Friday, February 4, 2011

Why We Can't Finish Stephanie Meyer's Twilight

Trey and I read aloud to each other at night while we're putting Olivia to bed. It gives us a chance to read books we're both interested at the same pace and talk about the content. Twilight was the third book we decided to read aloud together. We made it through a little over 100 pages before giving up. We found ourselves doing whatever we could to not read to each other at night - Trey would go clean up toys downstairs, refill the humidifier, and I'd suggest we just talk about our days instead. What's the point of reading a book you're constantly trying to avoid? We all graduated from having to do that after we left college.

The story wasn't the problem. I'm all for teen-angst-driven plot lines and tossing in vampires and werewolves really spices things up. This book should have been exciting, but Meyer suffocates the exciting bits with her extensively detailed narrative. Do I really care what color the walls of Bella's school's office are? Does it matter that Edward chuckles all the time and Bella is accident-prone? Nope.

Initially skeptical of the book for many reasons, Trey and I held off attempting to read the series until Trey was given Twilight as a gift. We felt we had to read it to see what all the fuss was about. Maybe the book would be better than the movies (although they turned out to be much more entertaining when compared to the book,) but I can finish watching the movie whereas I couldn't finish reading the book. I can't even write more of a review. We didn't even make it to the part where Bella figures out Edward is a vampire.

I know I read a lot of escapist books so it sounds contradictory for me to be so cruel here, but I stand by my feeling that you can write all kinds of crap as long as you write well, as long as you put forth an effort to engage the reader. This droll babble doesn't even come close. So my advice if you're one of the few people left yet to jump on the Twilight bandwagon -- see the movies and be done with it.

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