Twilight

I just finished reading Twilight.  I made a deal with my novels class, "You read Dracula, I'll read Twilight."  I think most of them actually read it.  So here, in five words, are a 33-year-old man's thoughts on the infamous teen vampire romance: it's a teen vampire romance.  That's it.  As I told my class one day, "my problem is that I'm not a teenage girl."

I feel like I have no context by which to fairly judge this book, having never read a romance novel, but I'm going to judge it anyway.  Stephanie Meyer has obviously captured the imagination of millions of teenage girls of all ages, so she must doing something right.  For me, though, the book was a series of desperately hopeful build-ups, and awful let-downs.  I wanted it to be good, despite everything I'd heard, and honestly gave it a chance.  For the first 150 pages or so, I thought it was interesting, but only because I assumed it was going somewhere.  Alas, that was not to be.

I'll briefly list my chief complaints:
1. Vampires playing baseball during thunderstorms so they can literally hit the ball with a thunderous crack is the silliest thing I've ever read, and not the good kind of silly.
2. Everyone in this book, especially Bella, needs to eat more food.  Skipping lunch because your crush is mysteriously absent is a bad idea.
3. Every time I thought it was headed somewhere, that something was actually going to happen, all I got was more obsessing, more drooling over Edward.
4. A vampire sparkling in the sunlight of a secluded meadow, cuddling carefully with his human girlfriend is the most inane thing I've ever read.
5.  Will everyone please stop comparing this series to Harry Potter?  It is not at all the same sort of book, but as I was reading Twilight, I got so many questions and comments along those lines.

The worst thing about this book is that it is ALL about a lonely girl obsessing over a boy, mostly for his looks.  That's it.  Even the climax is disappointingly bogged down by pages and pages of Bella in a hotel room missing Edward, then being duped in a ridiculously simple way by her captor.

Finally, I'm not interested in the emotional complexities of loving a vampire.  By the end of the book, Bella wants to become a vampire.  She calls prom a "trite human thing."  Edward refuses to turn her into a "monster", which is supposed to demonstrate Edward's nobility, but somehow only makes him seem more self-indulgent.  The best literature, in my opinion, affirms our humanity while allowing us to escape our personal situation for a time.  Twilight, however, only affirms our desire to escape.