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I picked up one of the Twilight books in passing at my brothers place, his girlfriend of the time had one book in the series and it wasn't stimulating in the slightest when I had picked it up. Then again my taste in literature is apparently more than heart throbs and melodrama. Upon asking her I found out my brother’s girlfriend had not read it either and that she merely had it because a female friend of hers had suggested it.
Which got me to thinking, is it through peer suggestion that this series had grown so quickly?
I began to wonder how many copies of the books have been purchased and have gone otherwise unread.
Anyway...
I have not fully read any of the books. I’m busy with other reading right now and will be for some time. Even when I am finished with this round of reading I refuse to invest my time to ‘find out what all the fuss is about’ when I already know it is of absolutely no interest to me in the slightest. I have a copy of Dracula, when I want to read vampires I’ll read that. It’s raw. Like, when I want a carrot I won’t go steam one, I’ll peel it, cut the nub off and eat it raw, the way it should be. But that’s carrots and this is books and when it comes to books you could say I have a very specific taste. I like a slightly fustigated way of speaking, I find it stimulating, I want more than melodrama and cliché, and it needs to give me a shine in my eyes when I read from any random page, it needs to scream ‘of stimulating interest’.
Yoshpet While I've read arguments against it, read plot summaries and reviews, and have friends that love and loathe it, my only tangible experience was picking it up and reading the end of a chapter somewhere near the middle.
She ended a chapter by talking about putting her wallet in her purse and getting in a car. Poignant. I've never touched it since.
With that said, I’ve given each volume a shot with my tests. Speed reading- where I pick up a book and read only the larger words, random stage- where I pick a random page and read aloud from it. If I’m embarrassed to read it aloud I will switch to paragraph reading. If I get lost in the context while paragraph reading I will start from the beginning of the book and read a few pages. I do this when I am determined to give the book a shot. If my interest is non existent by the end of these tests, I put the book down and do not question its quality and only remark it as literature that did not peak my interest.
The twilight series didn’t stimulate me. I gave it a shot. A real shot.
The movie. Not a chance in hell. I won’t waste my time on that tripe. In a test of posterity I read a book before the movie came out for comparative sake. And the movie then appeared bleak and mostly broken. (not to mention the actor who had played a superior Dumbledore in the previous movies had died).
Movies and books are separate mediums and as such any incarnation of like material will be separated by every single sound and every single image.
Vampire stories are cliché. The word ‘vampire’ is a cliché. Everything learned about, read about or heard about vampires is happenstance, hearsay-ridden cliché! Vampire stories no longer stand as a metaphorical take on humanity as it once did. This new inception of vampirism in literature The Twilight series and its franchise as a whole is just that, cliché. It is the social and corporate vampirism of this generation. The new generation of vampire literature and culture is a rape of what vampirism once meant - when it had a point to make. It's a run around, standing on one leg, superficially sexually repressive obscurity, laced with a coming of age storyscape.
The last great vampiric upheaval was with Interview With a Vampire and the Vampire Chronicles Series which had spawned a real world organization known as ‘Strigiio Vi’ where people actually came together to drink real blood and have parties dressed in costumes and clothing that would otherwise look and feel just as foolish as they really are in any other setting.
Anne Rice’s books share a common trait with Stephanie Meyers series, they are both mediocre at best. The strong moral conveyance that was once present in stories of vampirism is all but sucked dry by the continual alteration of the vampire mythos. It is possibly with the works of Anne Rice that all the remaining lessons to be learned on vampirism and morality had been taught in the Vampire Chronicles.
There is no new information to be learned here.
Edit: If I were to watch the movie, would you suppose my ideas of this series would change?
 Bibbly · Wed Apr 01, 2009 @ 05:16am · 0 Comments |
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