Book 321: Twilight (Twilight Saga #1) – Stephenie Meyer

I think the text I sent to Alie when I was nearing the finish sums up my thoughts perfectly about this novel: “I hate you. The 14 year-old idiot girl in me loves this book.” Seriously, I hope you’re happy Alie!

I did enjoy the novel more than I thought I would, but there were times where I was so frustrated at Meyer’s writing and the idiocy of the characters/story that I was tempted to abandon it. I didn’t and have even downloaded the remainder of the series to finish while on vacation.

Aside from Alie’s numerous submissions on here for me to read the book the primary reason I read it is that Alie’s agreed to be Episode 4 of my podcast Come Read With Me if it was this book. So get ready for that release in early 2015.

As I said above, the biggest struggle for me was Meyer’s writing. It did work in her favor in that I was able to read the entire book in less than three days and probably in a total of about five hours. The writing was incredibly simple and it felt as if she didn’t have a very big vocabulary. The few times she chose to use a synonym of a word it felt awkward and problematic.

What I enjoyed most was that the characters, even though I wanted to smack the crap out of most of them, made me laugh and made me want to read faster. It also worked against Meyer in that this entire novel felt like the first part of a longer novel, in that the denouement never really happened (which is okay it’s a series), but that the novel itself didn’t seem to go anywhere. Everything that happened, was in the last 50-100 pages and that’s usually not a great sign. I won’t go into the characters more this post as I’ve got to talk with Alie and there are at least three more coming.

I think the line that drove me closest to the edge, and happened to be on the back cover, was:

“About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him — and I didn’t know how potent that part might be — that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.” (195)

For some reason it just hit on all the points that I was not impressed with about Meyer’s writing. It’s simple, it’s poorly written (to me) and it just irked me because of who was saying it.

Personal Note
The primary reason I put off reading this book so long is that I have a lot of issues with Stephenie Meyer’s personal politics, mostly that she’s a supporter of the Mormon Church and pays the tithe and thus money from the films and the books goes to support their homophobic and incredibly sexist policies. I also had issues with money from the books going to the American Red Cross as they still have incredibly homophobic regulations on blood donations. I did work around this by getting a copy of the book from the library book sale and checking the rest out from the library.

Recommendation: If you want to laugh at characters and laugh at yourself all while feeling like a giddy 14 year-old then definitely read this. If you hate bad usage of synonymous and limited vocabulary give it a pass. I vaguely know where the series ends, but I’m still curious how in the hell it gets there.

Opening Line: “I’d never given much thought to how I would die — though I’d had reason enough in the last few months — but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.”

Closing Line: “And he leaned down to press his cold lips once more to my throat.” (Whited out.)