Twilight

Twilight

Obsession Level: The Sparkly Anti-Obsession

Ok, so this should stir up a little debate and get things going on at least with the people who, unlike me, are obsessed with this book.

Let me tell you a little about myself and my reading habits.  To put it lightly, I'm an avid reader and I always have been.  By avid reader I mean that I make my way through one to two large, dusty, dense, academic tombs a day when forced to do so.  I can devour, however, five to six novels elected for pleasure in a day.  Needless to say, I'm a fast reader.  This means that when I'm on vacation and I have time to read, there's no stopping me.  I usually drop by some nice little hole-in-the-wall thrift shop or flea market and pick up all I can carry of the twenty-five to fifty cent reading material that they have to offer.  This means that I've read a lot of books.  In fact, I've read so many books that I can't even begin to remember half of what I've read unless it left an impact.  Let me just say an impact can be good or bad.

That little bit of background info being on the table, it's story time.  This is a story about how I came to read Twilight.  

I was on vacation for a few days and it was going to be great.  It was almost spring outside when it was just starting to become warm enough to be bearable and it was still cold enough that you didn't really feel motivated to do anything except curl up on the couch and indulge in inside activities.  I had the use of a quiet little beach house for a few days, all the junk food that one person needs, and time all to myself to read.  I had packed books for the trip, intending to spend the entire four days doing nothing but going through novel after novel.  I think I brought five with me, intending to make a stop at one of the aforementioned little shops when I arrived to stock up on the rest of the necessary reading material.

So I unpacked, headed out to the shop, and stood in front of the poorly arranged and overflowing shelves just dripping with possibility.  I immediately search out my favorites.  Any Dean Koontz books or Larry McMurtry books that I haven't read go into the basket first.  Then the wild card selecting happens.  The first thing I typically do in that situation is to think about books that I have heard people talk about or scan for titles that I remember them mentioning to me.  If the book or author came recommended, those are typically the second books to go in the basket.  Lastly, when all those possibilities are tapped out, I generally look around for any random title that catches my attention and I give that a go.  That's where things get sticky, and that's where you either end up with some gem that you're thrilled you discovered, or you end up with a twenty five cent book that you wish you could get a refund for.

This particular day I had packed my little basket when I saw a copy of Twilight laying there among the other stacks of unwanted and picked through books.  At this moment it was all the rage.  I seldom read any book that is all the rage until long after the  initial glory surrounding it has died down.  This is my practice simply because I've learned that books that aren't very good lose that initial glory rather quickly and then disappear from sight.  Those that were truly worthy of the glory remain very popular and therefore I am more assured of wisely spending my quarter and the few hours it will take me to read the book.

Still, I had a friend who had been nagging me for a while about this particular book.  She was in love with the series, patiently waiting for the new books to come out, and she said I had to read this book.  She swore that I would love this book.

I hesitated, a while, my heavy basket in hand, and finally decided to buy the book.  It was fifty cents, a bit more than I would have liked to spend for it, but it would shut her up and I had four days to read.  Also, the sheer size of the book promised, if it was any good, to provide me with possibly a full day of reading, which none of my other novels were going to be able to do, and four days was a long time to fill with reading material.

I took the book home, and I curled up in the chair.  I started reading and tried to hold off on my disappointment.  The book was written, at best, on a seventh grade reading level.  The grammar was atrocious.  The author apparently used a thesaurus and used it poorly.  The book was very long, yes, but it was so repetitive that half of that could have been removed without leaving any noticeable gap in what I suppose you could call the plot.  Furthermore, being a longtime vampire enthusiast, I found it utterly ridiculous that anyone could write about sparkling, vegetarian vampires.  To sum it up, the book took me three hours to read from cover to cover and that's three hours that I will never be able to get back in my life.  

I called my friend after that and asked her not to recommend anymore literature to me.  I'd had just about all I needed from that one experience.  We talked about the book, for a little while, but I had nothing positive to say about it, so we left it.  Luckily for me the rest of my vacation was salvaged by the one or two gems that I pulled off those dusty shelves, along with a few other decent books that, though not noteworthy, were not nearly as bad as the train wreck that Twilight is.  I took the giant book home with me from that vacation and debated what it could be used for.  It would make a nice doorstop, or a very large paperweight...in the end I think I ended up giving it to some teenage enthusiast of poor excuses for literature.

No, I never read the other books.  No, I never saw the movies.  I'd like to save myself those few hours of my life.  I did, however, eventually forgive my friend for such a terrible recommendation.  I still hold strong on my assertion, nevertheless, that she can no longer recommend any kind of book to me.