A question for Stephenie Meyer fans

[Tuvok Obama]

I haven't read any of the Twilight series.

I'm thinking about getting New Moon today so I can read it before the movie comes out next month. (I have a date to see it with a woman who is a big fan of the series.)

Will it make sense on its own, or should I read the first book first? I don't currently have a lot of time to read, so I'd really like to start with New Moon instead of trying to read two books by November 20.

(For anyone who might be wondering why I feel the need to read it at all ... well you'd just have to see how happy I am when I'm with her. I'd eat that book if I thought that would score me any points.)

[Midlodemocrat]

1. You need to read Twilight first, but be forewarned.

She is a terrible writer. Absolutely awful. That explains her appeal to the tween set.

[Tuvok Obama]

2. Oh that's not a good sign

My angel reads crap? Not a good sign at all

[Midlodemocrat]

3. I read the series along with my tween last year.

Let's just say...to be charitable...that the idea is really great, but the writing is horrible. It would have been a wonderful series if someone like JK Rowling wrote it.

[EOTE]

4. Damn straight. But as it is, it's drivel.

I read the first to see what the fuss was about and stupidly read the second to see if it would get any better. It actually got worse.

While it's not exactly self-contained, I definitely wouldn't recommend reading any of the books just to catch up.

I was once amazed that Stephanie Meyers was as successful as she is, but then I realized she's so successful because she writes just like a very hormonal teenage girl would. Dear god, I'd say a good 90% of the books is the protagonist droning on and on about how dreamy her Edward is. You'd think after the first few chapters people wouldn't need to be reminded of his Adonis-like qualities. But the protagonist's lust shines through on just about every page. Who knew that making such a masturbatory fantasy could be so incredibly profitable.

[tekisui]

28. She is a Mormon.

And, those young-uns who suppress their sexuality because they are told that is what God wants, love it. The adults who have done the same enjoy it, too.

[EOTE]

29. Well, she wanted to sell the sequels too.

If they did it right off the bat, the sexual tension would be gone. So she has them wait like good little mormons until they reach the bloody payoff.

[EOTE]

6. Can I ask how old your date is?

Perhaps if she's in her teens to late 20s, I'd consider it forgivable. Everyone has their guilty pleasures. But 30 or over, I might be a little concerned. There's this lady at my work who has to be in her 40s and has a Twilight calendar in her office. That just seemed a little creepy to me.

[Tuvok Obama]

8. 24

Very high IQ, eidetic memory, ex-military with high security clearance

[EOTE]

9. Probably just a "guilty" pleasure which may or may not be so guilty.

Don't bother reading any of the books, just see the movie as I'm guessing you won't have any problems following the story.

I'll give you the Cliffs Notes version of the first book just to catch you up: (spoiler alert)

Phoenix girl moves to Washington where the weather matches her personality. Girl falls in love with vampire, vampire falls in love with girl. Girl spends a ridiculous amount of time obsessing over this vampire and thinks about his physical details nearly every second of every day. Girl finds out that being close to a family of vampires can be dangerous and girl almost gets killed (several times). Girl gets saved by vampire and they go to a school dance.

There, I just saved you several hours of drudgery.

[Tuvok Obama]

10. Oh wow

That sounds bad.

But the reason I want to read this isn't so I can follow the movie. It's to (since we're on the subject of guilt) impress her. I'm in deep

[EOTE]

12. If you want to impress her, read the books.

Then get frosted tips and perfectly tousled bed head so you can look more like Edward. If she's like most girls who read the books, she's insanely attracted to Edward and might wonder why you can't be more like him. The books are the most emotionally manipulative things I've ever read. It's like the author wanted to know the best way of selling books without actually knowing how to write and decided that manipulating girls' emotions would be the best route. I'm convinced a lot of the girls who read the books read them more as PG (or perhaps PG-13) literotica than anything else. Although I've never read any Harlequin Romance novels, I can't imagine they're any worse than this.

But yeah, if you're concerned with impressing her, I'm sure that will do it. If you're a seasoned reader, you can probably bump each one off in less than 3 hours. And if you're really devious, I'm sure you could use a lot of the things you learn in the book to... ahem, get on her better side. I've done worse things to impress girls.

[Tuvok Obama]

13. You have been an enormous help

Thank you

It hadn't occurred to me to read this book and then not even tell her I read it

:evilgrin:

[EOTE]

14. Tsk tsk. Now that's TRULY devious.

That's a bold move to take. If you accidentally let something slip that shows you've read the books, you might be in trouble. But hey, no guts no glory.

It's funny that the positive reviews of the books note how impressive it is that the female protagonist is smart. Well yeah, she may be smart for a 17 year old, but she's written by a 40 something lady. The books are just her own personal fantasy, how her high school life would have played out in her idealized world. And then all the adulation for Edward, it all makes sense because this is just a lady who refused to let go of her teenage years and had to make literary porn and Edward is her ideal porn star.

I'd imagine I'd have similar success if I made my own vampire novel directed at teenaged males. The protagonist is Ted. Ted falls in love with Amber whom he soon finds out is a vampire. Despite her insatiable appetite for his bodily fluids, Amber manages to control herself around Ted because she loves him so much. Forget everything you think you know about vampires, it's all bullshit. Amber's primary ability is a complete lack of gag reflex and Ted takes full advantage of it. Amber has the looks of a porn star, yet is attracted to plain ol' Ted because he's so gosh darn smart, and she finds the scent of his seminal fluids irresistible (real vampires need semen to survive, all that blood stuff is just hokum). It turns out that Amber and her family of vampires moved to Seattle because of the dreary weather. Not because sunlight makes vampires explode into flames, mind you, but because sunlight makes their clothes instantly disappear (an interesting tidbit that Amber shares one day with Ted in the seclusion of a meadow). Amber is incredibly powerful, but knows that Ted likes to be the male, so she gives him the impression that he's still the man in the relationship.

Shit practically writes itself.

[nolabear]

16. Only difference here is that as a Mormon, Mayer's whole m.o. is to KEEP sex from happening.

Seriously.

[EOTE]

18. But they DO have sex, that's the payoff.

Granted, there's a rather unrealistic wait, but it happens. And the delay in sex says nothing about the book's sole intent to provoke "special feelings" for those millions of young readers. As I said, it may be mostly PG porn, but it's porn none-the-less.

[Missy Vixen]

15. I'm 49, I just read "Twilight" the night before last

I don't have a "Twilight" calendar or an Edward Cullen action figure, but I'm sorry I didn't write the book. Even more, I enjoyed it.

It's a nice break from Jon Krakauer's biography of Pat Tillman, and my own writing.

I might also mention that I am a romance author. You may be interested to know that the women who write the novels you're speaking of are making a high five-figure income for two 60,000 word novels a year. It's also next to impossible to get a contract.

[EOTE]

19. I have no doubt that it's a lucrative profession.

Millions of people buy those books. I'm simply saying that there's no correlation between the popularity of a work and its quality. I can't comment on any of those Harlequin Romance novels, but my opinion on Meyers' books remains.

[Missy Vixen]

21. So, in other words, you've never actually read a romance novel

Why don't you read a book written by one of the following, and get back to me with your comments?

Jennifer Crusie (Ohio State prof, currently working on her doctorate)
Eloisa James (tenured prof at Fordham; Yale Ph.D)
Julia Quinn (dropped out of med school at Yale when her first two books went to auction)

>I'm simply saying that there's no correlation between the popularity of a work and its quality.<

Again, you've never read a romance novel. How would you know anything about how they're written?

Stephenie Meyer may not be your taste, but she's written something that resonates sufficiently with large groups of people that she found herself on the NYT list. For those who think they can do so much better, I challenge you to do so.

[EOTE]

22. I said earlier that I don't read romance novels.

I never said that I did. Those two Twilight books were the closest I've come, and I thought they were pretty bad.

I made the comparison to Harlequin Romance books because of the emotionally manipulative way they were written. When I was talking about the correlation between popularity and quality, I was referring to Meyers' books, not romance novels in general. So once again, while I've never read a romance novel, I imagine that most females read them as a form of erotica (my SO certainly does). If I was a 13 year old girl, I'd imagine I'd have been consumed by the books and would have had many sleepless nights over the fate of Edward and Bella. But considering that I'm a 30 year old male, I can see that her work is just manipulation. She retrofits facts and fudges whenever she wants to go in a direction she didn't intend before and she does whatever the hell she wants with the vampire mythos simply to make them more attractive to teenage girls.

I'm not an author, but I know good fiction when I read it. Once again, your assertion that because she's on the NYT list, she's made a good piece of fiction doesn't hold any water. Millions of people have read Mein Kampf. Billions have read the Bible. How many millions of books do you think Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin have sold? Popularity does not equate to quality no matter how much you'd like that to be the case.

[Missy Vixen]

23. So, in other words, you don't know what you're talking about

I saw in a later post that you claim "that shit writes itself". Again, I challenge you: Write a romance novel. Most of the people who smugly inform me (and my colleagues) that they're "formulaic" and "badly written" don't get even one chapter down on paper, let alone the 100,000-word manuscripts I write.

>So once again, while I've never read a romance novel, I imagine that most females read them as a form of erotica (my SO certainly does).<

Most romance readers enjoy the story, the characters, and the reminder of what it was like when they fell in love. Sex scenes make up less than 10% of the typical romance novel. "Erotica" is a completely different classification, and those in the market for it tend to ignore other sub-genres.

>Popularity does not equate to quality no matter how much you'd like that to be the case.<

You might want to pick up "Jane Eyre" or any of the works of Jane Austen; they're romance novelists who've been selling for hundreds of years now. Then again, they're "popular", so it's probably crap, right?

[EOTE]

25. You seem to have some comprehension problems.

For the third time now, I'm not commenting on the romance novels you're talking about, I'm strictly talking about those Twilight novels which I've read and feel are crap. And once again, the primary function of those books is PG porn for young girls.

And for you to make a completely obvious note about how some popular works are in fact good shows me how little you get it. When I say "Popularity does not equate to quality", that does not mean that there's an inverse relationship between how popular something is and its quality. That would be silly. It simply means that there is NO relationship between how popular something is and how good it is. In fact, a lot of popular things are utter crap. Does that mean that if something is popular, it's crap? Not at all. This is rather simple logic here.

[LynneSin]

5. Skip Twilight and get the True Blood Series (Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Stories)

First book is "Dead Like Me"

Books are written for adults, not tweeners

[EOTE]

7. +1. The books and the show are awesome.

The quality of the writing stands in stark contrast the trite crap in the Twilight series. Harris is an infinitely better writer than Meyers.

[kiva]

11. I haven't read Meyers, but absolutly agree about the Southern

Vampire series - they're great fun.

[I Have A Dream]

17. I enjoyed the books.

I know many intelligent, mature adults who enjoyed them.

[Fleshdancer]

20. I think you'll miss a lot by not reading Twilight first. It's a VERY quick read though...

Out of all the books, I think New Moon is the least interesting. Overall it's a quick, fun series to read as long as you remember what audience it was written for (translation: don't expect terrific writing).

If you want to skip Twilight, PM me and I'll give you an in depth overview as well as answer any New Moon questions you have later.

on edit: your reason for reading it is VERY sweet. :)

[Tuvok Obama]

26. After realizing the potential (clued in by EOTE's replies),

I went out and bought Twilight and New Moon last night, hoping to get a glimpse into the mind of this woman I'm so interested in. You're right, it's a quick read. I should have these finished in no time. Thank you for the offer, though

[greenbriar]

24. you MUST read Twilight first

no joking

[Generic Brad]

27. Read the books

Go in without any expectations of how a vampire or a werewolf should behave and enjoy.