Have You Ever…
…read a book that every one around seemed to be reading and raving about but found it to be forced, cliche, and, well, kind of lame? My husband and I just finished reading (technically listening to; we’re all about the audio books) Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a vampire love story and the main character is a teenage girl (Bella) who falls in love with a 100 year old vampire (Edward). Shortly before Aubrey was born, I saw that a couple of acquaintances whose blogs I read had posted reviews about the third book in the series, Eclipse, and had gone on and on about how good it was and how good the series as a whole is. Then my church’s book club decided to read Twilight that same month. I nearly read it and attended my first ever book club meeting just based on what I’d read about it so far. What I did instead was download it off of Audible.com, set it up on my iTunes account, and then forget about it until two weeks ago.
That was when it happened. We spent several evenings listening to it and generally making fun of the book. Suffice it to say, it was like an audio version of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The narrator read the book, trying hard to impart an emotion other than the "OhmyGOODness! Gag me with a spoon!" attitude one expects from the stereotypical high school drama queen. The writing was…lacking at best. There was one sentence where the author used the word "immeasurable" three different times referring to three different nouns. In one sentence. I kid you not. Also? If Bella had used the word "perfect" or "beautiful" to describe Edward one more time, I may have had to mail the author a thesaurus. Or perhaps this instead…
I guess I had such a rough time in high school that I truly don’t want to hear anymore about it. I’m really glad I didn’t end up going to that book club meeting. I doubt they would have appreciated anything I had to say about it at all! So why, oh why, am I looking forward to listening to the rest of the series? Perhaps I should just leave it to the teen demographic it was aimed at.
