breaking dawn

after reading eclipse, i couldn't wait to read breaking dawn. but mostly because i love a good wedding. and descriptions of weddings. and wedding dresses. and food. and flowers. and i wanted to see what all the hype was about concerning the "suggestive" scenes between edward and bella. however, i felt like the whole book wasn't necessary. perhaps it should have been a novella or it could have been combined with eclipse since i didn't feel that whole book was neccesary. after book 2 the whole tone of the series changed. it was more of a sci-fi book and less of a love story. and i still wasn't sold on bella becoming a vampire until it became a neccesity for her to do so. edward loved her humanity and i didn't want to see either of them lose that.



what i liked-

-the wedding. i can't get enough of weddings and the like. it was a nice launchpad to bella's next hurdles that she needed to encounter.

-the best part about bella becoming a vampire was that she was no longer an indecisive dummy. hallelujah!

-i loved the post-vampire bella descriptions of the world around her. the world was more clear to her and to me.

-renesemee- at first i hated it because i hate a contrived made up name. but then characters started calling her nessie and i decided renesmee wasn't so bad after all. i am more than on the fence with it, i almost like it more than a little.

-bella started dressing better. even it it was just a nice pair of jeans and a longsleeved t-shirt, it was a million times better than the oversized flannel shirt descriptions of other books. and the cashmere sweater dress that she wears to meet the lawyer? i think that desciption was just for me. loved it. and the oyster colored silk dress too. so happy.



what i could have done without-

-jacob. why won't he just die and go away? he could have been eaten by a bear while he was depressed about bella. i would play the bear in the movie. they wouldn't have to pay me. i thought his perspective was completely unneccesary. his chapter headings were quite humorous but the rest just made me feel like i had walked around in mud with no shoes on and then it dried on my feet. and then i sweated a bunch and didn't have any clothes to wear and i slept in the dirt and ate raw animals. yuck. and he just kept hanging around all the time. shouldn't he be looking for gainful employment?

-why couldn't the wolfpacks have worn back packs? it makes sense to me. they could call them wolfpack packs. surely someone could have figured out a way to have clothes on when other people were around. something with elastic straps to expand with them when they got bigger and smaller.

-the wolves story line just bugged. it felt cartoony.

-EJ- thank goodness the baby was a girl. i think edward would have been a nice name for a boy, but having jacob as a middle name would be plain idiotic. and doesn't edward get a say in his own monster child's name? even i let thomas have some say on our kid's names.

-leah and jacob should have hooked it up. if sam uley dated her at one point then she certainly couldn't have been completely unfortunate looking.

-i found the ending completely anti-climactic. i wanted carnage. or a revolt. i wanted multiple vampires to have their limbs ripped off their bodies and then have seen them put themselves back together. i wanted wolves to be bitten in half(perhaps jacob). it seems to me that this was the cop out ending.

-and the WORST PART OF THE WHOLE BOOK- jacob imprinting on renesmee. BARF-A-RONI. be still my lunch. the book almost went out the window, but it's not my copy so i had to treat it nicely. this made no sense to me. sometimes a character not getting what they wanted and ending up unhappy is more interesting than every little loose end being nicely tied up. i just can't handle that, but i could see it coming. it just borders on pedophilia. creepy. someone go buy jacob a nice windowless van to cruise neighborhoods in. if you were a parent, would you want your speedy-growth-half-vampire-half-human-blood-guzzling-daughter to hook up with an unemployed wolf? what is he even bringing to the table? is edward going to support them for the rest of eternity?

-charlie not needing a real excuse about his daughter suddenly looking inhuman and having a 4 month old baby. seriously? i don't buy that for a minute.

i'm on the fence with-

-i really hope they make jacob hottt in the next movies so that he has some sort of redeeming quality about him.

-renesmee- saccharine-sweet faultless children are so bothersome to me. almost as bad as talking animals. her dad has a horrible temperament issue and her mom is completely passive, how did renesmee end up not throwing any tantrums whatsoever? she's still part human.

-bella's shield power. seemed a bit obtuse. annoying. not that the power was that dumb, just the descriptions about it. i did like at the end when edward could briefly read her mind and saw her thoughts about him. that was nice.

new questions that were posed-

-how do non-cullen vampires make money??? the cullens certainly depended on their cash to give them the anonymity they needed. how do the others hold down jobs and travel and obtain visas if they don't have mind reading powers to see how the stock market is going to go??? we live in a documented world, does everyone have a shady lawyer working for them?

-what was all the drama with edward and bella's "suggestive" scenes? they were married and it didn't describe anything. i was fine with it. i am glad that they were married before having sex. i think that was the main point that ms. meyer was trying to make.

finally, this ending totally leaves the door wide open for more vampire/wolf themed books. i will not read them. i only care about edward and bella. but i can't wait for midnight sun. i think edward's perspective on twilight and a little more history about him will be fascinating. i have held out this long not reading the portions posted online. i don't like book previews and i know reading it will only antagonize me. so, i hope ms. meyer will hurry it up and get over having her feelings hurt and will finish it up within the next decade.

how i rank the 4 books-
1. twilight-great, sooper, fun, fantastic. loved it!!!
2. new moon- good. sad, heart-breaking, but enjoyable.
3-eclipse-eh? okay.
4-new moon- the wedding and bella-the-new-vampire descriptions are it's only saving grace.

eclipse

what i liked-
-i liked mrs. meyer's reference of cathy and wuthering heights. a true classic. hopefully more people will be inclined to read it. i read it once in 7th grade and grasped almost none of it. i am planning on trying to read it again.
-also, romeo and juliet and anne of green gables references. not just junk you are forced to read in high school.
-the edward/heathcliff comparison. solid.
-bella/cathy comparison. for real. bella needs to pick something and stick with it.

what made me barf-
-the wolf pack. they might as well of been animated talking animals. i just can't handle that. i want them to all drown in the ocean.
-bella's apathy toward college attendance. becoming a vampire does limit some of a person's opportunity to be a part of the outside world. i wish she would take advantage of every opportunity she got.
-why can't she let edward buy her something? perhaps a new wardrobe? at least a car? i would take a BMW 525i in charcoal gray, please. she is sort of selfish to limit other people's generosity.
-bella's love of jacob. if she loves edwards as much as she claims, then jacob's friendship should be just that and not a threat to edward. selfish snot. she wants it all for herself. she thinks that because she loves both edward and jacob, granted differently, that they should both be happy because she is.
-kissing jacob. how in the world did she fall for that?
-requiring edward to stay with her during the battle. no way. she needs to be supportive of edward protecting his family. how could they have happiness together if his whole family had been slaughtered?

i'm on the fence with-
-getting married. these are teenagers! at least one of them is. but,at the same time, i don't get why the idea is so repulsive to bella. it's like she can't see beyond her own nose. selfish selfish selfish.
-the victoria/newborn battle. eh? perhaps that is just the rosalie coming out in me. i wasn't that interested. they could have taken a trip somewhere for about a month and avoided the whole ordeal.

new moon

new moon knocked my socks off. and not in the motivated, let's-run-10-miles-and-learn-italian-literature kind of way. i really liked it, but it depressed me. BIG TIME. which is probably what mrs. meyer was going for, right? what affected me the most about new moon was the break-up scene and the foreboding few days leading up to it. edward's withdrawal was all too familiar from personal experience. i could smell "break up" in the air. i was anticipating it, though i didn't have any clue as to if it was really going to happen. the pre-emptive anxiety i experienced was beyond ridiculous. i had to keep prepping myself and tell myself that this wasn't happening to me. not to get too personal(why is it so easy to share a lot about my embarassing daily life on the internets, but not personal things?) but i even got out my old journal from college and reread some entries from june 2001. the worst break up of my life. and for you that were with me at the time, it wasn't lance(are you kidding me?), and certainly not joseph the lumberjew. (haha, i've always wanted a reason to type lumberjew.) i was a mess. i didn't realize that some of those emotions had simply been buried and that the pain was still there. rejection is no fun if you are the one being rejected. but i pulled through; i finished the book. i'm okay. for real. no intervention needed.

things i liked about new moon-
-the single pages with the month listed and no further information. october, november, december. this killed me. totally effective way to showcase the doom and nothingness that bella experienced. bawled my face off.

-bella being overy dramatic. cracked me up. at first i scoffed at her but then i realized that she is just a teenager in love. and i am a condescending adult.

-alice. i love her and i want to be her and steal cars for sport. and drive a yellow porshe. and go shopping with her. and let her give me a make over. also, her character was the most emotionally available of any of them. she was willing to drop everything and help bella so that her brother would be happy. and risk her own safety. a truly benevolent character.

-italy and the volturi. yikes. bikes! the interrogation wasn't that alarming. the lunch the volturi had was more than alarming. and, i was so excited to get edward back. because i like him. he actually has job prospects if he wanted them.

what i disliked about new moon-
-jacob. at first he was tolerable but then i just kept picturing the big, sweaty, perpetually happy ogre. i couldn't visualize him well. just too sloppy and unclean. i picture him wearing a wife beater. a vote for team jacob is a vote for team unemployed. hopefully the movie will rectify this situation for me.

-werewolves- WEIRD(because vampires are so normal). i just couldn't grasp that. what does sam uley do for money? how does he support his fiancee? i think i am too practical for all that bizness. imprinting? no gracias.

-bella in port angeles confronting the guys outside the bar. it just didn't jive for me. i knew nothing was going to happen. it was too wordy and too thoughtful to be very climatic.

i'm on the fence with-
-bella trying to hear edward's voice in her head. i understand the need to try and ressurrect as many memories as possible but i was hoping that it really would be edward talking to her. otherwise she was just nuts. and should be medicated.

twilight

this review is more limited and disjointed than i was hoping for. feel free to ask for clarifications.

i really liked this book. it was fun and refreshing. bella could be as dull as dirt but also infinitely interesting. her fallibility and poor decisionmaking skills were frustrating but completely appealing to me. her lack of personality was not. i completely related to her in her obsessive attraction to edward. who hasn't crushed on someone in high school(or college) and then looked for them or tried to glean more information about them every chance they got? or drove completely out of their way just so they could see if anybody might be in a particular parking lot at the foreign language housing dorm? anybody? anybody?
edward was by far my favorite character. i love a good strong, smart male lead. he was inherently flawed despite his vampire perfection. i love a male character who feels the need to take care or protect a female. that doesn't necessarily make the lead female weak or pitiful, but just proves that gallantry and chivalry aren't dead. his word choices and phrases were nice. there was a strong voice distinction. i am determined to use the word absurd more often as a result. though, i do wish he would have murderized those unwashed miscreants in port angeles.

i liked that bella was able to assess situations and try and determine her own destiny; pumping jacob for edward information, deciding to fight back her attackers in port angeles, becoming the sacrificial lamb of sorts for the vampire james and not involving others who might get hurt. other things i related to with bella was her overwhelming feelings of not feeling good enough for edward. i think this teenage emotional nail was hit right on the head. i also like bella because she wasn't good at things. she wasn't perfect at everything or anything so she makes us feel like someday a fantastic vampire could fall in love with us too or just have exciting things happen to us. and bella did dumb things. and she was dumpy. and annoying. and she fell a lot. though i have no room to judge on personal grace or poise. i think stephenie meyer used a great mix of normalcy and extraordinary--and showed how they can be the same thing.

i was never concerned about the final outcome of the book. obviously, since there are 3 more books besides this one, i knew not EVERYONE would die. but that would have been fun too. regardless, i was interested in the parts that i found predictable as much as the parts that i found completely unpredictable. twilight was sort of like a cigarette to me. i took the book everywhere trying to get a few paragraphs in at a time when i could. once i was done i almost didn't know how to complete simple tasks like sitting at stop lights or blow drying my hair. the book was always there. i may need a 12 step program just to get me back to real life.

major likes-
-a fun, fast, slightly silly, nicely chaste but still exciting read. it was even easier and faster to read the second time around.
-i would pause after certain passages and laugh at myself because i was reading a book about vampires. and it was silly but i was compelled to read more.
-it made thinking of being a teenager again not such a completely revolting thought. especially if i was a vampire and looked like rosalie.
-the random bits of sarcasm and humor. it was like stephenie meyer was putting her own personal jokes in there.
-the obvious simliarities between lds doctrine and vampire dogma. funny. i like a nice subliminal message. i hope some of the teeny-bopper readers took the self-control message to heart.
-i LOVE the fact that stephenie meyer never describes anyone with the word sexy. i despise that word. it is so over-used that it means nothing. plus, sexy is so fleeting, so one-note. there is no depth to that description and it sounds very generic and cheap.
-baseball scene-verging on ridiculous but light-hearted enough to make the vampires seems like they were once human with human interests.

major issues-
-the long khaki skirt that bella wears to meet the cullens. yuck. that description almost ruined the chapter for me. i just pictured a sister missionary in honduras with some birkenstocks. be still my lunch.
-the just-add-water "i love yous"- i think this could have been more interesting had the relationship tension built up over more shared experiences or a little longer period of time.
-jacob-i don't know what it was about his description and mannerisms, i just saw him as sort of a dumb, easily manipulated lump.
-stephenie meyer is a comma freak. i would have to read several lines over again so that i could have a better handle on her true emphasis and meaning.
-i wish there was more rosalie. if i were at a vampire crossroads i would feel very much like her. i don't pine to be a vampire. i'm possibly opposed to it. i would struggle back and forth about whether or not if was in bella's position, if i would want to become a vampire. being human is pretty great. i like sleeping. i love eating. crying has its perks. not to say that being a vampire wouldn't be fun too. running faster would be great.

final thoughts that may or not be related to twilight:
i'm totally fine with people not liking twilight. i don't like the lion king. different strokes for different folks. it irks me relentlessly when people don't like it because it isn't "literature". what's so bad about fluff reading? brownies are not the "literature" of food but they are pretty dang fantastic anyway. the people who shun reading fluff only see "films" and not movies and only listen to indie music and pretend that christina aguilera or mariah carey are untalented. they are pretentious and they think they are smarter than everyone else. and that cannot possibly be true because i am smarter than absolutely everyone and i thought twilight was a great book.
thoughts?