I also plan to start reading Dracula soon

I'd been to the beaches around La Push many times during my Forks summers with Charlie, so the mile-long crescent of First Beach was familiar to me. It was still breathtaking. The water was dark gray, even in the sunlight, white-capped and heaving to the gray, rocky shore. Islands rose out of the steel harbor waters with sheer cliff sides, reaching to uneven summits, and crowned with austere, soaring firs. The beach had only a thin border of actual sand at the water's edge, after which it grew into millions of large, smooth stones that looked uniformly gray from a distance, but close up were every shade a stone could be: terra-cotta, sea green, lavender, blue gray, dull gold. The tide line was strewn with huge driftwood trees, bleached bone white in the salt waves, some piled together against the edge of the forest fringe, some lying solitary, just out of reach of the waves.

There was a brisk wind coming off the waves, cool and briny. Pelicans floated on the swells while seagulls and a lone eagle wheeled above them. The clouds still circled the sky, threatening to invade at any moment, but for now the sun shone bravely in its halo of blue sky.


--Bella likes the scenery in Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

I'm reading Twilight. It's kind of a personal project. There's a lot of blogs out there dedicated to how it sucks, but I know a lot of people who're fans of it. So I opened up a copy and got started, to see if I could find the positives. The amount of people who told me to steal the book or 'god save your soul' encouraged me all the more.

Well, I'm on page seventy five (It's been fighting for readtime with Lovecraft, specifically The Dunwich Horror, which has been a bit of a slog) and I'm giving you the early results:

It's an easy read, and entertaining enough if you go into it with a neutral/favourable mood. Now, I don't know the later stuff yet (No one's uterus has been eaten yet). Recall I'm on book one. So I'm just gonna talk about that stage of things.

1. I like how Bella's immediately on the 'he has powers!' things, leading to this dramatized conversation:
   
   Bella: YOU HAVE POWERS
   Edward: what no why would you think that
   Bella: FUCK YOU YOU HAVE POWERS
   Edward: that is a lie stop lying bella
   Bella: I AM GOING TO DIG A PIT AND KEEP YOU IN THE PIT UNTIL I LEARN YOUR SECRETS AND BECOME THE GREATEST SUPERVILLAIN THIS WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN*
   Edward: look i have to go.
   
   I like to assume (this image is aided by Ann) that after this, whenever she would pass him in the halls she'd hiss 'POWERS' and Ed would be all D:
2. Jacob's an infant! My god. Hello, Jacob. At least in the book I don't have to deal with you being played by a white guy.
3. I kind of enjoy Bella playing matchmaker for all her friends. And, honestly, Bella's not so bad so far. I've seen a lot on how she's like, evil, but at this point in the book she does think of others and I like her reading. However, the whole 'oh god, he's a vampire. I should stop seeing him. ~thinks for a moment~ Naw.'** may need some further thinking on her part.
4. It's really easy to daydream ridiculous lines in this book, which is giving it a +10 entertainment value. This is why Dragonball Z was such a great show for me as a kid.

Now the big question! Based on what I've read so far, would I rec this book? Not as a general recommendation, the text is too clumsy, I don't know if enough people would be that interested in teen drama (I've actually been drawing a lot of mental connections between this book and Smallville. PS: Bella is smarter than Lana. She figured out Ed had powers day one. Lana, day eight hundred: "Gosh, Clark, that sure was weird! Do you have powers?" Clark: "gosh no" Lana: "Okay! I'm gonna whine for a bit now. PS my parents are dead and I'm not even going to use this as an excuse to be Batman"), and the people I know who *would* love Twilight have already read it.

But I do plan to finish it, because like I said, it's an easy read and entertaining while it's at it. I'm Team Bella Becomes Lex Luthor/The Kingpin. Long story.



*That was an 'inside the head' dialogue. Actual dramatized line: FUCK YOU YOU HAVE POWERS CONFESS
**She reasons he hasn't eaten her*** yet, so why not? I actually used that logic for when I got a second cat.
***Line was originally typoed 'she hasn't eaten him yet'. Bella, Vampire Nommer