The Twilight series has come up a few times at my book club gatherings. A couple had read them (Most notably one member's husband was hard up for reading material on a vacation. He devoured Twilight and then rushed out to buy the other three!) and the rest of us sort of felt like we'd read them if we had to for book club. :-) Well, Twilight was our choice for February. I have yet to have the meeting so I'm not sure what everyone else thought.
I cannot really tell you why I haven't read these books before. It appears the entire rest of the world has read and reviewed them. When Breaking Dawn was released it was all the rage for several weeks on the book blogs. I guess part of my aversion was that it was such a big deal. I guess I didn't want to feel like I should read something just because it was a sensation all over. Especially when the topic was vampires. I'm just not really into vampires. Never really got into Buffy or anything like that. So, of course it was my book club book, I just had to read it then, right? ;-) I took it on vacation with me and it really was the perfect beach read. And just to further illustrate my point about the extreme popularity of this series. As I was sitting by the pool in the second row of chairs. I looked to my right. Three chairs down a woman was also reading Twilight. I looked to my left and four chairs down a woman was reading Breaking Dawn. In front of me someone was reading New Moon. And I just sort of scanned the crowd at that point and there was someone else reading one of the books. I mean, seriously! That was on ONE day.
I have to be completely honest and say I took forever to jump on the Harry Potter bandwagon too because of its sensation-like popularity. It took me seeing a 70-year old man reading it on a plane and obviously enjoying it to convince me to start the series. And well that was fantastic!
Anyhoo...my thoughts on the book. Hmmm...mixed feelings. I actually really liked quite a bit of the book. Maybe the first two-thirds. I enjoyed meeting the characters. I enjoyed the mystery of Edward and why he was the way he was. I enjoying learning about the "reality" of the vampires versus the mythology. It was fun to see how Meyer was so creative with stamping out the myths and stereotypes of vampires. But it started to go downhill for me when the other coven of vampires started hunting Bella down. And then her whining at the end about wanting Edward to turn her into a vampire really got on my nerves. I did read the excerpt of New Moon in the back and I can't decide if I want to continue the series or not. I'm a little curious to know what happens to the characters, but I'm not sure I can handle Bella for three more books. So I guess I'm on the fence with this one. I'll take a break. I have so many, many books I want to read that I think I may come back to the series after I have gotten through a few more on my TBR stack. But I guess I can understand the appeal of these a bit. This one just did not pull me in quite as much as I thought it might.
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2 comments:
Bella whines and is helpless all the way through the series. It isn't until Breaking Dawn that she finally grows up a bit and gets some backbone. I read them, mostly out of curiosity and I think they're incredibly over-hyped. My take on these is that they're like really bad fan fiction: you keep reading it and the whole way through you're asking yourself why. They're entertaining for their pop trash value, but nothing stellar.
See, I DID love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I was lukewarm about starting this series. Whiny Bella is part of what was holding me back. I also understand that Edward is fairly controlling and it's not the most healthy relationship. I finally bought Twilight, but it's not in my "read right now" pile. (Actually, my piles are now all in bookshelves, yay!) Your review is making me feel better that I haven't jumped on the bandwagon yet.
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