I think I need to apologize to the women out there who were offended by my post implying that these books were making girls wish their boyfriends were vampires. After the first book, I was still unconvinced. The second book was so slow and tough to read that it took me 3 weeks to start reading the third one after I finished. Well, that and the fact that I wasn’t about to pay for a hardcover copy, and people I knew who had the book were having trouble remembering to loan it to me. Now that I’ve read all the books, I can see that they have an appeal beyond simply “girl meets boy, girl finds out boy is vampire, girl falls in love with vampire, vampire loves girl so much he won’t eat her even though her blood smells SOOOOOO good.”
Though that part is there. The lovey dovey stuff in the books is so over the top, I found my eyes glazing over everytime Bella and Eddie were alone, only to have to go back and re-read all the mushy stuff to find the one sentence that tied that conversation to whatever the next scene was.
The biggest thing about these books is that they’re long enough that the author is able to bring the characters to life. The first book is almost exclusively Bella and Edward, but as the series progresses, you learn more and more about the peripheral characters, and you start to identify with one or many of them. You start to think about which characters you’d like to hang out with, which one’s you’d want to date (for me it’s unquestionably Alice) and which ones you wouldn’t mind if they were eternally damned.
Reading that many pages and investing that much time in the story is much like the feeling I got after playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I’d spent so much time with my gangsta that when I drove down the street, I’d be convinced that I could just use my car to block traffic wherever I wanted and take a better car from the old lady behind me. I would think about “what would happen if those guys on the corner suddenly pulled out submachine guns and opened fire? How would I react? What would I do?”
With the Twilight books, you almost can’t help feeling as if you’ve moved to Forks and are constantly seeing vampires and other supernatural things. Rachel remarked that she had trouble concentrating at work the other day when measuring people’s blood sugar levels because she was worried that if she poked somebody’s finger too hard and they bled a little too much, one of the other patients might not be able to contain their vampiric bloodlust any longer.
The ironic thing is that I hardly have any interest in vampire cultures. I’ve never read another book about vampires, I didn’t wait in line on opening night to see “Van Helsing” (still haven’t seen it actually) and only watched the Blade movies because TNT insists on playing them every weekend. Much like I don’t have any real interest in “Thug Life” yet was completely consumed by Grand Theft Auto. Sometimes people just like to get away from the mundane life of “eat, work, sleep.”
I also saw the movie this weekend. First off, nobody who didn’t read the books would ever consider that a good movie. Second, I was a bit bewildered by the girls in the theater who gasped when Edward first showed up on the screen....did you not know who was playing him? Did you honestly not know what he was going to look like? Thirdly, I’ve never been to a movie where the foreshadowing was picked up on instantly by ever single person in the theater. Every inside joke was hilarious, every hint about future happenings was blatantly obvious. Very different atmosphere than most movies I’ve been to. And finally, any guy who sees the movie will not be able to get over how horrible the special effects were. One of my friends equated the way the vampires moved to The Flintstones “driving” their cars. Not that far off. The only scene that involved special effects that was even remotely well done was the baseball scene in my opinion.
So when I finish the 4th book (I’ll finish tonight), I’ll have to take a week or two to “move out of Forks” so to speak. But then what? Do I start reading Harry Potter? Lord help me if I start down that path.....
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