I recently finished reading Twilight as my daily commuter book. Why would I do such a thing, you might ask? Here's why: to learn German. That's right, I read Twilight in German as an educational activity. And you know what? It worked (to an extent). There are so many repeated words and phrases that I managed to learn a lot of vocabulary and sentence structure, as well as some "fancy" past tense verbs.
Sure, it wasn't all fun and games. Based on my experiences with German-English translations for television shows and movies, I'm guessing the translation pretty closely mirrored its English counterpart. And if that's the case, the writing quality is, to put it delicately, quite poor. I must agree with Stephen King in his assertion that the difference between J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meier is that Rowling is an excellent writer and that Meier can't write worth a damn.
The only reason Twilight took off the way it did is because Meier happened to hit on a really hot topic: first love. In the case of this book, first love is synonymous with everlasting love as well as total obsession. Similar to relationships in real-life, where the involved parties can get so wrapped up in the relationship that it becomes their world and skews time, time isn't uniformly represented in the book: the first half of the book takes place over a number of months, while the second half covers approximately 3 days.
The book actually provides a pretty good model for how to have an unhealthy relationship: one in which the girl is completely reliant on her perfect man to take care of her and save her, wherein she becomes totally and utterly obsessed with him and can't imagine going on living without him, one in which the man must have her underwing at all times.
Though really, you can't blame Bella too much, because she's apparently found the embodiment of perfection for a boyfriend. Perfect hair and teeth, clothes to make a model jealous, a hot car, muscular physique... what more could a girl ask for, other than super-pale skin and dark undereye circles? Oh wait, he has those, too! However, he and all his family members have one fatal flaw: they're hopelessly stupid. Stupid, because they go along with Bella's ridiculous plans of escaping danger by splitting up their numbers, unable to posit a better idea of their own! If there's one thing I learned from years of watching Scooby Doo, it's that splitting up is NEVER a good idea.
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