Twilight

'Sparkle Family Reunion Tour 2020' Reread

Yeaaaahh. My feelings about this series, twinkies, loving the Cullens, the writing playlist, and side-eying a whole lot of SM have pretty much not changed in the past decade.

--------------------
(2008 Reviews / Continued Across all four books / all read in less than 53 hours
Just going to copy these over from the lolarious mass-review I did in 2018)

Let me start this out with saying, I'm sure if I tried I could take these books seriously and in doing so I would abhor Stephenie Meyers with the utter damnation burning hate in ground into me by five years of being an English major, but honestly, I'm not sure how anyone could go into these books expecting (or wanting to expect) more than fanfic-esque show more fourteen-year-old-wish-fulfillment. Which is what I did and likely why I was willing to roll with it, because lets just start with the bare minimum that I knew before I started reading.

We have a protagonist girl, who comes from a broken home, who's paler than anyone else who's human and blushes as often as the wind blows, who's never been interested in a boy seriously before, with extremely low self esteem, who is the worlds biggest cultz, who attracts danger like she's got a beacon on her head saying come and get it, who is all helplessly weak and who can not be touched, read, or effected by any type of mental magic.

She is paralleled by the boy protagonist, who just happens to be a one hundred and eight year old vampire with the most well adjusted family of Brandy-style vampires, who doesn't drink human blood, with the one-way power to listen to other people's thoughts, who looks like a runway model or God, has never considered any other woman seriously before in his life and unlife, and has to be broody/moody/strong enough to resist killing her every moment he's near her because she's the one thing in the world he'd best love to do that to out of no fault of their own but fate.
I mean, c'mon, Anita Blake wasn't even that flagrantly Mary Sue-Fan Fic-ish until she became the Whore of Babylon. Thus I went into it expecting fourteen-year-old-wish fulfillment and lo and behold I was not surprised or disappointed when I found it there.

I think Cleolinda said it best:

A lot of people are really passionate about these books. Some of them love and defend them passionately; others... well. I'm not going to defend them any more than I'm going to defend Twinkies--you go and get yourself a Twinkie when you have a very specific kind of craving. If you want a gourmet pastry or even a homemade cake, you know where to get that. If you're eating a Twinkie, you clearly know what you want and why you're eating it, and you know that it's not good to eat very many of them, but... you know... sometimes you just want one.

Twilight

Twilight is my favorite book out the set. It relies on nothing else and was born and written to be the end-all and be all of the Bella-Edward story before hype and popularity (and the fic bunnies of insanity we all know so well) convinced the writer that there would be a following interest if she wanted to write more in their world.

I like the way they first interact. I love that her innocuous presence drives him utterly bat shit crazy in the space of not even a second, and that while she's being all pity-party wounded about him being the biggest asshole in the world he's doing his damnedest not to kill a room full of twenty 'causalities' just to get to her. And that it's about two-thirds of the book away before Bella (and us through her) actually understand what has taken place. That by the time that takes places he's saved her from a van, without an explanation, and from a group of thugs in another city, where he's been stalkerishly following her, and told her to stay away even though he's given up trying to himself.

The realistic dynamic of having to take friendship on faith, without always getting answers, on both sides makes me deliriously pleased with it. On his side, he's spent eighty years knowing exactly how to manipulate and deconstruct the actions/thoughts/intentions of anyone in his presence and now there is this girl ('this child'), who is an utter mystery to him, who keeps compelling him to break all his rules (those set by his family, his species, and his moral code). On her side, she's dealing with a boy who first hates/reviles her, then saves her, then blows her off entirely right after saving her to the point where he won't talk or look at her, then who suddenly talks to her like its nothing, warning her that it's bad idea for her to let him, then saves her again, still without being willing to explain.

The changes in vampire mythos neither squick nor excite me. It's ground work that makes me happy, especially when you're willing to make and play by your own rules. I did like (forgive the hodge podge of my brain) whichever book had the hand crawling back to its body. That made me really love that she did keep to her mythos lines of only 'torn apart and burned' stopped a vampire. The sparkly thing just amuses the crap out of me. It's a weakness with a glittery side. Literally. Something amazing that can hardly be shared or ignored. I think the eye changing colors part is well thought out, how the color is effected by blood when feeding, when not feeding, when having fed on specific other things across time.

I love Alice's power, and how it changes every time the person in reference makes a new decision. I love that Edward is very specifically not a telepath but can only hear thoughts in his head the way we hear voices out loud. (And that we're given the grand difference of his not being able to project when compared with the werewolves community talk, and the fact Edward does not respond to anyone else with his thoughts.) I honestly laughed out loud at the sparkling thing, because its pricelessly shocking, unpredictable, and it would keep me from coming out in the sunlight too.

I've already rambled about the fact I love the plot (3/6ths, 2/6ths, 1/6ths) structure. I really, really do. In a large part because it's a coherent structure she sticks to, which is not the normal kind but works for her plot objectives. The romance, attraction, family feel good is not sacrificed on the altar of the scary tactics, but instead because it comes later it synchs all of those even tighter. I absolutely love the baseball game. I had no idea it was coming and had never conceivably thought in this direction (even with years as a Rice fan from my earliest teens).

Bella wanting to be a vampire in this book strikes me as no surprise, even if I can understand where people would go omg noes at it. Hello, we're talking about a conversation suddenly about age and life between a seventeen-year-old who looks seventeen and is seventeen years old and knows mortality is very starkly all over her and her beau, a 107-year-old man, who looks seventeen forever, and will never be. Of course, she doesn't want to age and he wants her to have what he never got to. They are both struggling with the same urge: to live the life the other has, even if vicariously through the other. This is so many relationships in the real world (with other reasons) it struck me interestingly to see. show less

3.5 Stars

I thought that since I am listening to Midnight Sun I would finally get around to writing reviews for this series. I'll use the same review for all the books.

I read these books about 10 years ago. I liked them enough to buy the entire series and they still sit proudly on my bookshelf. Ten years later and something still sticks out in my mind so vividly as to why I fell for this series.

Stephenie Meyer captured the melodramatic yearny kind of love so incredibly well.

It's not pretty. There's anxiety. There's self-doubt. There's fear that it's unrequited. There's crying and staring off into the distance (ala Joey's smell the fart scene from Friends). There's sense defying instalove. It's basically a cluster fudge of emotions. But show more wasn't it an utterly over the top, self-indulgent, no one in the world knows what I am going through glorious experience! To be fair, you aren't usually worried your love interest will drain you of blood...unless you are dating Dexter...or well, a vampire. I will acknowledge that I had my fair share of yearny love experiences as a teen. I was besotted with a new soul mate every other month. When I was reading some of the cringey inner monologue about the state of affairs in Bella's heart I had to flip to the front cover to make sure I wasn't reading my own journal. I'm sure we have all been there. Well genuinely I hope we have. It's a wonderful, wallowy experience not to be missed. And so that's what struck me as I read it. I saw my own ridiculous self in there. Again, it wasn't the vampire or werewolf thing. It was the messy falling in love thing. Isn't that the one of the marks of a good writer? To draw a reader in and create relatable characters? I never cared about Edward or Joseph, although if pressed I wouldn't choose a panting wet dog. Sorry Team Jacob. I wasn't wowed by the writing, in fact it felt really clumsy in parts, and Bella was a next level 'special snowflake'. So I will just put myself in to Team 'Dramatic Over the Top Ugly Snot Crying Messy Love' and leave it there.

Bravo, Stephenie, bravo. Thanks for the incredibly long walk down memory lane. show less

This is the only book I have ever pirated instead of checked out of the library/borrowed/bought, since I didn't want to wait for the gazillion teenage girls ahead of me in the public library holds queue to finish *squeee*ing before I got to weigh in on the phenomenon that is this book series. Consider this: I like YA, I like cheesy fantasy and I've read some truly awful fanfiction on the Internet. This book showed me that it's possible for me to dislike a cheesy YA fantasy novel to the point of revulsion, and that something far worse than some of the God-awful fanfiction I've read online can make it to publication. I had to force myself to finish the book and I ended up skimming from about halfway through it until the end. As much as I show more like to pride myself in being a tolerant reader, I've only been able to stomach read summaries for the other books in the series, and it's obvious to me that Stephanie Meyer is projecting her Mormon-tinged romantic and sexual fantasies in her fiction. It wouldn't have been such a bad thing had she not been such a horrific writer and wonderous producer of poorly-conceived characters and plots. I hope this fad fades as much as all others do. show less

If you peruse the lists here on Goodreads of the worst and best books of all time, you'll probably notice something they all have in common: Twilight tends to be near the top of all of them. So is this really possible? Has Stephanie Meyer somehow written a book that transcends the usual Newtonian laws of literature; a book that exists in a quantum mechanical state of being both outstandingly good and outlandishly bad simultaneously, and that collapses to one of these two states with a predetermined probability once some sentient observer — or an over excitable teenage girl — opens the book?

Predictably the answer is no. The notion that this book is the best one ever is clearly ridiculous. I can just about understand it being some show more people's favourite book, but they'd have to be a tad over zealous to believe that no other book could ever surpass it. And on the other side of things I get the feeling that many of the people who think this is the worst book ever do so mainly because of all the people who think it's the best.

Certainly the book has many faults, there are myriad reviews here on Goodreads that sum them up very nicely, as does Matthew Inman's rant at The Oatmeal. Succinctly put the book fails miserably as a romance story. Edward likes Bella because she's hot and smells like flowers. Bella likes Edwards because he's a perfect pale Adonis and he has nice breath. (Incidentally, although Meyer highlights how well read Bella is, the character's narration seems to struggle with vocabulary when it comes to Edward, everything about him is "perfect" and all his mood swings make him look "furious".) Later, once she's figured out he's a vampire, Bella seems to like him all the more because he represents the only possible cure for her painfully low self esteem. We've all seen those adverts for cosmetics or even cosmetic surgery: "Buy our product/Get surgery and change! Because you're not good enough the way you are!" Well becoming a vampire strikes young Bella as the cure for all that she perceives is rubbish about herself. Edward's mumbled complaints that maybe she's fine the way she is are shot down in flames.

But once the awkward and painful love story is out of the way and the two characters have convinced themselves they're in love, the vampire story gets under way. This, the final quarter of the book, is far more enjoyable than the preceding three hundred pages. Admittedly it still pales in comparison to, say, [b:Dracula|9683598|Dracula|Bram Stoker|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1289593001s/9683598.jpg|3165724], but then Stoker's masterpiece is one of my favourite books so this one was always going to struggle to compare.

I won't be reading the rest of the series, methinks. Some of the Cullen family seemed interesting enough to pique my interest, but I'm not sure I could stomach another few hundred pages of Bella or Edward. Although I am intrigued how Bella deals with the revelation about the Blacks being werewolves. The only time I laughed out loud in this book was when Jacob Black tells Bella that — if you believe this sort of thing — the native Americans in the area are werewolves and the Cullens are vampires, to which Bella's private thoughts are "Crikey, the Cullens are vampires!"

I mostly read the book so that if conversation ever turned to this book again I could, finally, put forth an informed opinion on it. (I have more respect for people who've read this book and defend it to the death than those who pour scorn on it then, when asked if they've read it, respond with "Of course not!") And now I have. So there. show less

There are books that are good, and books that are important, and these are not the same category.

The Twilight series is, on a technical level, not very good. The prose is clunky, the characterisation uneven, the gender politics… complicated at best, and the abstinence-only subtext is doing a lot of heavy lifting for something that insists it’s about eternal, overwhelming desire. If I encountered these books for the first time now, I would be deeply unimpressed and possibly a little annoyed.

And yet.

I read these books as a young, lonely, pale teenager in a rainy place, armed with an abstinence-only education and a profound sense of yearning I did not yet have the vocabulary for. In that context, Twilight was not merely a story — it show more was an atmosphere. Melancholy. Desire. Long looks. The fantasy of being chosen while doing absolutely nothing to deserve it except existing quietly and attractively near a window.

Edward Cullen is not a good romantic hero. Bella Swan is not a compelling protagonist. The relationships modelled here are, generously, questionable. But the vibe — that slow, overcast, emotionally constipated ache — landed with surgical precision on a very specific kind of adolescent brain. Mine included.

These books are bad. I know they are bad. I have always known they are bad.
They are also untouchable.

I do not reread them for pleasure. I do not recommend them without extensive caveats. But they remain in my library as artefacts: evidence of a particular cultural moment, a particular teenage hunger, and the strange power books can have even when they are, objectively, doing almost everything wrong.

A one-star series.
A permanent fixture.
Mind your business. show less

The 20th anniversary of this book was just released and I can’t believe it’s been that long. An absolute guilty pleasure read that I loved when it first came out. Rereading it on the beach was both addictive and made me roll my eyes. Obviously the relationships and situations are so toxic, but it’s also incredibly entertaining. It’s like eating a giant tub of ice cream, not great for you, but it taste good in the moment. Don’t base relationship goals off this book, but it’s perfect teenage yearning vampire drama. I’m off to reread the rest of the series.

Absolutely atrocious. Awful. Terrible. A truly bad story, and poorly written, as well. The fact that this made it onto a list called "Best Romances of all Time" makes my soul cry. It's not romantic in the least - and it's a horrible foundation for anyone to base their idea of great romance on. The relationship of these two characters is pathetic with overtones of abusive and controlling. A main character who, at the ripe old age of 17, would rather die to spend eternity with a sparkling, possessive vampire man-child than live out her life should not be a role model for any teenage girl... or 40+ year old woman, for that matter. I should also mention that this girl's life isn't even bad or plagued by anything. She moves to a new town show more with a father that is a bit estranged, but still loves her and dotes on her, new people who want to be her friend, tons of guys who want to date her - but still she's miserable... CONSTANTLY.

I just realized that if I keep going, I will talk about how much I loathed this book (and wish people would actually open their eyes to good writing and good storytelling) for an incredibly long time. Let's just say I have a very long list of reasons.

I've read a lot of books and I can say, in all honesty, this is the worst one I've ever had the extreme displeasure of reading. I finished it because I never like to leave a book unfinished, but oh good lord, was it awful. Read other things. Anything. Just not this. It's like literary marijuana - it kills your brain cells. show less