Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

I just finished reading Stephenie Meyer’s novel Twilight, which has been showing as a blockbuster movie hit (I haven’t seen it yet). I have no intention of spoiling the ending, but I doubt that I am giving anything away when I reveal that Twilight is about a romance between a teenage girl and a “teenage” vampire boy. This story is probably more appealing to girls than it is to boys, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and plan to read the rest of the series (without being in major hurry, though).

Presented in the first person by the protagonist, seventeen-year old Bella Swan, Twilight is a poignant revelation of life and people from the viewpoint of an adolescent girl whose parents had split up years earlier and who has decided to move from her mother’s house in Phoenix to live with her father in very rainy northwestern Washington state. She makes new friends easily, but discovers that there is a group of students who have deliberately set themselves apart from the others. Among this group is a very interesting boy, by the name of Edward Mullen, and with whom she falls in love. I’ll leave the eventual outcome of the story to the reader. Bella, like so many teenagers (I remember, having once been one myself), has a tendency to become completely enveloped in her feelings about herself and her romantic interest. I do want to point out that Twilight’s plot has a tendency to move along at an easy, slow pace and then suddenly become charged with excitement and high action. So if you’re reading it and may be thinking that it’s just another teenage romance novel (albeit with a vampire twist), then…think again! Read it through, and you may be rewarded at its end (although I had become a bit concerned about the protagonist’s capacity for rational thought by that point).

I read up a little about author Stephenie Meyer’s inspiration for Twilight, and discovered that she patterned it after Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I then asked myself why I wasn’t reading more of the great literary classics. So I’ve decided to do so! I am starting with For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated novel about the Spanish Civil War. I may have a actually read it before as an English assignment in the ninth grade (c. 1971), but since my mind was so distracted back at that particular time in my life that I had trouble concentrating on anything very long at a time, my memory of it may be very faint (the reading assignment could have been A Farewell to Arms, though; I do remember reading Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea then).