For Whom the Bella Tolls

Okay, I'll admit it: I'm starting to get hooked. I'd intended to immediately write a clever, erudite summation of the first Twilight book once I'd completed reading it, but it seems a little silly to do so now that I've plowed almost 200 pages forward into the second book, New Moon.

That doesn't mean that I've come to terms with the questionable writing or the cartoonishly angsty teenaged characters, but I am beginning to enjoy myself despite myself. But this wouldn't be a Swanson blog without my typically arrogant, Snarky McSnarkerson, Stiffly Stifferson commentary, so I will try to not disappoint. This is, after all, a culturally elitist blog (Thurston Howell has nothing on me).

As noted, I completed the first book a few days ago, and am now well into the second. My newfound sense of urgency is partly related to my wanting to finish all four books while Breaking Dawn, Part 2 is still in theaters, so I can say I sort of took part in the movie sensation while it's still around. Kristen Stewart has been making the talk-show rounds lately to promote On the Road, and I'm beginning to anticipate how she may have portrayed the character of Bella in the movie series. I must say I'm intrigued. Stewart's personality seems to be not unlike Bella, and it's not hard to see why she was given the role. As for Robert Pattinson, his pretty boy take on Cedric Diggory never seemed particularly appropriate to Harry Potter, but I can see it working perfectly in the role of Edward Cullen in Twilight. I'm actually excited to start watching the movies, and that is a big reason for my accelerating reading.

Much to my surprise, however, most of the reason for my increasingly eager consumption of this literary celebration of all that is youthful ants-in-the-pants is that I'm actually enjoying it. We were all teenagers at one time, and it's not hard to get dragged back into that mindset from reading Twilight. Now that I'm a 32-year-old, married, professional symphony musician it can get all too easy for me to forget about how the pain of lost love feels to a young person, but Bella's emotional agony at the (presumably temporary) end of her relationship to Edward Cullen uncomfortably brings me back to that time of life. On reading of this development in her story I began to actually feel some sympathy for Bella.

Then I came to the part of the story where Bella is (for some bizarre reason) given two non-functional motorcycles and takes them to her friend Jacob Black to fix up without her father knowing (he disapproves of motorcycles). This is her forward-thinking way of accomplishing this:

"'I've got some money saved. College fund, you know.' College, schmollege, I thought to myself. It wasn't like I'd saved up enough to go anywhere special - and besides, I had no desire to leave Forks anyway. What difference would it make if I skimmed a little bit off the top? ... As we skulked back to the makeshift garage, I contemplated my luck. Only a teenaged boy would agree to this: deceiving both our parents while repairing dangerous vehicles using money meant for my college education. He didn't see anything wrong with that picture. Jacob was a gift from the gods."

Yeah.

My sympathy for Bella now? Not so much. Throughout the first book I felt that Bella simply wasn't a good person, and now it's even harder for to find any sense of agreement with her decision-making ability. I guess a person's overall character and her decision-making are not necessarily the same thing, but Bella's choices have consistently left my jaw hanging (and a hanging jaw is not a good look for me). She's using money from her college fund to fix up motorcycles? Since when did 18 become an acceptable age to have a midlife crisis?

And yet, despite this, I continue reading, and I'm okay with that. My sense of inner chagrin is getting less pronounced every day. I anticipate being 100% chagrin-free by the end of 2012. Maybe it's a good thing that, if the Mayans are right, we'll never live to see that day.

Wipe that chagrin off your face.

Things are getting intense in the latter chapters of Twilight. Bella Swan is being chased by an evil "tracker" vampire named James who is determined to catch her and violently suck her blood until she is dead. So, naturally, I'm quite concerned about the fact her 104-year-old boyfriend has been, without her knowledge, sneaking into her room at night to watch her sleep.

As obsessed as Bella is with Edward Cullen, you would think that the fact her vampire beau has been sneaking into her room to watch her sleep would be a deal-breaker, or at the very least a tremendous red flag. Edward justifies his actions by asking her "What else is there to do at night?" You can just imagine the tough talk the obviously furious Bella dresses him down with:

"'You spied on me?' But somehow I couldn't infuse my voice with the proper outrage. I was flattered."

There was a brief period on Friends when Chandler was living with a psycho named Eddie. There was a memorable episode in which Chandler woke up in his bedroom to find Eddie sitting in a chair beside him, watching him sleep. Obviously, Chandler freaked out and immediately set about permanently removing Eddie from the apartment. I would consider that a perfectly understandable and quite necessary reaction.

I do not, however, consider "I was flattered" to be an understandable reaction.

Not only that, but Edward still thinks Bella is overreacting: "His expression shifted instantly to chagrin ... 'Don't be upset!' he pleaded. He dropped his face to the level of my eyes, holding my gaze. I was embarrassed. I tried to look away."

Are you kidding me? What on earth is wrong with these people? I've been married for a few years now to a woman I've known for a decade, and I would find it a bit strange if my wife was regularly watching me sleep. Bella hasn't known Edward very long and she's 87 years younger than him. This vampire story has just taken a turn for the creepy, and not the awesome, horror-movie kind of creepy that one would hope for in a blood-sucker tale. This is creepy in a To Catch a Predator kind of way.

I'm almost done with the book now, but as I write this I'm staring at the tall stack of books in the Twilight series left to be read, and I'm scared of what I might end up having to read in the name of writing a good blog. I've got to say that my mindset is shifting to chagrin.

"Somehow Smolder" would make an excellent name for a rock band.

Hello everyone, and welcome to my fourth entry in Twilight and the High Life! I've been neglecting this blog over the last couple of weeks, and until recently I had been neglecting reading Twilight. This happened for a very good reason:

My wife stole the book from me.

This happened over Thanksgiving, when I was too concerned about where to find good coconut cream pie amongst the sea of pumpkin to bother reading the symphonic ode to teenage girl-angst that is Twilight. As it turned out, Stephenie Meyer's tract of post-pubescent spiritual disquietude was exactly what my wife, Jeanne, was looking for in a holiday read, and she quickly managed to consume the entire book while I concentrated on other things, such as flossing. I've only gotten back into the book in the last three days or so, but have managed to just about get to the halfway point. Jeanne is constantly nagging me to read more, so that she can talk about the book with me. Under such hostile conditions I don't really have much choice to read, but it's hard to do so - really hard - and for a very good reason: the word choices are driving me crazy.

Let me give you an example of the kind of sentence that is very typical in this book. In this example our heroine, Bella Swan, is talking about her vampire beau, Edward Cullen: "He grinned back, his eyes somehow managing to smolder, even in the dark." His eyes somehow managed to smolder? When I first read that sentence I was tremendously confused. Reading the dictionary definition of the word "smolder" left me still more befuddled: "to burn sluggishly, without flame, and often with much smoke." Is it just me, or should Bella have rushed Edward right to the hospital as soon as she noticed the smoldering?

As it turns out, however, "smolder" has another meaning: "to show suppressed anger, hate, or jealousy." This doesn't sound very positive to me, and simply adds to my suspicions that Bella is in an abusive relationship. Sure, Edward has saved her from a number of very sticky situations (Bella calls him her "perpetual savior"), but he also seems to be extraordinarily controlling, cruelly patronizing, and just plain rude. (He also happens to be a vampire.) These tendencies were brought up in my last post, and I was very gratified over the Thanksgiving holiday when my visiting aunt told me "THANK YOU for saying that Edward is abusive. He is." My aunt was a librarian for many years and knows her books. I'll trust her on this one.

Anyway, I've reached a point where the reading is getting faster and easier, and I imagine I should finish the first book by later this week. I was thinking I would wait until I'd read all of the books to watch the movies, but Jeanne is pressuring me to watch the first movie as soon as I've finished the first book. This may have been prompted by a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, in which we took a look at that antiquated area in the back of the store called the DVD rack. Jeanne was most intrigued by the section in which Twilight was located:

Girls Night In.

I've got my work cut out for me.