to be romanticising the very “bad boy” phenomenon that Rowling warned us against, whenever someone would express a fondness for Draco, Lucius, or Snape.
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Sept. 15 –
Well, I finished it. And you know what? I like it. I can’t help it. Yes, Bella does kind of annoy me. And that ending, sheesh. I mean, how utterly moronic is she? Seriously, as soon as she got off the phone with James she should have immediately told Alice and Jasper what happened so that they could all form a plan of attack. However… I did like that they skipped over the tedious vampire fight scene at the end. I’m sure the movie will make a whole production out of it, but frankly I was glad that it skipped right to them saving her. Also, it made Edward, Jasper, and Emmett seem totally badass that Edward just pulled James off her, then let his brothers “deal with him”. Yeah, that made me LOL. And I’ll agree that the romantic relationships are mostly hard to buy, but I really love the ridiculously heartwarming Cullen family vibe. They’re all just so darn sweet! When Carlisle called Bella part of his family when they were playing baseball, I actually had to stop reading and go, “Awww.” Because really, I’m just a big sap. I love all that family togetherness crap. And I kind of adore Carlisle. Where can I get one of him?
(and then, in response to some of what they said…)
I agree about Bella being irritating, but I kind of find Edward a bit hilarious. In fairness, I read about his watching her sleep from his POV first, so it was a bit less creepy to me. Although I do find her lack of finding things like that even a bit creepy to be a bit disturbing. The other thing is that whenever he (or anyone, but it seems to usually be him) says something about how something could have gone or didn’t, or refuses to disclose something, it tends to immediately make me think of what it might have been like if it had gone that way, or if he had told her, and the image conjured in my mind is often quite funny. Like when he told her about the excuse he thought up later as to why he saved her from the truck, I got this rather hilarious picture of her getting all mangled, her blood puddling all over the pavement, and him crouched there on his hands and knees, lapping up the blood like a dog, while all the other students stand around, first in horror, and then going, “…Dude?” and he looks up at them, his mouth covered in blood, and is like, “What?” …And now I just added to that the image of him getting his tongue frozen to the icy pavement. … Yeah, those are the kinds of things that pop into my head all the time when I read this. Although sometimes the actual jokes they make amuse me a lot, too, particularly the vampire jokes, like when she thought they might be getting dressed up to turn her into a vampire and he’s all like, “Thought that would be a black tie affair, did you?” which pretty much was exactly what I was thinking. And the prom horror movie crack with the vampires and locking everyone in and slaughtering them… quite amused me. And sometimes when things aren’t worded quite as well as they perhaps could be… like when he takes her to that Italian place and it says something about him opening the door without taking his eyes off of her, and I immediatley imagined him opening the door, all smooth and cool, and another car speeding by and totally taking the door off, then him just looking at the missing door, then looking back at her and going, “Well… that was embarassing.” … I have a feeling this book my be far more amusing in my head than it is on the page.
The lying in the book did rather displease me, especially the easy way that Bella seems to think of lying as a perfectly acceptable alternative to telling the truth, despite how she may claim to be a bad liar.
Some of the logical problems, character inconsistencies, and time issues bothered me. Like how Edward’s saying things like, “A good dose of fear would be the best thing for you,” then not too long after, in the meadow, going, “Don’t fear me.” And a lot of times it seemed like the actions she described would not take near the time it seemed to. Like at one point Bella’s running late for school, then Edward picks her up and his crazy driving gets her there in plenty of time. Now, for that to be true, for there to be any real noticible time saving, she’d have to live a good distance away. If it normally takes her five minutes to drive to school and he gets her there in three, that’s not really enough to make her go from almost-late to having plenty of time. But later, she says that it would be no big deal to walk home (and remember, at one point she dreads walking five miles through woods, because she’s so clumsy), so that would indicate that it was maybe a mile or two away, in which case any time savings by driving fast would be negligible.
I had some issues with the very end, as well. When they save her, Edward’s there, acting like you might expect a human boyfriend to, all panicked and concerned for her safety. Only a couple days before, he seemed to be still so affected by her scent that her enthusiastic kiss made him pull back, as if he was going to lose control. Then take into account the fact that he hadn’t been around her for a day, which he claims weakens his immunity to her scent (so to speak). Then suddenly when he sees her, it’s not just a finger prick, but a massive headwound that’s spilling copious amounts of her blood. Even considering his concern for her at that moment, how is it that he didn’t lose control and go after her blood? And then, they decide that he’d be the right one to suck the venom out. Okay, granted, Carlisle is busy stitching her head, but Alice is right there, and she seems to have perfectly fine control, and she’d certainly have more than Edward would when it came to Bella’s blood. Why didn’t she do it? For that matter, if she has enough control to sit there calmly helping while a human’s bleeding that much, why was it necessary for her to skip her class when they did blood typing, too? Surely she wouldn’t have been fazed at all. And then later, when they’re in the hospital and Bella notes that Edward’s eyes are mostly black, only slightly amber… Now, it said something about them hunting every two weeks or so, which seems to imply that it takes that long for their eyes to turn from amber to black. If they’d gone hunting at any point after rescuing Bella, his eyes would still be amber. But if not, as seems the case, his eyes should be slightly red, not slightly amber, as the last blood he drank was human.
I am glad, though, that she was finally like, “Dude, why don’t you just turn me into a vampire?” because that’s kind of what I was thinking from the start. Given that these vampires have, like, none of the usual weaknesses and a huge number of advantages, if the only down side is wanting to drink blood, and animal blood is a viable option… seems like the necessity for a bit of self-control is a small trade-off for the advantages of being a vampire, not the least of which in her (and his) case is getting to be with your true love. His reluctance (to say the least) on this issue doesn’t make much sense to me.
…
And now I’d just like to add that one thing I did appreciate was the fact that both Bella and (more importantly) Edward came right out and said they’re virgins. With the backwards sort of stigma that virginity has in our society today, it’s nice to see it being romanticized, as well it should be. Especially in books aimed at teens. … Even if it did inspire me to draw this:
… but in my defense, that was mostly because I wanted to draw Edward with a dorky smile, because he strikes me as very dorky sometimes. (And I know I forgot the darkness around the eyes, and I really wanted to give him sharp teeth, but I haven’t figured out yet what these vamps’ teeth are meant to look like.)
I’ve actually been wanting to draw a lot from this book, mostly to get down my versions before the movie shatters all my mental images. Maybe I’ll post some later.
I started reading the second book, New Moon, so I just may post my thoughts on that as I go.
