Prompted by a discussion with Ian Tregillis in the comments section of my post on YA Publishing and R-Rated People, and my friend Ferrett’s excellent rant, Twilight: Read The Fucking Books, I tried.
To read the fucking books, that is.
I couldn’t do it.
I almost never abandon a book. I sometimes put one down for awhile, and come back to it later. Years later, in some cases, but it’s rare that I set one aside with no intention of ever picking it up again. I’ve even finished books I hated because I felt as if I had some kind of responsibility toward them – like maybe I’d hurt their feelings if I didn’t. More recently, I’ve forged ahead with books I didn’t like so I could analyze why I didn’t like them, what about them wasn’t working for me.
In all my years as a reader, I’ve probably walked away from fewer than a dozen novels. One of them was Twilight.
I actually read the beginning several years ago, when someone handed me a free chapbook at Comic-Con. I didn’t think it was particularly well-written, but it seemed fairly harmless. I was frankly baffled when it blew up into the cultural sensation it’s become.
I read my friends’ commentary on it (I’m particularly fond of Oslowe’s write-up), and some reviews of the films, and thought I might sit down and read it someday, just to know what all the fuss was about.
And last week, I tried. I really did. But about halfway through the first book, I realized that I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about Bella, who likes to read but doesn’t seem to think. I didn’t care about Edward, who smirks and stalks and struts and smiles in the wrong places. I didn’t care about their scent-driven romance, or Edward’s iron self-control, or Bella’s inability to control her limbs. I didn’t care who was sitting next to whom (“front seat, back seat, which seat shall I take?“).
Part of the problem, I think, is that Stephanie Meyers made the decision to write in first person, from the POV of a girl who’s bored and lonely and depressed, who thinks she’s ordinary and dull. If Bella doesn’t care about herself, then why should I care about her? A really good writer might be able to give me a reason, but Ms. Meyers isn’t a really good writer. She’s not a very good writer at all. (For a whole slew of examples, with copyediting and commentary, check out Reasoning with Vampires.)
Somewhere in the darkness of their shared Biology class, as they sat watching a film neither of them cared about, I decided Bella and Edward could get along fine without me. Before I left them for good, though, I looked up the sex scene from Breaking Dawn that the R-Rated Person in last month’s coffee shop sequence described as, “Where they skip over the whole thing and she wakes up bloody and bruised?”
It really does read like that.
(And Edward really does perform a C-Section with his teeth, which is actually kind of awesome, but also really disturbing. Especially in a novel billed more as romance than as horror.)
And with that, I was done. I’ve read enough to understand some of the appeal – I probably would have devoured the series if I’d started it when I was 15 (though sadly, it would have reinforced some of my less-sensible relationships) – and more than enough to know that it holds no appeal for me. I hope Bella and Edward are very happy together, somewhere far away from me.
