Twilight (the book)

[rsadelle]

Any and all spoilers are below the cut. I make no promises about what may or may not be in the comments.

I have a thing about reading series in progress (this is why it was so hilarious that I spent fully one-fifth of my Barnes & Noble gift card on the next books in four different series), so I'd been waiting to try out Twilight until the series was complete. I didn't want to actually buy the thing, even with a gift card, and the library's waiting list is apparently insanely long, so I took myself off to Barnes & Noble today to read it. The irony of the situation is that I spent just as much or more on lunch, a cookie, and hot chocolate as I would have on buying the actual book.

Here's the short, non-spoilery version of what I think: Twilight would have been greatly improved by an editor who was unafraid to (a) chop and (b) force Stephenie Meyer to tighten it up. I have to admit to skipping whole sections. I also will not be reading the other books, but instead reading the plot summaries on Wikipedia or somewhere similar.

Now it's time for spoilery talk.

Politics and Worldview
The first time I really heard anything about Twilight was at WisCon 2007. I believe it was at the Lifestyles of the Rich and Supernatural panel. Holly Black, who was on the panel and writes YA fantasy, told us she meets a lot of teenage girls and they were all reading Twilight. She sounded mildly alarmed by it. Now that I've read the book, I can understand why. The book is extremely problematic from a feminist standpoint. Edward is, once they meet, Bella's entire reason for living. And she says this repeatedly. I think there would be a way to do this that would make it a natural consequence of being a teenage girl, but Bella is otherwise sensible, and it doesn't come across that way. It comes across as the most natural thing in the world. This made more sense when I read the about the author blurb: she went to BYU and currently lives in Arizona. A quick check of Wikipedia confirmed my suspicion, based on that blurb, that she's Mormon. This is not the message I want being given to the legions of young women who've made this such an insanely popular series.

The Loose End
There's something special about Bella, and Meyer never tells us what. I think there's a strong implication that her physical clumsiness, her mother's escape from Forks, her father's determination to stay there, and whatever it is that makes her so instantly attractive to Edward are all interconnected. I'll have to read book summaries for the other books to see if she ever follows up on that.

Technical Difficulties
K from my writing group has been struggling with how to describe people's eyes. She said she really likes the way Meyer does it, so I was half watching for that. I wasn't impressed. I thought her descriptions of Edward's eyes were repetitive and, quite frankly, cliche for the genre.

The other thing that stood out for me as a technical writing thing is the freeway regionalism. When Bella gives directions, she gives them as "the [freeway number]." Bella, like Meyer, has been living for years in Arizona, so I assume that this is the way people in Arizona actually refer to freeways. (And I have a suspicion that it might be a regionalism that's come to the area with transplants from Southern California.) But then Edward gives directions the same way, which I thought was iffy. Do people in the Pacific Northwest use "the" before the freeway number? I know it only as a SoCal thing.

Comments

[dine.livejournal.com]

wrt your last point - no, not generally, at least in Oregon, and I *think* that's also commonly the case for Washington.

when speaking, most of us include a designator with the number - I-5, I-84, 99E and 99W, etc. however, we also have a number of nicknames for highways (or even stretches of highways) which are frequently used, and it can take a while to figure out the correlation, as they're not used in conjunction with the number.

newcomers are often confused by the persistent usage of names such Terwilliger Turns, the Sunset, the Banfield, etc., in conversation/traffic reports. it took me ages after moving here to realize "the Banfield" was I-84, for example, though that was probably aided by the fact that initially I didn't drive, so I didn't really need to pay much attention.

[rsadelle]

I didn't think it was a Pacific Northwest kind of thing.

I was thinking that a lot of places have named freeways, but then I realized I'm not sure if it's "Capitol City Freeway" or "the Capitol City Freeway" in Sacramento. Here in Chico we have only 99 and 32, neither of which get any letters or other things tacked onto them (unless it's SoCal folks calling them "the 99" and "the 32" or Google Maps calling them "CA-99" and "CA-32"), and, in fact, I might even refer to 99 simply as "the freeway." Interstates sometimes get the I in front of them - I would be comfortable calling it either 5 or I-5.

I continue to find this a fascinating regionalism. Maybe I need to see if anyone's done any research on it.

[norwich36.livejournal.com]

As a data point, midwesterners (at least in the Chicago area) would say, for example, take I-65 to I-80 (though a lot of times these are named as well, and you might also say "take the toll road to the Bohrman," depending on where you were.

[rsadelle]

Huh. Interesting. Edward is originally from Chicago, but since he was turned in 1901, I don't think that would influence how he talks about freeways.

[meaganola.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to think of any highway/freeway in the Puget Sound area that we refer to using "the" and failing to come up with a single one (although I'm on day, um, five, I think, of con crud). There's the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but that's a *bridge*, not a highway.

Side note: I now literally cannot even go get my mail without seeing crap for this series. I moved to an apartment about half an hour from the hotel where they filmed the prom scene, and there were flyers by the mailboxes advertising a _Twilight_ Prom event there a few weeks ago.

[rsadelle]

Oh, yikes. I feel your Twilight overload pain.