But no, I said, no. There are four novels and they're all long, potentially sucking me in for a total of 2000+ pages. I just feel like my reading time is very precious and I have to guard it for the best stuff, and 2,000 pages crosses some mental barrier for me.
Then comes Caitlin Flanagan with a fabulous essay on the series in The Atlantic (which is great magazine seemingly at the top of its game right now). Flanagan apparently loved the Twilight series with its tale of Bella, a high school student, who falls in love with a classmate and finds out he's a vampire. Flanagan writes:
The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof. ...Then Flanagan medidates on the act of reading itself:
The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.
I think this is a really astute observation, and if it's a little bit of an overly broad generalization, it's only by a little bit. I particularly think her description of reading -- "to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others" -- holds true for adults as well. Though it reading as an emotional escape is something I'm always on guard against. I don't want to be some zombie escaping reality through books. I then wonder if I should be out traveling the world and having extreme experiences instead of reading. But then I argue with myself -- I have only a moderate fondness for travel, I love the home comforts, and reading is not only about entering the emotional lives of others. Reading is also (at least for me) about entering into language itself in an abstact, metaphysical way that I would personally describe as sacramental.
Now that's getting far afield of Flanagan's essay, but it's the kind of interesting thoughts her essay evokes. If any of this interests you at all, the whole essay is really worth reading. (But I still don't think I'm going to read 2,000+ pages of Twilight.)
3 comments:
Hi,
I read the first Twilight book out of curiosity. You need not fear that you will be sucked in to the rest of them. The writing at the sentence level sometimes descends into mockability. More importantly, the problem with the entire series was nicely summed up by an entertainment news source that criticized Bella Swan as an anti-feminist heroine whose entire daily life is spent waiting for the male hero to rescue her from her near-fatal cluelessness and klutziness. The male hero is also, basically, a God. His ability to rescue her comes largely from his power to hear every human's thoughts within 10 miles or so (every human's thoughts but hers, that is). I enjoyed the saccharine pleasures of the first book, but it left me feeling slightly sick.
Hee hee! That's funny!
I love YA and I loathed the first Twilight book. I have to agree with many of Lola Kate's points. The writing was laughable and Bella was horrid and annoying.
That said, I don't blame young girls from loving the series.
THAT said, I have too many other, better things to read than to read the next 3.
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