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.
No comments:
Post a Comment