Curiosity killed the cat. . .
So, *sigh* I read the Twilight books. Even Midnight Sun (in fact, I started with that one and I can't say Stephenie Meyer's writing improves much with editing). I read from Friday to Friday. The following are my thoughts on the series (there are probably spoilers). Nevermind the annoying teenager point of view (the "oh, 19 is so old compared to 17" mentality or the "OMG our love is unlike anything that's ever happened in the world EVAR!" mentality or the "we've been dating for 6 months and now that he's gone my life is over" mentality), these are some other thoughts I had.
First, these books were written by Captain Obvious, or at least from his/her point of view. I swear, things the characters, even the supposed centuries old "perfect" ones with supernatural mind powers, were struggling to piece together were so painfully obvious from the reader's point of view. Then I felt this dragging to get to the point from there. There was a constant feeling of knowing what's going to happen several chapters ahead and then dragging through a bunch of mundane crap like brushing your teeth and going to school to get to the freakin' point.
Second, I'm glad I'm not in high school anymore.
Third, does she have to be so anticlimactic? All four books lead up to some showdown, of course. In all four books, she either finds a way to avoid directly describing the action by removing the person narrating from the action or she avoids it by having it fizzle out into an agreement instead of a confrontation. I could understand it happening once, even twice out of the four books, but when you follow the exact same pattern for every one of your novels, it just shows lack of creativity, in my opinion. Granted we get a little bit of a fight in Eclipse with the 2 on 2 action of Victoria and her protege versus Seth and Edward, but that's just not very satisfying when there's the ultimate battle between the Cullens and their werewolf friends versus an army of newborn vampires. The Breaking Dawn anticlimax pissed me off to no end. I mean, they were even discussing their targets, each person staking their claims on who they wanted to take down on the Volturi side, and then all of the sudden Alice comes in with some sort of new info. I'm just not buying it that the Volturi were so hell bent on destroying the Cullens no matter what excuse they had to make for their actions and then a little piece of info comes up that didn't seem like it would have mattered to them under the circumstances, and they suddenly don't want to dispute anymore? I know Bella surprised them with her little mental shield, but seriously, like she was anticipating, they could have taken her out easily and then the rest would be history.
Fourth, I'm glad I didn't pay for these books (downloaded pdfs).
Fifth, I don't appreciate the glorification of abusive relationships, especially since it seems teenage girls are idealizing this sort of behavior. Both Edward and Jacob are quite abusive to Bella, especially in Eclipse and all I could think about were clips of crowd interviews when the movie was coming out about "every girl wants to be Bella" and "Edward's like the perfect boyfriend". I'm sorry, but someone who sneaks in your room at night to watch you sleep and follows you when you go out of town with your friends and tries to control where you're going and when and tries to forbid you to see your best friend just because he's afraid of a little competition. . . you get my point. I had the list of Dear Abbey's 15 signs your partner is abusive fresh in my head while reading this and I have to say, both Edward and Jacob exhibit too many of those signs to be healthy choices for Bella. Granted, Edward did chill out eventually and I have to admit, I liked him a lot more after he did, but still, these were qualities Bella found endearing and that's not right! And the way they played games over her near the end of Eclipse? Jacob telling her he was going to go kill himself in the battle because she didn't love him just to get her to kiss him? That's bullshit!
Sixth, I'm having trouble with most of the characters. They're just not believable. While reading Midnight Sun, I kept thinking about how Edward doesn't live up to his history. He's supposed to be over a hundred and can read people's thoughts. He should be an expert on human nature, right? But, he's totally puzzled by Bella and she's just such an ordinary girl. I realize he can't read her thoughts and that's become sort of a crutch for him, but still, I'm not buying it, he should have better intuition than that. Also, he just doesn't have the maturity I'd think someone who lived that long should have. There are others, but I won't get into them. Some exceptions, of course Alice is awesome and Jasper is pretty cool too when he's not sulking and Emmett actually was one of my favorite characters, which I wasn't expecting. I just pictured him as being an overgrown kid the way he took nothing seriously. It just doesn't make sense that the secondary characters were better put together than the primary ones.
Seventh, Stephenie Meyer needs a thesaurus. I got so sick of seeing "stalked out of the room" and "narrowed his eyes" and "pursed my lips". What 17-year-old girl talks or thinks like that? Also, I got sick of seeing descriptions of every movement (or stillness even) and every subtle motion. There's so much filler in these books! That's kind of what I meant by not much is improved by editing for her. There's still so much junk that's left in that does nothing to advance the story and doesn't add a lot to the atmosphere either. It just doesn't seem well thought out, which I guess, after reading the wikipedia article to get a little more insight into her writing process, I understand that now. From the time she had her inspirational dream that gave her the story, she only took three months to write Twilight. That's why it reads like a rough draft. But the rest of the series reads the same way, and it's so annoying to drag through a bunch of crap that doesn't matter to get to something that does (and then to have the stuff that matters fizzle out into anticlimax). I agreed with cleopatramwi that I wanted to kill myself while reading this series, but that's not entirely true. It actually made me want to kill someone else! I read a criticism somewhere that Meyer seems to like anything that unnecessarily drags a sentence out and that's so true! Her adjective and adverb usage more often than not just made for awkward sentences and just drags the point out. Then, once the point is made, she almost harps on it.
Eighth, I was so sick of the recaps of every little back reference. Granted I was reading these books end to end, but anyone, and I mean ANYONE who's reading past book 1 has read the previous books. The first three chapters of every book and even a few references farther out were written with the assumption that you haven't read the others or at least that you need to be brought up to speed, like a refresher course or something. There again, it just seemed like something that needlessly drew out the story. Not only that, it just felt clumsy and made Bella's narration seem that much more artificial.
I will say though, it took no brain power to read this. I'd set up my laptop somewhere that I could easily see it and fold clothes or wash dishes or clean the bathroom. I actually still got a lot done last week even though I read five books (or 4.5 since Midnight Sun is incomplete). And like I said, the story itself wasn't inherently bad, if I could ignore the incomplete feeling of the characters and the amateur, rough draft feeling of the writing. It was an ok idea, just executed horribly. I am now feeling a very strong need to wash out my brain, though. I think after I finish Bart Yasso's 'My Life on the Run' so I can get it back to J-9, I'm going to pick up the Zen meditation book baka_san gave me for Christmas. Need to read something meaningful before I become homicidal. I think for vampire stories, I'll stick to Anne Rice or Bram Stoker.
First, these books were written by Captain Obvious, or at least from his/her point of view. I swear, things the characters, even the supposed centuries old "perfect" ones with supernatural mind powers, were struggling to piece together were so painfully obvious from the reader's point of view. Then I felt this dragging to get to the point from there. There was a constant feeling of knowing what's going to happen several chapters ahead and then dragging through a bunch of mundane crap like brushing your teeth and going to school to get to the freakin' point.
Second, I'm glad I'm not in high school anymore.
Third, does she have to be so anticlimactic? All four books lead up to some showdown, of course. In all four books, she either finds a way to avoid directly describing the action by removing the person narrating from the action or she avoids it by having it fizzle out into an agreement instead of a confrontation. I could understand it happening once, even twice out of the four books, but when you follow the exact same pattern for every one of your novels, it just shows lack of creativity, in my opinion. Granted we get a little bit of a fight in Eclipse with the 2 on 2 action of Victoria and her protege versus Seth and Edward, but that's just not very satisfying when there's the ultimate battle between the Cullens and their werewolf friends versus an army of newborn vampires. The Breaking Dawn anticlimax pissed me off to no end. I mean, they were even discussing their targets, each person staking their claims on who they wanted to take down on the Volturi side, and then all of the sudden Alice comes in with some sort of new info. I'm just not buying it that the Volturi were so hell bent on destroying the Cullens no matter what excuse they had to make for their actions and then a little piece of info comes up that didn't seem like it would have mattered to them under the circumstances, and they suddenly don't want to dispute anymore? I know Bella surprised them with her little mental shield, but seriously, like she was anticipating, they could have taken her out easily and then the rest would be history.
Fourth, I'm glad I didn't pay for these books (downloaded pdfs).
Fifth, I don't appreciate the glorification of abusive relationships, especially since it seems teenage girls are idealizing this sort of behavior. Both Edward and Jacob are quite abusive to Bella, especially in Eclipse and all I could think about were clips of crowd interviews when the movie was coming out about "every girl wants to be Bella" and "Edward's like the perfect boyfriend". I'm sorry, but someone who sneaks in your room at night to watch you sleep and follows you when you go out of town with your friends and tries to control where you're going and when and tries to forbid you to see your best friend just because he's afraid of a little competition. . . you get my point. I had the list of Dear Abbey's 15 signs your partner is abusive fresh in my head while reading this and I have to say, both Edward and Jacob exhibit too many of those signs to be healthy choices for Bella. Granted, Edward did chill out eventually and I have to admit, I liked him a lot more after he did, but still, these were qualities Bella found endearing and that's not right! And the way they played games over her near the end of Eclipse? Jacob telling her he was going to go kill himself in the battle because she didn't love him just to get her to kiss him? That's bullshit!
Sixth, I'm having trouble with most of the characters. They're just not believable. While reading Midnight Sun, I kept thinking about how Edward doesn't live up to his history. He's supposed to be over a hundred and can read people's thoughts. He should be an expert on human nature, right? But, he's totally puzzled by Bella and she's just such an ordinary girl. I realize he can't read her thoughts and that's become sort of a crutch for him, but still, I'm not buying it, he should have better intuition than that. Also, he just doesn't have the maturity I'd think someone who lived that long should have. There are others, but I won't get into them. Some exceptions, of course Alice is awesome and Jasper is pretty cool too when he's not sulking and Emmett actually was one of my favorite characters, which I wasn't expecting. I just pictured him as being an overgrown kid the way he took nothing seriously. It just doesn't make sense that the secondary characters were better put together than the primary ones.
Seventh, Stephenie Meyer needs a thesaurus. I got so sick of seeing "stalked out of the room" and "narrowed his eyes" and "pursed my lips". What 17-year-old girl talks or thinks like that? Also, I got sick of seeing descriptions of every movement (or stillness even) and every subtle motion. There's so much filler in these books! That's kind of what I meant by not much is improved by editing for her. There's still so much junk that's left in that does nothing to advance the story and doesn't add a lot to the atmosphere either. It just doesn't seem well thought out, which I guess, after reading the wikipedia article to get a little more insight into her writing process, I understand that now. From the time she had her inspirational dream that gave her the story, she only took three months to write Twilight. That's why it reads like a rough draft. But the rest of the series reads the same way, and it's so annoying to drag through a bunch of crap that doesn't matter to get to something that does (and then to have the stuff that matters fizzle out into anticlimax). I agreed with cleopatramwi that I wanted to kill myself while reading this series, but that's not entirely true. It actually made me want to kill someone else! I read a criticism somewhere that Meyer seems to like anything that unnecessarily drags a sentence out and that's so true! Her adjective and adverb usage more often than not just made for awkward sentences and just drags the point out. Then, once the point is made, she almost harps on it.
Eighth, I was so sick of the recaps of every little back reference. Granted I was reading these books end to end, but anyone, and I mean ANYONE who's reading past book 1 has read the previous books. The first three chapters of every book and even a few references farther out were written with the assumption that you haven't read the others or at least that you need to be brought up to speed, like a refresher course or something. There again, it just seemed like something that needlessly drew out the story. Not only that, it just felt clumsy and made Bella's narration seem that much more artificial.
I will say though, it took no brain power to read this. I'd set up my laptop somewhere that I could easily see it and fold clothes or wash dishes or clean the bathroom. I actually still got a lot done last week even though I read five books (or 4.5 since Midnight Sun is incomplete). And like I said, the story itself wasn't inherently bad, if I could ignore the incomplete feeling of the characters and the amateur, rough draft feeling of the writing. It was an ok idea, just executed horribly. I am now feeling a very strong need to wash out my brain, though. I think after I finish Bart Yasso's 'My Life on the Run' so I can get it back to J-9, I'm going to pick up the Zen meditation book baka_san gave me for Christmas. Need to read something meaningful before I become homicidal. I think for vampire stories, I'll stick to Anne Rice or Bram Stoker.