Twilight mania

I recently finished reading the book Twilight. This is news for a few reasons:

1) I barely ever read books.

2) I barely ever finish reading books.

3) Twilight is an incredibly popular book series.

The books are currently some of the most popular books written for young adults, with sales exceeding eight million and over five million sold in the U.S. alone. Stephenie Meyer is the author of the books and has also grown in popularity.

I first heard about Twilight from my favorite movie website /Film because of the news they posted about the Twilight movie. After learning that it was one of the most popular books, I told Bethany about it. Bethany, who is an avid reader, immediately picked up on the series and finished reading them all within two weeks. Me, not being the avid reader, took about the same amount of time just to finish the first book. It has interested me enough to start reading the second.

I have to say that Meyer has created a unique world. Twilight is about vampires, but not your typical vampires. Yes, they still crave blood, but there's a lot of differences from the traditional vampires. Garlic doesn't affect them, they don't fear crosses (they actually have some in their own house), and the sunlight actually does something cool to their skin rather than burn them. It makes the story a little more interesting because you quickly realize that you don't know how these people actually work.

The book is geared more towards teen girls as there is a lot of romance and teenage angst to get through. Most of it was quite boring to read through for me, but bearable. Meyer tends to repeat herself after a while (like talking about Edward's icy cold hands), but I just start to scan over those paragraphs when I see them. The ending, although not entire satisfying, is fairly well-written.

On Friday, the fourth book in the series, Breaking Dawn, was released at midnight. Bethany, Tawnya, and I went to the book release party at the Federal Way Borders. I've never seen so many 14-17 year old girls gathered in one place, but then again, I never went to a Backstreet Boys/'N Sync concert back in the day. They had trivia and look-a-like contests going on. I sat in a big comfy chair and read some Bleach manga and Batman comics.

The books mostly take place in Forks, Washington. This adds some extra cool points to the books because they talk about local cities sometimes. I guess Forks has grown in popularity because of Twilight, which is good for the little town. Perhaps one day, we'll drive out there and go on a tour of the city.

But let me get back to the movie since I prefer talking about movies much more than books. It looks quite promising with only a few annoyances that I may have to get over. I think the casting was fairly poor with the exception of Edward, Jacob, and Bella. Kristen Stewart (Into the Wild, Panic Room) will be playing Bella and Robert Pattinson (Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) will be portraying the vampire Edward. Almost all of the other cast members, aside from Taylor Lautner who plays Jacob, look nothing like I pictured them in the book. I'm also not a fan of them choosing to shoot the film in Oregon instead of Forks and La Push in Washington. Despite these things, this movie is going to be huge. The preview and behind-the-scenes clips are pretty cool looking, but we shall see.



If you haven't read the books, try reading the first one and if you don't like it, you're not going to like any of them. The movie might be a little more interesting, but then again, it could fail miserably. Twilight mania is coming. Are you ready?