AAAH TWILIGHT

I picked up the first book intending to read only to the bit where the vampire sparkles. I was told this occurred early in the book, but I was misled. After wading through 200 pages of Bella and Edward exchanging significant glances and Bella’s internal monologue about Edward’s perrrrfect sillhouette and deliiiicious-smelling breath (seriously? a vampire? shouldn’t he smell like blood?), Edward finally sparkled. I was so close to the end that I finished the book, but first I bought sparkly gel pens and left my opinions in the margins. I then proceeded to mark up the second book and got halfway through the third before nausea left me unable to read any further. (I am now enjoying The Scar by China Mieville.)

I don’t expect teen romance novels to be beautifully written, but the messages these books send are flat-out apalling. Bella has no interests aside from Edward, scorning human friends unless she needs something from them. In the first book, Edward snuck into Bella’s room every night and watched her sleep–she finds out after a couple months and is of course flattered by his attention. Later on, Edward forbids Bella to see her werewolf friends, even disabling her truck so she can’t disobey. The Cullens basically keep her as a pet–seriously, they carry her around. Oh, and did I mention that the whole reason Edward is so fascinated by Bella is because she smells like the tastiest walking dinner he has ever encountered and he has to constantly battle desires to drain her of blood? As of now, her only plans for the future consist of becoming a vampire and living happily ever after.

My eventual plan is to finish, ahem, annotating the books, include warning signs of abusive relationships inside each cover, and release them into the wild, possibly through Bookcrossing.

 

Purpose.

I read for fun. This is hard to do in grad school; my weekdays are filled with homework and projects and the half-time job that pays for my education, and on weekends I try to get outside and see friends as much as I possibly can without compromising my grades. I can’t imagine what life will be like once I start working on my thesis in a month or so. After squinting at words on a computer screen all day long I can’t bear to read anything that isn’t compelling. Lately my two genres of choice have been domestic fiction and cyberpunk. Between May and September last year I plowed through the complete adult works of Jane Austen, William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, a handful of Discworld novels I hadn’t previously read or didn’t remember, and the first Jason Bourne book (haven’t picked up another). Then I devised a challenge for myself: how long could I go reading only women authors? Twisty’s sci-fi thread served as my initial source of authors and aside from a brief Discworld lapse I haven’t really looked back. I have finally decided to devote this little piece of internet real estate to my exploration of woman-authored science/speculative fiction.

Coming soon: Marge Piercey’s Woman on the Edge of Time.