Sunday, October 23, 2011

Book Report: Total Bullshit: The Work of Stephenie Meyer 2009-02-19

Whoops, I read this! This is a great way for me to demonstrate that I’m not here trying to impress anybody with this book report project for which I have already lost what small amount of enthusiasm I had.

Anyways, I read this horseshit. It was at work; I wouldn’t have been doing anything important with my time otherwise.

First of all, Jacob is clearly better than Edward. Second,

He parallel-parked against the curb in a space I would have thought much too small for the Volvo, but he slid in effortlessly in one try.

I bring this up not for the vague innuendo you may have chosen to notice, but because it is overall a good example of the content and style of Twilight and whatever the second one is called. Let’s now take a gander at an excerpt from the sizable list of acknowledgments to Twilight.

…and my online family, the talented staff and writers at fansofrealitytv.com, particularly Kimberly “Shazzer,” and Collin “Mantenna” for the encouragement, advice, and inspiration.

Very good. Moving along to book two.

I’d used him as a crutch for too long, and I was in deeper than I’d planned to go with anyone again.

Wow, this is going pleasantly quickly. Book three!

My indifferent attitude to fashion was a constant thorn in her side. If I’d allow it, she’d love to dress me every day — perhaps several times a day — like some oversized three-dimensional paper doll.

I must be honest. Meyer has a number of stylistic tics that may trouble the reader. Whatever editing may have been done to the typescripts of these books seems to have been applied with a delicate touch if at all. This passage is not the worst to be found in these books. For whatever reason, though, it bothers the hell out of me. A three-dimensional paper doll is just a doll. Furthermore, it’s entirely valid and maybe even trite to “blah blah blah dress someone like a doll.”

I felt the blood slither from my face.

Great, let’s move on to book four. I’ll note here that book four makes little sense. I don’t believe the pregnancy is the Latter Day Saints propaganda that some observers make it out to be. Indeed, I find that there is much to be troubled by in addition to the pregnancy. Aside from numerous problems in the plot,

Was he oblivious to the fact that an electric current was pulsing through my body like adrenaline spiked blood?

I hope to develop a new family of descriptions based on this sentence. It has proven very difficult. So far, the best I have come up with is, “The jazz music of the orange juice roared into my mouth like a drink made out of fruit.”

The last two-hundred pages of whatever the fourth book is (Twilight Four I assume?) are a series of non-events operating in blissful ignorance of the conventions of narratives, pot-boiler or otherwise. It’s a technically impressive feat how willfully things don’t happen throughout the final third of T4.

For readers too busy to read T4, here is a short summary of its events:
- She names the baby “Renesmee.”
- The werewolf is going to have sex with the baby.

I have many more and better opinions on this topic, but I’m going to stay coy with those. Who knows, perhaps if you are lucky one day I’ll delight you with them. I mainly wrote this to pass a small amount of time and in the hopes that I would be so ashamed of having committed my misdeeds to the public record that I might do something useful.

If you would like to learn more about vampires, some films have been made on the topic. They are:
Blade
The Hunger
Vampire Hunter D
Vampyros Lesbos
The Lost Boys
Night Watch
Buffy
seasons two through five
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Dracula
with the Philip Glass / Kronos Quartet stuff
Nosferatu
Blade II


There’s also Let the Right One In but I haven’t seen that yet because I’m kind of dumb so I’m not sure whether it’s about vampires. In conclusion I’m pretty disgusted with myself for reading these books and a number of other reasons. I ate some granola with chocolate milk today but that’s not one of the reasons. Dark City is not about vampires.

1 comment:

  1. I lol'ed pretty hard at these:

    “The jazz music of the orange juice roared into my mouth like a drink made out of fruit.”

    - She names the baby “Renesmee.”
    - The werewolf is going to have sex with the baby.

    ReplyDelete