A friend of mine wanted to borrow my copy of Twilight. I warned her that it was crack. Sweet, sweet, wonderful crack. But she went ahead and borrowed it. And then a few days later, she was drooling and shaking from the withdrawal, fiending at more door for the next one (who really cares what the exact title is?)
Months later, she got around to returning them and once that happened, those two books sort of sat on my dining room table, like glistening, sparkly vials of tantalizing crack. I tried to ignore them for a few days, but then on accident, I picked up the first one. And I started to read it. The next thing I know, I had accidentally re-read all four of them.
So now that I’ve done it a second time, I have to say what I should have said when I was reading these the first go round: these books are such complete and utter trash, but addictive in the most wretched sort of way. It’s a combination of trash and addiction that I would liken to the VC Andrews books. Except without the sexual tensions and incest and periods and arsenic poisoning, because the Twilight books are written by a Mormon! The raciest we get is some heavy breathing. Scoff.
So I am carrying around these 800 page tomes with me everywhere: to work every day, to the nail salon, to Tahoe. And teenage girls keep pointing out that I’ve got one and wanting to commiserate about how great they are. And I’m all, mmm hmm… yeah, they’re super. There’s a girl at work who would come in every day to see where I was, except that she was rather horrified that at the same time that I was scarfing my way through the books (for the SECOND time) that I was also hating them. The first go round, I was so caught up in just being engaged in the story that my hate was minimal. I was still skeptical and annoyed by the immediate profundity of the teenage love and just how much they wanted to DIE DIE DIE without each other. But god damn! What’s gonna happen next? What WHAT WHATTT??!!!
Another friend who read the series turned me on to this blog site: Occupation: Girl, which has a completely genius synopsis of all 4 books. I particularly love the bits about the fourth book, when Bella and Edward finally have sex. They are both virgins and it’s their honeymoon and it’s just so SO wholesome that I want to roll my eyeballs straight out of my head. There is no sex scene description, just a fade to black, dot dot dot, wink wink, oh isn’t it dreamy?! Swoon! But the next morning, Bella is bruised all over her body from being pounded on by the sparkly granite body of Edward. And what I loved in that blog, was that she points out that this would only have been the case from doing it missionary style. The sad Mormon sex (which was passionate as evidenced by a destroyed headboard) should certainly not involve any women on top.
It’s been a week since I finished reading. And it still gets me all annoyed. And sadly, the truth is, I have no doubt that a time will come that I will accidentally go plowing through all four books again. <chagrin>
margaret edith 